I've spoken about Daniel Kahneman and his book, Thinking: Fast and Slow at conferences because of his insights into behavioral economics and how that affects the way people analyze and discuss topics related to the origin and setting of the Book of Mormon.
The Wall St. Journal summarized his work here:
Excerpt, with parts relevant to the topics on this blog in bold:
Kahneman and his friend Amos Tversky, who died in 1996, upended traditional economic assumptions that people consistently act rationally and with their self-interest at heart. Instead, experiments conducted by the two Israeli-born psychologists showed that when presented with complex situations, people often rely on rules of thumb that can lead them to behave irrationally.
Insights from Kahneman and Tversky’s work were widely adopted in many fields beyond psychology and economics, including law, marketing, government, investment management and even the planning of giant infrastructure projects.
[and discussions about the origin and setting of the Book of Mormon.]
The two found that people derive patterns and probabilities based on small sets of data, not understanding the role of randomness—for instance, ascribing skill to a fund manager who beat the stock market a couple of years in a row, and not recognizing the role of luck. They also found that people tend to feel losses much more keenly than gains.
This leads to the phenomenon of loss aversion, where, for example, investors are less willing to sell a stock that has fallen below the price they bought it at than they would be to sell the same stock, at the same price, if they had registered a gain.
...
Largely on the basis of this work, Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002—an honor that Tversky, had he lived, would likely have shared. ... his and Tversky’s work provided the framework for economists to develop behavioral economics.
“It’s like, suppose there’s somebody who discovers that the Earth is round and then that sets off the explorers,” said Richard Thaler, the University of Chicago Booth School of Business economist who won the economics Nobel in 2017. “Pick up any issue of the American Economic Review and there will be one or two articles that are explicitly behavioral, and you know that wouldn’t have happened without Amos and Danny.”
...
Kahneman’s work found a greater audience with the publication of his 2011 book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” which reviewed his research with Tversky and popularized the idea that people are guided by two modes of thinking: “fast” thinking, which operates quickly and automatically, and “slow” thinking, which is more deliberative.
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