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{{Infobox person
{{Infobox person
| name             = Daniel Kahneman
| name = Daniel Kahneman
| native_name     = דניאל כהנמן
| native_name = דניאל כהנמן
| native_name_lang = he
| native_name_lang = he
| image           = Daniel Kahneman (3283955327) (cropped).jpg
| image = Daniel Kahneman (3283955327) (cropped).jpg
| caption         = Kahneman in 2009
| caption = Kahneman in 2009
| birth_date       = {{Birth date|1934|3|5}}
| birth_date = {{Birth date|1934|3|5}}
| birth_place     = [[Tel Aviv]], [[Mandatory Palestine|British Mandate of Palestine]]
| birth_place = [[Tel Aviv]], [[British Mandate of Palestine]]
| death_date       = {{Death date and age|2024|3|27|1934|3|5}}
| death_date = {{Death date and age|2024|3|27|1934|3|5}}
| death_place     = [[Nunningen]], Switzerland
| death_place = [[Nunningen]], Switzerland
| nationality     = Israeli, American
| nationality = Israeli, American
| occupation       = Psychologist, academic
| occupation = Psychologist, academic
| known_for       = [[Prospect theory]], [[behavioral economics]], [[heuristics]] and biases, ''[[Thinking, Fast and Slow]]''
| known_for = [[Prospect theory]], [[behavioral economics]], ''[[Thinking, Fast and Slow]]''
| education       = Ph.D., [[University of California, Berkeley]]
| education = Ph.D. in Psychology ([[University of California, Berkeley]])
| spouse           = {{plainlist|
| spouse = Anne Treisman (m. 1978; her death 2018)
* Irah Kahneman
| awards = [[Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences]] (2002)
* [[Anne Treisman]] (m. 1978; died 2018)
| website =  
}}
| awards           = {{plainlist|
* [[Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences]] (2002)
* [[Presidential Medal of Freedom]] (2013)
* [[American Psychological Association]] Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contributions (2007)
}}
| employer        = [[Princeton University]]
| title            = Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology, Emeritus; Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs, Emeritus
}}
}}


'''Daniel Kahneman''' ({{IPAc-en|ˈ|k|ɑː|n|ə|m|ən}}; {{lang-he|דניאל כהנמן}}; March 5, 1934 – March 27, 2024) was an Israeli-American psychologist whose decades-long investigation into the mechanics of human judgment and decision-making reshaped the fields of psychology and economics alike. Though he never took a single economics course, Kahneman's empirical findings challenged foundational assumptions about human rationality that had long underpinned modern economic theory, earning him the 2002 [[Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences]] jointly with [[Vernon L. Smith]].<ref name="nyt-obit">{{cite news |last=Wolfe |first=Jeremy |date=2024-03-27 |title=Daniel Kahneman, Who Plumbed the Psychology of Economics, Dies at 90 |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/27/business/daniel-kahneman-dead.html |work=The New York Times |access-date=2026-02-24}}</ref> Together with his longtime collaborator [[Amos Tversky]], Kahneman developed [[prospect theory]] and established a cognitive basis for systematic human errors arising from [[heuristics]] and biases. His 2011 book ''[[Thinking, Fast and Slow]]'' became an international bestseller and brought his research to a vast popular audience. The [[London School of Economics]] described him as "the founder of modern behavioural science and behavioural economics."<ref name="lse">{{cite web |title=Daniel Kahneman: a legacy |url=https://www.lse.ac.uk/events/daniel-kahneman-a-legacy |publisher=The London School of Economics and Political Science |date=2025-11-18 |access-date=2026-02-24}}</ref> At the time of his death, Kahneman held the title of Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology, Emeritus, and Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs, Emeritus, at [[Princeton University]]'s [[Princeton School of Public and International Affairs]].<ref name="princeton">{{cite web |title=Daniel Kahneman, pioneering behavioral psychologist, Nobel laureate and 'giant in the field,' dies at 90 |url=https://www.princeton.edu/news/2024/03/28/daniel-kahneman-pioneering-behavioral-psychologist-nobel-laureate-and-giant-field |publisher=Princeton University |date=2024-03-28 |access-date=2026-02-24}}</ref>
'''Daniel Kahneman''' ({{lang-he|דניאל כהנמן}}; March 5, 1934 – March 27, 2024) was an Israeli-American [[psychologist]] whose research on [[judgment]] and [[decision-making]] fundamentally reshaped the understanding of human rationality and its limits. Born in Tel Aviv during the period of the [[British Mandate of Palestine]], Kahneman spent much of his childhood in France during [[World War II]] before returning to what would become [[Israel]]. Over a career spanning more than five decades, he produced a body of work that bridged [[psychology]] and [[economics]] in ways that had not previously been attempted at such scale. Together with his long-time collaborator [[Amos Tversky]], Kahneman developed [[prospect theory]] and identified a range of [[cognitive biases]] and [[heuristics]] that systematically influence human judgment. For this work, he was awarded the 2002 [[Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences]], shared with [[Vernon L. Smith]], making him one of the very few non-economists to receive the prize.<ref name="princeton">{{cite web |title=Daniel Kahneman, pioneering behavioral psychologist, Nobel laureate and 'giant in the field,' dies at 90 |url=https://www.princeton.edu/news/2024/03/28/daniel-kahneman-pioneering-behavioral-psychologist-nobel-laureate-and-giant-field |publisher=Princeton University |date=2024-03-28 |access-date=2026-02-24}}</ref> His 2011 book ''[[Thinking, Fast and Slow]]'' became an international best seller and introduced his ideas to a broad popular audience. At the time of his death, Kahneman held the title of Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology, Emeritus, and Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs, Emeritus, at [[Princeton University]]'s [[Princeton School of Public and International Affairs]].<ref name="princeton" /> He came to be known as the "grandfather of behavioral economics," a field he helped establish as a major discipline within the social sciences.<ref name="lse">{{cite web |title=Daniel Kahneman: a legacy |url=https://www.lse.ac.uk/events/daniel-kahneman-a-legacy |publisher=The London School of Economics and Political Science |date=2025-11-18 |access-date=2026-02-24}}</ref>


