Professor of Behavioral Science, University of Chicago, Booth School of Business
Essential Ingredients
Kahneman's influence was to provide the essential ingredients for all of my work: a problem, and possible solutions. The problem was that people's beliefs, judgments, and choices are routinely "wrong." They may wrong because they disagree with a statistical principle, a rational principle, reality, or some combination of all three. The solution is that people beliefs, judgments, and choices are not guided simply by statistics, rationality, or reality, but instead are guided by generally intelligent, but imperfect, psychological processes that take hard problems and convert them to easy problems that normal human beings can solve. If you understand these processes that guide intuitive judgment, then you can understand why perception and reality diverge.
By extending Kahneman's problem as well as his ideas about its solution, I have built a career trying to understand how otherwise brilliant human beings can be so routinely "wrong" in their beliefs and judgments about each other. Why do people overestimate how often others agree with them? Why are people sometimes less accurate predicting their own future behavior than predicting others' behavior? Why do people overestimate how harshly they will be judged for an embarrassing blunder? Why do liberals think conservatives have more extreme views than conservatives actually do? The list of such cases where our social thinking goes wrong is long, but it is Kahneman's influence that runs through its entire length.
Asking how Kahneman's work has influenced my own is a bit like asking a doctor how oxygen influences life. My work wouldn't exist without him.
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