The late Nobel laureate advocated deliberate thinking, but what rules now is haste and gut instinct. His passing should give us pause

Here is a simple maths problem: together a bat and ball cost £1.10. The bat costs one pound more than the ball. How much is the ball?

It doesn’t take long for most people to answer 10p. And most people get it wrong. If you are in the minority that pauses long enough to realise that the ball costs 5p and the bat £1.05, congratulations, smartypants. If you recognised the question as an exercise in misdirection to expose the foibles of human intuition, you are probably familiar with the work of Daniel Kahneman, psychologist and Nobel laureate, who died last week.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist