Daniel Kahneman has died, and I remember reading him and thinking he was wrong. What do you think?

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@Q.Q.Switcheroo

Not to mention the risk of making yourself look like a jerk in front of millions of people, and bringing shame and disgrace on your family name for generations to come.

@Thudlow_Boink

You don’t get to come back tomorrow. You don’t even get a lousy copy of our home game. You’re a complete loser!

I got this , but for anyone who didn’t (You loss!) these are quotes from the wonderful Weird Al song “I Lost on Jeopardy”.

Back to the thread.

@Pardel-Lux

I may be wrong, but I think the relevant studies were made in the USA, with US students. It is known as WEIRD problem, and I think it is more a US than Western specific in Kahneman’s case.
Has your daughter come up with any interesting results for non-Western countries?

This is a fascinating question. I would absolutely not be surprised that there’s a serious bias towards reactions towards risk/reward when you have absolute confidence in a basic living style regardless of the results. Heck, I made it clear when I talked about out-of-budget expenses v unexpected windfalls.

Please let us know more if you find it!

[HMS_Irruncible]

As I recall, the usual formulation is that a person who has $100 is likely to turn down a chance to risk $50 to get another hundred.

Those are really good odds if you run the trial over and over. But in real life there’s no guarantee you’ll get to do that, so people tend to ask for irrationally high premiums on any at-risk value proposition.

Then there’s also the way that marginalism changes the calculus. If you already have resources such that the loss of $50 doesn’t mean much to you, then of course you’ll take bigger risks.

[Voyager]

@Pardel-Lux

I may be wrong, but I think the relevant studies were made in the USA, with US students. It is known as WEIRD problem, and I think it is more a US than Western specific in Kahneman’s case.
Has your daughter come up with any interesting results for non-Western countries? In one of the links provided by other posters in this thread (haven’t found which one, there are so many, sorry) it was stated that Kahneman’s assertion did hold reasonably well for China, but not so much for Africa, FWIW. Checking the details, in particular the methodology, is beyond my capabilities.

I’m not aware of studies in Africa, but it would be interesting. Kahneman’s ideas came in large part from his experience in the Israeli Air Force, though I’d grant that’s still Western.
One chart she showed was organ donation rates across Europe, both Western and former Eastern bloc countries. It varied wildly. When she taught this she’d ask her class for explanations. It turns out the numbers are correlated to whether donation was the default case in these countries, with those where it was the default having much higher donation rates.

@bump

But people act like there’s some sort of loss involved with money you don’t actually have (yet), and are very risk-averse to losing this fictitious money, and will often not take chances and leave rather than “lose” the money.

Which is absurd; you don’t ever come out behind.

Yes, this behavior is irrational, which is the point.
In the old Jeopardy all contestants got to keep their winnings. They found that certain ones had dollar goals, and if they reached them during the game they would stop playing, never try to buzz in with the risk of losing money. Made for a terrible game, and the current one has only the winner keep the money, and the other two contestants get fixed prizes.