The Insidious Elitist Upshot of Behavioral Economics
The Exxon Valdez being towed away from Bligh Reef in April of 1989. (Erik Hill / Anchorage Daily News / Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
In March of this year, the Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman passed away. Glowing obituaries followed, with just about every intellectually minded newspaper and magazine attesting to his reputation as a pathbreaking scholar, and as perhaps the greatest psychologist of a generation.
Whether or not you realize it, you are probably familiar with his ideas. You need not have ever read a word of Kahneman’s — not his landmark Science article, “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases,” nor his popular airport book Thinking Fast and Slow — to know his ideas. In a way, we are all living in Kahneman’s world.
Kahneman and his frequent coauthor Amos Tversky are known for discovering, naming, and popularizing numerous cognitive biases and heuristics. The Atlantic aptly described Kahneman as “the world’s greatest scholar of how people get things wrong.” This research program spawned a cottage industry of psychologists, behavioral economists, and cognitive scientists who work to catalog different kinds of cognitive distortions, now purportedly numbering in the dozens (though many of these studies have now been debunked).
