Daniel Kahneman changed the lives of many

livemint.com:

To most, professor Daniel Kahneman (1934-2024) is best known for his path-breaking explorations of how people’s decisions deviate from perfect rationality and the Nobel Prize he won for that work. For me, Professor Kahneman is someone who changed the course of my life. In the 1990s, I was an advertising professional.

While being part of the ad industry, I knew that much of what we were doing to understand and influence human behaviour was not really working. So, I questioned a lot what I was doing in my daily job. Deep within, I had a passion to understand human behaviour better.

So anything new about human behaviour caught my attention. I remember reading an article in Business Standard in 2002. It was about the man who had won that year’s Nobel Prize in Economics and a brief explanation of his theory.

Even before finishing the article, I was ecstatic. I knew I had found the theoretical foundation of human behaviour that I was desperately searching for. Until then, I had an inkling that understanding human brain processes could be the key to understanding behaviour.

But I had dismissed it as just another random thought of an average intellectual. But Kahneman’s Nobel Prize changed it all. What was most interesting for me about Kahneman’s work was not the framework of Prospect Theory, nor the nuances of loss aversion.

I was delighted to hear about the world of heuristics, the short-cuts that the brain takes while taking a decision. It greatly strengthened my fledgling thought that understanding various processes in the brain will surely give me new insights into human behaviour. From then on, my quest to acquire as much knowledge about the human brain as possible increased by leaps and bounds.