Wednesday, March 19, 2025

Part I

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How Do Humans Make Decisions, By Rational Thinking or Intuition? The Answer Isn’t As Rational As You Might Think

To be human is to think. We define ourselves, we name ourselves Homosapiens, the being who thinks, the conscious thinking being. But as you know, even as that is a reflection of the fact that we are made in God’s image, to be human is to think and eventually to think about thinking.

Now, that’s something we acquire over time. A three-year-old thinks, but a three-year-old does not think about thinking. On the other hand, a 13-year-old, well, he or she thinks about thinking. That’s a part of what makes 13 such an interesting age. There have to be developments in the brain that allow for complex analytical cognition. That is the ability to abstract yourself, to watch your own thinking, to anticipate other minds at work.

But this is not only a matter of practicality, it is also a matter of economics. And no one made that point more famously than Daniel Kahneman, one of the most influential economists in the world. His 2011 book entitled, Thinking Fast and Slow, was the culmination of a work trying to think about thinking. It all began when he was a very young boy and a teenager growing up and what would eventually become Israel, was Palestine under the mandate, and then eventually the nation of Israel. He grew up as a Jewish boy with some of his family having fled Hitler. And he grew up and went to high school there in Israel and then came to the United States. He eventually earned a PhD in psychology there at the University of California at Berkeley. He was very interested in how human beings think. That became an obsession indeed. That was the main professional interest of his life.

He worked with others, including his very close associate, Amos Tversky, and he worked on watching human beings think. Eventually that led to the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002. So you have a person trained in psychology who wins the Nobel Prize in economics, and was considered one of the world’s most influential economic thinkers ranked certainly in the top 10 worldwide so long as he was at the peak of his career.

And when you think about thinking, if you’re someone like Daniel Kahneman, you eventually conduct a lot of experiments. You also begin to ask basic questions as to what other people are missing, what they’re getting wrong. And the reason why he became so influential in the field of economics is because he held that the standard economic model held by most economists at the time is just basically wrong. They assume that human beings as consumers and economic agents were primarily rational beings operating in terms of reason and making cold calculations in their economic decision making.

Daniel Kahneman basically said that’s fundamentally wrong. That’s how human beings make most decisions, and that’s not how economics works. As a matter of fact, the title of his most famous book, as I said, was Thinking Fast and Slow, and he pointed to the fact that human beings actually operate by two different ways of thinking. One of them is fast thinking and the other is slow thinking.

The standard economic model was based upon people thinking slowly, making mathematical calculations, thinking about long-term interest and long-term appreciation. Thinking about the rational choice between this lawnmower or that lawnmower. Daniel Kahneman said, however, that the economic model needed to be changed because most people don’t make consumer decisions or even economic decisions, vocational decisions, based upon long reason. They make it on far shorter term thinking.

When it came to thinking, he came to distinguish between what he called system one and system two. 

System one is basically intuition. It’s based upon experience. It’s fast. It’s fast decision-making based upon some very clear intuitive factors. 

There’s also system two. System two is long thinking. It takes more time. You have to reduce this to math. You have to get out a calculator and do a mathematical projection. This is the long slow deliberative thinking that economists assume most people were using most of the time. Kahneman came back and said, that is a radical miscalculation.

He came up with a lot of categories including endowment effect, the peak end rule. His most famous was a form of prospect theory. And this comes down to asking the question, why do people make certain decisions rather than others? Now, for one thing, he pointed out that human beings, when watched economically, actually operate on the basis of being more averse to loss than they are positive about gain. And that is to say their economic decisions are often based upon that system one thinking, that intuitional thinking. They don’t want to lose what they’ve worked for. That sometimes leads them to make economic decisions that aren’t in their own best interests because they should be looking for the opportunity of gain. They will trade an opportunity for gain for the assurance that they will not experience loss.

Now just think about how fundamental that would be to those who are involved in the economy, say selling investments or planning retirement. Or for that matter, just deciding how you’re going to advertise something. Save $20 turns out to be a winning formula where I’ll give you a 20% discount doesn’t work the same way. System one wants to hear, “You just avoided losing money.” System two says, “Maybe we need a long-term calculation.” System two is quite necessary for investing. But even investors, as Kahneman pointed out, more often than not, they operate at least at first on system one.

That completely upset the entire field of economics, and that’s why he was the 2002 Nobel Laureate in economic sciences. He also came up with what was known as the peak end rule. Now we’re going to have to hang on to this. It becomes very important. The peak end rule, according to Kahneman’s research, says that when you look at an experience, say an experience over time, human beings looking back at it tend to think about the peak experience in their evaluation or the end of the experience.