== Early Life ==
== Early Life ==


Daniel Kahneman was born on March 5, 1934, in [[Tel Aviv]], in what was then the [[Mandatory Palestine|British Mandate of Palestine]].<ref name="princeton" /> His parents were Lithuanian Jews who had emigrated to Palestine, though Kahneman spent much of his early childhood in [[France]], where his family was living at the time of the German occupation during [[World War II]].<ref name="nyt-obit" /> The family's experience during the [[Holocaust]] profoundly shaped Kahneman's early consciousness. His father was rounded up in one of the early mass arrests of Jews in Paris in 1941 but was released after several weeks, reportedly through the intervention of his employer. The family spent the remainder of the war years moving between hiding places in the south of France, living under constant threat of discovery and deportation.<ref name="nyt-obit" />
Daniel Kahneman was born on March 5, 1934, in [[Tel Aviv]], in what was then the [[British Mandate of Palestine]].<ref name="princeton" /> His parents were Lithuanian Jews who had emigrated to Palestine but were visiting [[Paris]] at the time of his birth, and the family remained in France. Kahneman spent his formative childhood years in Paris, where his father worked as a research chemist in a large cosmetics company. The German occupation of France during World War II had a defining impact on Kahneman's early life. As a Jewish family living under the [[Vichy regime]] and the German occupation, the Kahnemans faced persecution and were forced into hiding. Kahneman later recounted experiences of narrowly avoiding capture and living under constant threat during this period. His father was briefly detained in what appeared to be an early roundup of Jews but was released; however, he died of untreated diabetes in 1944, before the liberation of France.<ref name="nyt-obit">{{cite news |last= |first= |date=2024-03-28 |title=Daniel Kahneman, Who Plumbed the Psychology of Economics, Dies at 90 |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/27/business/daniel-kahneman-dead.html |work=The New York Times |access-date=2026-02-24}}</ref>
 
Kahneman's father died of untreated diabetes in 1944, just weeks before the [[Normandy landings|Allied liberation of France]]. Following the end of the war, Kahneman and his mother emigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine in 1946, arriving roughly two years before the establishment of the [[State of Israel]] in 1948.<ref name="nyt-obit" />


