Daniel Kahneman, world’s leading thinker, chose to end his own life, says report

Nobel Laureate and a psychologist, best known for his work on psychology of judgment and decision-making as well as behavioural economics, Daniel Kahneman took the decision of ending his own life, a Wall Street Journal report said.

The report, published on Friday, said that shortly before Kahneman died in March last year, he sent an email to his friends saying that he was choosing to end his own life in Switzerland.

“I have believed since I was a teenager that the miseries and indignities of the last years of life are superfluous, and I am acting on that belief. Most people hate changing their minds,” he said, “but I like to change my mind. It means I’ve learned something…” read the email Kahneman wrote to his friends before flying to Switzerland.

While the world mourned his death last year, only close friends and family knew that it transpired at an assisted-suicide facility in Switzerland. “Some are still struggling to come to terms with his decision,” the report said. 

His last email went on to say: “I am not embarrassed by my choice, but I am also not interested in making it a public statement. The family will avoid details about the cause of death to the extent possible, because no one wants it to be the focus of the obits. Please avoid talking about it for a few days.”

Who was Daniel Kahneman? 

Kahneman was one the world’s most influential thinkers, a psychologist at Princeton University, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002 and author of the international bestseller ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ published in 2011. 

Born on March 5, 1934, in Tel Aviv, British Mandate of Palestine (now Israel), Kahneman lived in Paris but moved to Palestine with his mother and sister after his father’s death in 1944. 

He studied psychology at Hebrew University and the University of California, earning his Ph.D. in 1961. Kahneman researched on decision-making under uncertainty resulting in the formulation of a new branch of economic, prospect theory. 

Kahneman’s award wining research

“Before his groundbreaking research, economists had long assumed that human beings are rational. By that, they meant that people’s beliefs are internally consistent, they make decisions based on all the relevant information and their preferences don’t change,” the WSJ said.  

However, Kahneman refuted this definition of rationality. He also did not contend that people are irrational. Instead, he argued that “they are inconsistent, emotional and easily fooled—most easily of all, by themselves… In short, he made the case that people are neither rational nor irrational; they are, simply, human,” the report said.

His decision to take his life

The WSJ report added, “Some of Kahneman’s friends think what he did was consistent with his own research. ‘Right to the end, he was a lot smarter than most of us,’ says Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. ‘But I am no mind reader. My best guess is he felt he was falling apart, cognitively and physically. And he really wanted to enjoy life and expected life to become decreasingly enjoyable. I suspect he worked out a hedonic calculus of when the burdens of life would begin to outweigh the benefits—and he probably foresaw a very steep decline in his early 90s.. I have never seen a better-planned death than the one Danny designed’.”

His friends and family say that Kahneman’s choice was purely personal; he didn’t endorse assisted suicide for anyone else and never wished to be viewed as advocating it for others.

Some of his friends knew about his plans before he went to Switzerland. Despite their efforts to talk him into deferring his decision, he wouldn’t budge. In fact, he had to ask a friend to stop after they relentlessly pleaded with him. 

“Life was certainly precious to him. Kahneman and his Jewish family had spent much of his childhood hiding from the Nazis in southern France during the Holocaust. ‘We were hunted like rabbits,’ he said,” the WSJ said. 

His final words in his final email were: “I discovered after making the decision that I am not afraid of not existing, and that I think of death as going to sleep and not waking up. The last period has truly not been hard, except for witnessing the pain I caused others. So if you were inclined to be sorry for me, don’t be,” the report said.

“Thank you for helping make my life a good one.”