I'm not a person who has idols, but Daniel Kahneman came about as close as it gets for me. It is not an exaggeration to say that he revolutionized our understanding of the mind. Among many other concepts, Kahneman and his collaborators came up with the ideas of: Anchoring (where an irrelevant number can influence our judgments) Prospect theory (a theory of how we make judgments when there is uncertainty that incorporates a number of biases) The focusing illusion (where we overempha...