These formative experiences — the daily negotiation of danger, the observation of human behavior under extreme duress, and the arbitrary nature of survival — left a lasting imprint on Kahneman's intellectual development. He later recounted that his childhood experiences had given him an early and abiding interest in the complexity of human psychology and the ways in which people assess risk and make decisions under uncertainty.<ref name="nyt-obit" />
After the war ended, Kahneman and his surviving family moved to the British Mandate of Palestine in 1948, shortly before the establishment of the [[State of Israel]]. The experiences of his childhood—the constant assessment of danger, the need to read people and situations for signs of threat—left a lasting impression on Kahneman and, by his own account, contributed to his lifelong interest in the workings of the human mind and the errors to which it is prone. Growing up in a context of existential uncertainty shaped his intellectual curiosity about how people perceive risk and make judgments under conditions of ambiguity.<ref name="nyt-obit" />


== Education ==
== Education ==


Kahneman pursued his undergraduate studies in Israel, earning a bachelor's degree in psychology and mathematics from the [[Hebrew University of Jerusalem]] in 1954.<ref name="princeton" /> Following his undergraduate education, he served in the psychology department of the [[Israel Defense Forces]], where he worked on developing interview techniques and screening procedures for evaluating officer candidates. This early applied work gave Kahneman direct exposure to the ways in which human judgment could be systematically flawed — an insight that would become central to his later research.<ref name="nyt-obit" />
Kahneman pursued his undergraduate studies at the [[Hebrew University of Jerusalem]], where he earned a bachelor's degree in psychology with a minor in mathematics in 1954. His early academic training in Israel included mandatory service in the [[Israel Defense Forces]], where he worked in the psychology department. During his military service, Kahneman was tasked with evaluating candidates for officer training, an experience that gave him early insight into the shortcomings of intuitive judgment and the superiority of structured assessment methods—themes that would recur throughout his career.<ref name="nyt-obit" />


Kahneman subsequently moved to the United States to pursue graduate studies. He earned his Ph.D. in psychology from the [[University of California, Berkeley]] in 1961.<ref name="berkeley">{{cite web |title=Catalogue record |url=http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b12138684~S1 |publisher=University of California, Berkeley Library |access-date=2026-02-24}}</ref> His doctoral work focused on aspects of visual perception and psychophysics, subjects that laid the groundwork for his later investigations into judgment and cognition.
Kahneman subsequently moved to the United States for his graduate education. He enrolled at the [[University of California, Berkeley]], where he earned his [[Ph.D.]] in psychology in 1961.<ref>{{cite web |title=Daniel Kahneman catalog record |url=http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b12138684~S1 |publisher=University of California, Berkeley Library |date= |access-date=2026-02-24}}</ref> His doctoral work focused on relationships between specific adjectives in the semantic differential, a topic in psychophysics and the psychology of perception. At Berkeley, Kahneman was exposed to the rigorous experimental traditions of American psychology, which complemented the theoretical foundations he had built at the Hebrew University.


== Career ==
== Career ==


=== Early Academic Career and the Hebrew University ===
=== Early Academic Career and Collaboration with Amos Tversky ===
 
After completing his doctorate at Berkeley, Kahneman returned to Israel and joined the faculty of the [[Hebrew University of Jerusalem]], where he held a position in the psychology department. It was during his years at the Hebrew University that the most consequential intellectual partnership of his career began. In the late 1960s, Kahneman began collaborating with fellow psychologist [[Amos Tversky]], a colleague at the Hebrew University whose background in mathematical psychology complemented Kahneman's expertise in perception and attention.<ref name="nyt-obit" />
 
The Kahneman-Tversky collaboration, which would span nearly three decades until Tversky's death in 1996, produced a body of work that fundamentally altered the understanding of human cognition. The two researchers developed a distinctive working method, often spending hours in intense conversation and jointly drafting papers sentence by sentence. Their intellectual chemistry proved extraordinarily productive, and the work they generated together transcended what either might have accomplished individually.<ref name="nyt-obit" />
 
=== Heuristics and Biases Program ===
 
Beginning in the early 1970s, Kahneman and Tversky published a series of landmark papers that identified systematic patterns of error in human judgment. Their research program, which became known as the "heuristics and biases" approach, demonstrated that people rely on a limited number of cognitive shortcuts — heuristics — when making judgments under uncertainty. While these heuristics are often useful, they can lead to severe and systematic errors, or biases.<ref name="nyt-obit" />