And so he used to say a medical test as an example. Let’s say someone has to undergo a medical test. He used colonoscopy as the classic example, and that is something that is very unpleasant, but it gets better as the test goes on. The first part of it is more unpleasant than the rest of it. And thus Kahneman says, “When people look back at the experience, they don’t remember how bad it was at the beginning. They remember that it got better. And furthermore, if the result’s good, well that’s a great peak experience. I’m going to walk away with that one as a winner.”

Now, as I said, this says immediate application to economics. But all of us thinking about thinking, we think about ourselves as thinkers. How exactly do we think about things? How did I make that decision? How much of me is system one? How much is system two? And that’s for one thing why on The Briefing we talk about thinking in accordance with the Christian worldview, with the biblical worldview. That requires system two thinking. But it also underlines the fact that we will tend to go with intuition, that first fast response, what seems right to us. And with many things, it really doesn’t require system two thinking. And you’re thinking about, say, choosing this candy bar or that candy bar. But thinking about a complex issue, that requires system two thinking and that requires thinking about thinking in a whole new way.

Why are we talking about this now? Daniel Kahneman died about a year ago, and he died as a result of what you can only call assisted suicide. He planned the end of his life. The man who won the Nobel Prize for thinking about decision-making decided to end his own life, and he did so in ways that even to many of his peers just don’t make sense because he wasn’t suffering an urgent cognitive decline. He wasn’t suffering from any kind of intractable suffering. He was at the peak of his career and he just decided that he did not want to experience the indignities of aging further so he just decided to end it.

So this article is by Jason Zweig and he is a major writer for the Wall Street Journal. He’s someone who had been a colleague and collaborator with Daniel Kahneman. So that tells you this is someone who not only knows about Daniel Kahneman, he knew Daniel Kahneman, although he tells us that he did not know until recently that indeed this was assisted suicide. This was Daniel Kahneman’s decision to plot his own death.

Now, as Zweig tells us, “Kahneman was one of the world’s most influential thinkers, a psychologist at Princeton University, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, author of the international blockbuster Thinking Fast and Slow, first published in 2011. He had spent his long career studying the imperfections and inconsistencies of human decision-making by most accounts, although not his own. Kahneman was still in reasonably good physical and mental health when he chose to die.”

Now, I don’t think it’s an accident that so many front-page articles, so many massive articles have appeared in recent days in the national and international media on assisted suicide. It is a big issue. Now, the fact that it’s showing up where it shows up right now tells us that among many of the elites in our country, evidently this is a very fervent conversation, but it also tells us that the way culture works, this is actually something that is being considered by more people than we might imagine.

Part II

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A Decision for Death? How Does Daniel Kahneman’s Assisted Suicide Fit into the Worldview of the Leading Expert on Decision Making?

In this case of course, the irony is just massive. The irony of the world’s leading expert on decision-making making this decision. And the reason that’s so interesting is that when you think about his distinction between system one thinking and system two thinking, this isn’t just system one. It very clearly is evidence of system two, which means he had to plan and plot this for a long time, and he did so in such a way that he went with his partner. And she’s the widow by the way, of his former colleague, Amos Tversky. We are told that they flew from New York to Paris to unite with Kahneman’s daughter and her family. “They spent days walking around the city, going to museums and the ballet and savoring soufflés and chocolate mousse around March 22,” this is of 2024, “Kahneman who had turned 90 that month also started emailing a personal message to several dozen of the people he was closest to.” This is a goodbye letter he wrote, “I’m sending friends to tell them that I am on my way to Switzerland where my life will end on March 27th.” 

So just imagine you’re a close friend to this man who’s given his life to thinking about decision-making, and he writes you in advance that he’s made the decision to end his life in Switzerland on the 27th of March 2024. Jason Zweig later asked this, “How did the world’s leading authority on decision-making make the ultimate decision? How closely did he follow his own precepts on how to make good choices? How does his decision fit into the growing debate over the downsides of extreme longevity? How much control do we and should we have over our own death?” Fascinating. That last question is the big question. How much control should we have over our own death?

Now, here’s where the worldview clash comes immediately to mind because when you think about this, it becomes extremely clear. Let’s use system two thinking here. This requires us to have complex analytical thinking here. When you trace back this man’s decision to end his life by assisted suicide under the conditions, by the way, of no urgent threat, no terminal disease, no intractable pain, that from the Christian worldview would not justify such a decision. But even from a secular worldview, here’s the interesting thing, many of his closest colleagues are asking the question, “What sense did this make? What kind of logic, what kind of decision making was he operating by?” And thus, you have to look at some evidence. Some of the evidence came, for instance in interviews where he said that he had come to the conclusion much earlier in life that living past a certain time was superfluous. That’s his word, superfluous. In other words, it’s unnecessary. It’s a plus that we don’t need. And of course it comes with risks, the risk of decline, the risk of potential Alzheimer’s disease, the risk of physical decline.

