GUEST COLUMN
The Thinker Underlying
So Much in Lighting By THOMAS PATERSON
We recently lost a hero of mine, Daniel Kahneman (1934-2024), a psychologist and Economics Nobel Prize winner. If you know who he is, you probably are aware of him from his incredibly popular Thinking, Fast and Slow. My first awareness of his work was in the late 1990s as I studied artificial intelligence, as a support and backup to being a lighting designer. His work that drew my attention was on how people understand the value of loss, versus gain, and the fundamental irrationality of human thought. Indeed, if you asked psychologists, neurologists, philosophers and especially economists about Kahneman prior to Thinking, Fast and Slow, they would almost certainly have told you about the way Kahneman (and his collaborator Amos Tversky) rocked the foundations of economics when they demonstrated that humans are not rational thinkers, and therefore you can’t analyze economics simply by assuming everyone is rational. But over the 25 years I’ve been in architectural lighting, Kahneman’s work has been ever more dominant in my thinking, and in ever wider aspects. I’d like to share five examples that perhaps can help you see where you can use him. 1. When negotiating professional fees, make the fee seem like an emphatic gain, rather than any kind of loss, let alone a big one! Kahneman talks about the way one is more averse, more negative, about losing than gaining. You would appreciate being given ten dollars, sure. But if someone took ten dollars from you – that would make you upset, even angry. The same change in your net worth is so exaggerated in loss compared to gain. I won’t recapitulate all his experiments here, but I’m sure you understand that feeling! What that means is that in negotiations, you do better to ensure that losses
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designing lighting