Among the key heuristics they identified were:
After completing his doctorate at Berkeley, Kahneman returned to Israel and joined the faculty of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he held a position in the psychology department. It was during this period that he began his collaboration with [[Amos Tversky]], a fellow Israeli psychologist who had also studied at the Hebrew University before earning his doctorate at the [[University of Michigan]]. The Kahneman-Tversky partnership, which began in the late 1960s, became one of the most productive and influential collaborations in the history of the social sciences.<ref name="nyt-obit" />


* '''Representativeness heuristic''' — the tendency to judge the probability of an event by how closely it resembles a prototype or stereotype, often leading to neglect of base-rate information.
Together, Kahneman and Tversky embarked on a systematic investigation of the ways in which people deviate from the predictions of rational choice theory when making judgments and decisions. Their early work focused on identifying [[heuristics]]—mental shortcuts that people use to simplify complex problems—and the systematic [[cognitive biases|biases]] these heuristics produce. In a series of landmark papers published in the early 1970s, they described phenomena including the [[availability heuristic]] (the tendency to judge the likelihood of events based on how easily examples come to mind), the [[representativeness heuristic]] (the tendency to judge probabilities based on resemblance to stereotypes), and [[anchoring]] (the tendency for initial exposure to a number to influence subsequent estimates).<ref name="princeton" />
* '''Availability heuristic''' — the tendency to estimate the frequency or likelihood of an event based on how easily examples come to mind, which can be influenced by factors such as media coverage or personal experience rather than actual statistical frequency.
* '''Anchoring and adjustment''' — the tendency for initial values or starting points to exert disproportionate influence on subsequent estimates, even when the anchor is arbitrary.


These findings, published in influential papers in journals such as ''[[Science (journal)|Science]]'' and ''[[Cognitive Psychology]]'', challenged the prevailing assumption in economics and decision theory that human beings are rational actors who process information optimally. Kahneman and Tversky demonstrated that departures from rationality are not random but predictable and systematic, governed by identifiable cognitive mechanisms.<ref name="nyt-obit" />
Their 1974 paper "Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases," published in the journal ''[[Science (journal)|Science]]'', became one of the most cited papers in the social sciences. It demonstrated through a series of elegant experiments that human judgment systematically departs from the norms of probability theory and statistics, not because of ignorance or stupidity, but because of the inherent architecture of human cognition.<ref name="nyt-obit" />


=== Prospect Theory ===
=== Prospect Theory ===


In 1979, Kahneman and Tversky published "Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk" in the journal ''[[Econometrica]]'', a paper that became one of the most cited articles in the history of economics. [[Prospect theory]] offered an alternative to [[expected utility theory]], the standard economic model of decision-making under uncertainty.<ref name="nyt-obit" />
In 1979, Kahneman and Tversky published "Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk" in ''[[Econometrica]]'', a paper that would become the most cited work in the history of that journal and one of the most cited papers in all of economics. [[Prospect theory]] offered a descriptive model of how people actually make decisions involving risk, in contrast to the normative model of [[expected utility theory]] that had dominated economics.<ref name="nyt-obit" />


The key insights of prospect theory included:
The theory introduced several key concepts that challenged prevailing economic assumptions. Among these was the idea of [[loss aversion]]—the finding that losses loom larger than equivalent gains in people's psychological experience. According to prospect theory, the pain of losing a given amount of money is roughly twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining the same amount. The theory also described the [[certainty effect]], which refers to people's tendency to overweight outcomes that are considered certain relative to outcomes that are merely probable, and the [[framing effect]], which demonstrates that the way a choice is presented—whether in terms of gains or losses—can reverse people's preferences.<ref name="princeton" />


* '''Loss aversion''' — the finding that losses loom larger than equivalent gains in people's evaluations. Losing $100, for example, produces a stronger psychological impact than gaining $100.
Prospect theory's empirical findings directly challenged the assumption of human rationality that underpinned much of modern economic theory. By demonstrating that people's choices are systematically influenced by the framing of options and by reference points rather than absolute outcomes, Kahneman and Tversky provided a more psychologically realistic foundation for understanding economic behavior.<ref name="lse" />
* '''Reference dependence''' — the observation that people evaluate outcomes not in terms of absolute states of wealth but relative to a reference point, typically their current situation.
* '''Diminishing sensitivity''' — the principle that the subjective impact of changes in wealth diminishes as those changes grow larger, applicable to both gains and losses.
* '''Probability weighting''' — the tendency for people to overweight small probabilities and underweight large ones, which helps explain behaviors such as the simultaneous purchase of lottery tickets and insurance.
 