Evidently, he decided all of that was superfluous and he would just end his life on his own terms. He would end his life as a famous economist. He and his colleagues had written articles including the most influential, the most often cited article in the history of economics. He could go out on that note. He could go out after enjoying chocolate mousse in Paris. Just take a quick trip to Switzerland and end your life there.

But this is something that also, in worldview terms, gets our attention because even many of his close associates operating apparently also out of a secular worldview, that can’t come to terms with this. They’re asking the question that Zweig asks openly, “What kind of decision making process was Daniel Kahneman following here? Does it make sense to us? How did it make sense to him?” And once again, you come back to the idea that evidently it makes sense according to his own values, his own worldview, because he saw life as just something that was eventually a matter of loss rather than gain. And he didn’t want to lose his dignity. He didn’t want to lose that control.

Remember what I talked about in prospect theory where he talked about loss aversion? That loss aversion, he said, is extremely powerful. It comes out in investing, it comes out in consumer activity. It comes out in vocational choice. We are more concerned about not losing than we are about gaining. Evidently, it was his cold calculation, although he seems to have made it in a relatively happy frame of mind that makes it all the more perplexing. He came to the conclusion that living longer represented more risk of loss than hope of gain.

This is exactly where the Christian worldview comes in. The gospel comes in and says our calculation has to be exactly the opposite. And this is where we do want to know more about this man’s worldview. And so I have been on a search in recent days to try to excavate his worldview as best I can understand.

He was born in a very unusual circumstance to a very Jewish family that had gone to Palestine, then under the British mandate, and of course it became Israel. He went to high school in Israel. And he was very much identified with Israel. He was, at the end of his life and throughout his life, he was a citizen of both Israel and the United States. And even though he’s a very liberal critic of the government of Israel, and I mean a very liberal critic of the government of Israel, he maintained that Israeli citizenship. He retained his Jewish identity, but he did not retain any belief in God.

I found an interview he had given there in Israel years ago in which he traced his loss of belief in God to a walk home from school when he was a 15-year-old boy. And he just came, he said to the instantaneous realization that he didn’t believe in God. And that was all a part of his own decision-making. And of course that was the major factor, I would argue, in the shape of his life that eventually led to the end of his life.

Daniel Kahneman’s closest friends are trying to analyze the decision. One of them is Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at University of Pennsylvania. Speaking of Kahneman, he said, “Right to the end, he was a lot smarter than most of us. I am no mind reader,” he said. “My best guess is that 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,” that’s a calculus about pleasure, “of when the burdens of life would begin to outweigh the benefits, and he probably foresaw a very steep decline in his early 90s.” Tetlock said, “I’ve never seen a better planned death than the one Danny designed.”

Well, let me just say in response that I have rarely seen a sentence so chilling in its form. I want to read that sentence from this colleague again. He said, “I’ve never seen a better planned death than the one Danny designed.” Now, I just want to say this is where the distinction between the Christian worldview, a biblical worldview on the one hand and a secular worldview on the other hand, this is where it really shows. And it is because we as Christians, we’re not allowed to conduct that kind of hedonic calculus. We’re not allowed to envision the circumstances in which we will design and plan our own death. We believe that our life is not a cosmic accident, that we are created in God’s image. The Creator made us for his glory. Our life has a purpose, and He is the Lord of our lives, not only in the beginning, but also at the end.

Part III

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Life is Worth Living for God’s Glory – And Hedonic Pleasure is a Horribly Empty Rationale for Assisted Suicide

But the Christian biblical worldview also prevents us from making this hedonic calculus because our life is not worth living because it is full of pleasure. Our life is worth living because we are made for God’s glory. And then we come to understand that in this life, we will have trouble. The Gospel of John, Jesus says that to his own disciples just before the crucifixion. We come to understand that life and death are a part of our lives by God’s design, and that we are made for not only this life as much loss or gain as we may experience in this life. We are meant for a world to come. We’re meant for a life to come by the grace and to the glory of God.

And so you look at this and you recognize, “Okay, this gain-loss theory, this prospect theory, I guess Daniel Kahneman in one sense was just living out the implications of his worldview.” His worldview didn’t start with a creator. So life is just basically an accident. And he was constantly looking at decision-making, and he himself early on came to see that avoiding loss was a bigger motivation for most people than even desiring gain. But I just want to point out that whether he knew it or not, that is the exact refutation of what the Apostle Paul tells us about the gospel and the Christian life.

