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Daniel Kahneman, Nobel-winning economist, dies at 90
Daniel Kahneman, an Israeli-American psychologist and best-selling author whose Nobel Prize-winning research upended economics — as well as fields ranging from sports to public health — by demonstrating the extent to which people abandon logic and leap to conclusions, died March 27. He was 90. His death was confirmed by his stepdaughter Deborah Treisman, the fiction editor for the New Yorker. She did not say where or how he died. Dr. Kahneman’s research was best known for debunking the notion of “homo economicus,” the “economic man” who since the epoch of Adam Smith was considered a rational being who acts out of self-interest. Instead, Dr.
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Science Breaks Through the Barricades to Mental Healthcare
Researchers and clinicians are attempting to break down the institutional and social factors that block marginalized populations from receiving mental health services.
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The Smartphone Kids Are Not All Right
I did not know this at the time, but apparently my children were part of a generation of guinea pigs. “It’s as though we sent Gen Z to grow up on Mars when we gave them smartphones in the early 2010s in the largest uncontrolled experiment humanity has ever performed on its own children,” Jonathan Haidt writes in The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. ... The picture, however, looks a lot less clear when you talk with an actual young person. In this episode, I spoke with my child Jacob, and we juxtapose theory with lived experience.
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Feeling Lonely Isn’t Just About Being Alone
The more time you spend alone, the more likely you are to be lonely, right? Seems obvious. But it isn’t always true, according to a new study. For instance, it found that although, in general, those who spend the most time alone are the loneliest, that isn’t the case for young people; their time alone has little impact on how lonely they feel. What’s more, people who spend the least time alone tend to be slightly lonelier than those between the extremes. ... But age made a significant difference. Study participants over the age of 40 generally were more likely to feel lonely when they spent more time alone.
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Frans de Waal, Who Found the Origins of Morality in Apes, Dies at 75
Frans de Waal, who used his study of the inner lives of animals to build a powerful case that apes think, feel, strategize, pass down culture and act on moral sentiments — and that humans are not quite as special as many like to think — died on Thursday at his home in Stone Mountain, Ga. He was 75. The cause was stomach cancer, his wife, Catherine Marin, said. A psychologist at Emory University in Atlanta and a research scientist at the school’s Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Professor de Waal objected to the common usage of the word “instinct.” He saw the behavior of all sentient creatures, from crows to persons, existing on the same broad continuum of evolutionary adaptation.
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THE FADING MEMORIES OF YOUTH
You might think you remember taking a trip to Disneyland when you were 18 months old, or that time you had chickenpox when you were 2—but you almost certainly don’t. However real they may seem, your earliest treasured memories were probably implanted by seeing photos or hearing your parents’ stories about waiting in line for the spinning teacups. Recalling those manufactured memories again and again consolidated them in your brain, making them as vivid as your last summer vacation. ...