Prospect theory provided a descriptively accurate model of how people actually make decisions, as opposed to how rational economic agents were assumed to behave. The theory had far-reaching implications for economics, finance, insurance, public policy, and numerous other fields.<ref name="nyt-obit" /><ref name="lse" />


=== Move to North America ===
=== Move to North America ===


In the late 1970s and 1980s, Kahneman held positions at several institutions in North America. He spent time at the [[University of British Columbia]] in Vancouver, Canada, where he continued his research on judgment and decision-making and also pursued work on the psychology of well-being and hedonic experience.<ref name="nyt-obit" />
In 1978, Kahneman moved to Canada to take a position at the [[University of British Columbia]]. He subsequently held positions at the [[University of California, Berkeley]], before joining the faculty of [[Princeton University]] in 1993, where he would remain for the rest of his career. At Princeton, he was appointed the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and held a joint appointment at the [[Princeton School of Public and International Affairs]] (formerly the Woodrow Wilson School).<ref name="princeton" />


Kahneman eventually joined the faculty of [[Princeton University]], where he was appointed the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and also held an appointment in the [[Princeton School of Public and International Affairs]]. At Princeton, Kahneman continued to expand the scope of his research, exploring topics including the distinction between experienced utility and decision utility, the role of memory in the evaluation of past experiences, and the determinants of subjective well-being.<ref name="princeton" />
The geographical separation from Tversky (who was based at [[Stanford University]]) did not initially end their collaboration, though the frequency and intensity of their joint work diminished over time. Tversky died of [[metastatic melanoma]] in 1996 at the age of 59, six years before the Nobel Prize was awarded for work to which he had been a central contributor. Because the Nobel Prize is not awarded posthumously, Tversky did not share in the honor, though Kahneman consistently and publicly acknowledged Tversky's equal contribution to their joint work.<ref name="nyt-obit" />


=== Two Systems of Thinking ===
=== Behavioral Economics and Broader Contributions ===


Over the course of his career, Kahneman developed and refined a dual-process framework for understanding human cognition that distinguished between two modes of thinking. This framework, which he termed "System 1" and "System 2," became the organizing principle of his bestselling book ''Thinking, Fast and Slow'' (2011).
Kahneman's research extended beyond the heuristics and biases program and prospect theory into several other areas of psychology and economics. He made contributions to the study of [[hedonic psychology]]—the science of what makes experiences and life pleasant or unpleasant. His work on experienced utility versus decision utility drew attention to the distinction between what people choose and what actually brings them satisfaction, revealing systematic discrepancies between the two.


* '''System 1''' operates automatically, quickly, with little effort and no sense of voluntary control. It generates impressions, feelings, and inclinations that, when endorsed by System 2, become beliefs, attitudes, and intentions.
Kahneman also developed influential ideas about the "experiencing self" versus the "remembering self," demonstrating that people's memories of experiences are governed by different rules than the experiences themselves. His research showed, for example, that the duration of an experience has surprisingly little effect on how it is remembered, a phenomenon he termed "duration neglect," while the peak intensity and the ending of an experience disproportionately shape memory—a finding known as the [[peak-end rule]].<ref name="ted">{{cite web |title=Daniel Kahneman — Speaker |url=https://www.ted.com/speakers/daniel_kahneman |publisher=TED |date= |access-date=2026-02-24}}</ref>
* '''System 2''' allocates attention to effortful mental activities, including complex computations, and is associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.


Kahneman argued that much of human judgment and behavior is governed by the fast, intuitive operations of System 1, and that many of the biases identified in his research with Tversky can be understood as cases where System 1's automatic processing leads to errors that System 2 fails to detect or correct.<ref name="nyt-obit" />
Throughout his career, Kahneman's empirical findings challenged the assumption of human rationality prevailing in modern economic theory. His work provided much of the intellectual foundation for the field of [[behavioral economics]], which integrates psychological research into economic analysis. Economists including [[Richard Thaler]], who would himself win the Nobel Prize in 2017 for his contributions to behavioral economics, explicitly credited Kahneman and Tversky's research as foundational to the discipline.<ref name="lse" />