In the Apostle Paul, we find the opposite of the hedonic calculus. We find the opposite of loss aversion. In Philippians chapter 3 beginning in verse 7, Paul writes, “But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as lost because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord. For His sake, I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish in order that I may gain Christ and be found in Him. Not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ. The righteousness from God that depends on faith, that I might know Him and the power of His resurrection and may share His sufferings, becoming like Him in His death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.”

And so I’m just going to make the connection that came to my mind when I saw that statement and put it in the context of the gain loss calculus that Daniel Kahneman was famous for and is now famous for because of the way he decided to end his own life in Switzerland. Loss aversion theory tells us that we as human beings are, by system one, our intuition, we are more motivated by not losing something, by avoiding a loss than we are even the possibility of gain.

The Apostle Paul turns that exactly on its head and says that He was willing, and thus we as Christians must be willing to lose all things for the gain of the surpassing glory of the Lord Jesus Christ and to be found in Him and to know in Him the resurrection from the dead.

The difference in horizon is also very clear here. Daniel Kahneman, given a secular worldview, was looking at the end of life as the ticking out of a clock that would eventually at one point just end and with it would go life. He made the very clear point in the communication that he sent to his friends just before his death that he considered himself to have lived a very good life. And evidently, he wanted a life defined as good on his own terms. This is something else that we as Christians are told it is not our right to demand. To his friends in that communication, he said, “Thank you for helping make my life a good one.”

Part IV

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Atheism and Assisted Suicide: The Theology Behind the Final Decision of the World’s Leading Expert on Thinking

Now, here’s something else that’s very interesting about Daniel Kahneman. He wanted to hold the fact that he had died in this assisted suicide secret so that the press attention about his death would focus on the achievements of his life and his Nobel Prize and his of course pioneering economic theories and not on the situation of his death and the fact that he had brought about his own death in Switzerland by assisted suicide. That also tells us something. It tells us that he actually was concerned with what would happen after he was dead. What he’s most concerned about was the news coverage of his death and what would dominate in that. He didn’t want it to be the assisted suicide.

But that also tells us something else because in the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal where this article ran, it was almost two full pages of the newspaper. So in other words, it was just a delayed effect. What Daniel Kahneman didn’t want to be most talked about is indeed, as this article not only represents but reflects, it is exactly what people are talking about.

I want to take you back to that interview I found from Israel. In talking about when he lost his faith, Daniel Kahneman told the interviewer that he came to that sudden realization, he said, as a fifteen-year-old boy that God did not exist or that God would not care about him, and some very specific things in his life. He went on to say, “That was a very sudden insight. That if I can’t imagine God caring about me, then we were irrelevant to each other. And it really didn’t matter whether he existed or not, and that was the end of the religion for me.”

It’s an amazing statement made by an older man looking back at himself as a fifteen-year-old boy. He had just come to that instantaneous decision that he couldn’t imagine God caring about Him. And that even if God existed, “then we were irrelevant to each other.” That’s an extremely sad statement. And of course it is a direct rejection of the entire revelation of Holy Scripture in both the Old and the New Testaments. And we are told that God does care about us right down to the minutiae of our lives. And it just points very sadly to the infinite distinction that the gospel makes, the infinite change, the infinite distinction, the infinite power that enters our life, the infinite meaning that enters our life, solely because God does exist and he does care about us, and that while were we yet sinners, Christ died for us. And it also just underlines the fact that decision-making is very important. The process of our thinking is very important. But even the most brilliant thinker about thinking, left in a situation in which he didn’t believe, even if God existed, that he cared about him. I think that has to be tied to the final decision that he made and the fact that even many of the people who prized his expertise in decision-making are left wondering about how exactly he made that final decision.

This is an unusual edition of The Briefing, but this event, now very much in public conversation, deserves this kind of attention. And especially for those of us who love Christ and love the gospel, this is one of those events that simply brings to a very clear understanding the distinction not between fast and slow thinking, but between a world in which we understand that God exists and loves us and another world in which we know neither of those things.

It’s just unspeakably sad that Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Laureate, the illustrious thinker, the best-selling author, died without Christ. It is certainly a clarion reminder to all of us of the importance of bearing witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ and understanding the stakes and reminding people that we are not left in a calculus in which we have to make the evaluation of the meaning and worth of our own lives in the beginning, in the middle, or at the end. That’s more than enough for today.