=== ''Thinking, Fast and Slow'' ===
=== ''Thinking, Fast and Slow'' ===


Published in 2011, ''Thinking, Fast and Slow'' brought together decades of Kahneman's research into a single, accessible volume aimed at a general readership. The book covered a wide range of topics, including cognitive biases, prospect theory, the distinction between the "experiencing self" and the "remembering self," and the implications of his research for fields ranging from medicine to public policy.<ref name="nyt-obit" />
In 2011, Kahneman published ''[[Thinking, Fast and Slow]]'', a comprehensive account of his life's work aimed at a general audience. The book organized his research around the metaphor of two systems of thought: "System 1," which is fast, automatic, intuitive, and largely unconscious; and "System 2," which is slow, deliberate, analytical, and conscious. Kahneman argued that many cognitive biases and errors in judgment arise from the dominance of System 1 thinking and from people's tendency to rely on its outputs without adequate scrutiny by System 2.<ref name="princeton" />


The book was a commercial and critical success. It won the [[Los Angeles Times]] Book Prize in the science and technology category in 2012.<ref>{{cite web |last= |first= |date=2012-04 |title=Alex Shakar, Stephen King win Times Book Prizes |url=http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2012/04/alex-shakar-stephen-king-win-times-book-prizes.html |publisher=Los Angeles Times |access-date=2026-02-24}}</ref> The book remained on bestseller lists for extended periods and was translated into numerous languages, making Kahneman one of the most widely read social scientists of his generation.
The book became a major international best seller, translated into dozens of languages, and received extensive critical acclaim. It won the 2012 [[Los Angeles Times Book Prize]] for Current Interest.<ref>{{cite web |title=Alex Shakar, Stephen King win Times book prizes |url=http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2012/04/alex-shakar-stephen-king-win-times-book-prizes.html |publisher=Los Angeles Times |date=2012-04-20 |access-date=2026-02-24}}</ref> ''Thinking, Fast and Slow'' brought Kahneman's ideas to audiences far beyond academia, influencing fields including public policy, medicine, law, and business strategy. In a 2015 interview with ''The Guardian'', Kahneman discussed the book's themes and his broader views on human cognition.<ref>{{cite news |last= |first= |date=2015-07-18 |title=Daniel Kahneman: 'What would I eliminate if I had a magic wand? Overconfidence' |url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/18/daniel-kahneman-books-interview |work=The Guardian |access-date=2026-02-24}}</ref>


=== Behavioral Economics and Influence on Policy ===
=== Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment ===


Kahneman's work, along with that of Tversky and subsequent researchers such as [[Richard Thaler]], gave rise to the field of [[behavioral economics]], which integrates psychological insights into economic models and policy design. Kahneman became known as the "grandfather of behavioral economics," a designation reflecting the foundational nature of his contributions to the discipline.<ref name="lse" />
In 2021, Kahneman co-authored ''Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment'' with [[Olivier Sibony]] and [[Cass Sunstein]]. The book addressed the problem of variability in judgments that should be identical—a phenomenon the authors termed "noise," as distinguished from "bias." While biases cause judgments to deviate systematically in one direction, noise refers to the unwanted scatter in judgments made by different individuals or by the same individual at different times. Kahneman and his co-authors argued that noise is a pervasive and underappreciated problem in fields including medicine, law, insurance, and business, and that algorithms and structured decision procedures could reduce it significantly.<ref name="fs">{{cite web |title=Daniel Kahneman: Algorithms Make Better Decisions Than You |url=https://fs.blog/knowledge-project-podcast/daniel-kahneman-2/ |publisher=Farnam Street |date=2025-07-22 |access-date=2026-02-24}}</ref>
 
In 2015, ''[[The Economist]]'' listed Kahneman as the seventh most influential economist in the world, a notable distinction for someone who had never formally studied economics.<ref>{{cite web |title=The most influential economists |url=https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2015/01/influential-economists |publisher=The Economist |date=2015-01 |access-date=2026-02-24}}</ref> His research informed the development of "nudge" approaches to public policy, in which the design of choice environments is used to steer people toward better decisions without restricting their freedom of choice.


=== Consulting and Applied Work ===
=== Consulting and Applied Work ===


Beyond academia, Kahneman was a founding partner of TGG Group, a business and philanthropy consulting company that applied insights from behavioral science to organizational decision-making.<ref name="princeton" /> He also delivered a widely viewed [[TED Talk]] on the subject of experience versus memory and the nature of happiness.<ref>{{cite web |title=Daniel Kahneman – Speaker |url=https://www.ted.com/speakers/daniel_kahneman |publisher=TED |access-date=2026-02-24}}</ref>
Beyond his academic career, Kahneman was a founding partner of TGG Group, a business and philanthropy consulting company that applied behavioral science insights to organizational decision-making. This work reflected his long-standing interest in translating psychological research into practical improvements in how institutions and individuals make decisions.<ref name="princeton" />
 
=== Later Research Interests ===
 
In his later years, Kahneman turned his attention to the study of "noise" — unwanted variability in human judgments. Working with [[Olivier Sibony]] and [[Cass Sunstein]], he co-authored ''Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment'' (2021), which argued that inconsistency in professional judgments — from medical diagnoses to sentencing decisions — represents a pervasive and underappreciated source of error distinct from bias.<ref name="princeton" /> He also discussed the superiority of algorithmic decision-making over human judgment in various contexts, arguing that simple statistical models often outperform expert intuition.<ref>{{cite web |title=Daniel Kahneman: Algorithms Make Better Decisions Than You |url=https://fs.blog/knowledge-project-podcast/daniel-kahneman-2/ |publisher=Farnam Street |date=2025-07-22 |access-date=2026-02-24}}</ref>


== Personal Life ==
== Personal Life ==


Kahneman was married twice. His first marriage, to Irah Kahneman, ended in divorce. In 1978, he married [[Anne Treisman]], a cognitive psychologist known for her influential work on attention, including [[feature integration theory]]. Treisman was a Fellow of the [[Royal Society]]. The couple remained married until Treisman's death in 2018.<ref name="princeton" /><ref name="nyt-obit" />
Daniel Kahneman was married to [[Anne Treisman]], a cognitive psychologist and Fellow of the [[Royal Society]], known for her influential work on attention and feature integration theory. The couple married in 1978 and remained together until Treisman's death on February 9, 2018. Both held positions at Princeton University, making them one of the more prominent academic couples in the cognitive sciences.<ref name="princeton" />


Kahneman held dual Israeli and American citizenship throughout his life.<ref name="princeton" />
Kahneman held dual Israeli and American citizenship throughout his life.<ref name="princeton" />


In a 2015 interview with ''[[The Guardian]]'', Kahneman reflected on his intellectual life and the nature of his work, discussing the personal and philosophical dimensions of his research into human fallibility.<ref>{{cite news |date=2015-07-18 |title=Daniel Kahneman: books interview |url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/18/daniel-kahneman-books-interview |work=The Guardian |access-date=2026-02-24}}</ref>
On March 27, 2024, Kahneman died at the age of 90 in [[Nunningen]], Switzerland. It was subsequently reported that he had ended his life through [[assisted suicide]], which is legal in Switzerland.<ref>{{cite news |last= |first= |date=2025-03-15 |title=Daniel Kahneman, Israeli-American Nobel Prize winner, died last year by assisted suicide |url=https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-846140 |work=The Jerusalem Post |access-date=2026-02-24}}</ref><ref>{{cite news |last= |first= |date=2025-05-04 |title=Daniel Kahneman's Decision: A Debate About Choice in Dying |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/04/opinion/daniel-kahneman-dying-assisted-suicide.html |work=The New York Times |access-date=2026-02-24}}</ref> His death prompted widespread tributes from colleagues and former students, as well as broader public discussion about end-of-life choices.<ref>{{cite news |last= |first= |date=2025-04-14 |title=There's a Lesson to Learn From Daniel Kahneman's Death |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/opinion/daniel-kahneman-death-suicide.html |work=The New York Times |access-date=2026-02-24}}</ref>
 
Daniel Kahneman died on March 27, 2024, in [[Nunningen]], Switzerland, at the age of 90.<ref name="princeton" /> Reports subsequently confirmed that Kahneman had ended his life through [[assisted suicide]], which is legal in Switzerland.<ref>{{cite news |date=2025-03-15 |title=Daniel Kahneman, Israeli-American Nobel Prize winner, died last year by assisted suicide |url=https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-846140 |work=The Jerusalem Post |access-date=2026-02-24}}</ref><ref>{{cite news |date=2025-05-04 |title=Daniel Kahneman's Decision: A Debate About Choice in Dying |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/04/opinion/daniel-kahneman-dying-assisted-suicide.html |work=The New York Times |access-date=2026-02-24}}</ref>


== Recognition ==
== Recognition ==


Kahneman received numerous awards and honors over the course of his career, reflecting the breadth and significance of his contributions across multiple disciplines.
Kahneman received numerous awards and honors over the course of his career. The most prominent was the 2002 [[Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences]], which he shared with [[Vernon L. Smith]]. The prize was awarded to Kahneman "for having integrated insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty." Kahneman was one of the few psychologists ever to receive the economics Nobel, and the award was seen as a landmark recognition of the relevance of psychological research to economics.<ref name="princeton" />


His most prominent honor was the [[Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences]], awarded in 2002 jointly with [[Vernon L. Smith]]. The Nobel committee cited Kahneman "for having integrated insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty."<ref name="nyt-obit" /> Kahneman was the first psychologist to receive the Nobel Prize in Economics, and the award underscored the transformative impact of his work on the field.
Kahneman was elected a member of the [[National Academy of Sciences]] of the United States.<ref>{{cite web |title=Daniel Kahneman — Member Directory |url=http://www.nasonline.org/member-directory/members/892035.html |publisher=National Academy of Sciences |date= |access-date=2026-02-24}}</ref> He was also recognized by the [[American Psychological Association]] for his contributions to the field.<ref>{{cite web |title=A towering figure |url=http://www.apa.org/monitor/apr07/towering.html |publisher=American Psychological Association |date=2007-04 |access-date=2026-02-24}}</ref>


In 2013, Kahneman was awarded the [[Presidential Medal of Freedom]] by President [[Barack Obama]], the highest civilian honor in the United States.<ref name="princeton" />
In 2011, ''[[Foreign Policy]]'' magazine named Kahneman to its list of top global thinkers. In 2015, ''[[The Economist]]'' listed him as the seventh most influential economist in the world, a remarkable distinction for someone who had never taken a formal course in economics.<ref>{{cite web |title=The most influential economists |url=https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2015/01/influential-economists |publisher=The Economist |date=2015-01 |access-date=2026-02-24}}</ref> ''Bloomberg Markets'' included him on its list of the 50 most influential people in global finance.<ref>{{cite web |title=The 50 Most Influential People in Global Finance |url=http://topics.bloomberg.com/the-50-most-influential-people-in-global-finance/ |publisher=Bloomberg |date= |access-date=2026-02-24}}</ref>


Kahneman was elected a member of the [[National Academy of Sciences]] of the United States.<ref>{{cite web |title=Member directory: Daniel Kahneman |url=http://www.nasonline.org/member-directory/members/892035.html |publisher=National Academy of Sciences |access-date=2026-02-24}}</ref> He received the American Psychological Association's Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contributions to Psychology in 2007, with the APA describing his impact as "towering."<ref>{{cite web |title=A towering figure in psychology |url=http://www.apa.org/monitor/apr07/towering.html |publisher=American Psychological Association |date=2007-04 |access-date=2026-02-24}}</ref>
Kahneman was also elected as an academician of the [[Royal Academy of Economics and Financial Sciences]] of Spain.<ref>{{cite web |title=The Honourable Dr. Daniel Kahneman |url=https://racef.es/en/academicians/elected/the-honourable-dr-daniel-kahneman |publisher=Royal Academy of Economics and Financial Sciences |date= |access-date=2026-02-24}}</ref>


In 2011, ''[[Foreign Policy]]'' magazine named Kahneman to its list of top global thinkers.<ref name="nyt-obit" /> He was also named to ''Bloomberg Markets'' magazine's list of the 50 most influential people in global finance.<ref>{{cite web |title=The 50 Most Influential People in Global Finance |url=http://topics.bloomberg.com/the-50-most-influential-people-in-global-finance/ |publisher=Bloomberg |access-date=2026-02-24}}</ref>
In 2014, Kahneman was featured prominently in BBC coverage of research on cognitive biases and decision-making, further extending his public profile.<ref>{{cite news |last= |first= |date=2014-02-18 |title=Daniel Kahneman |url=https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-26258662 |work=BBC News |access-date=2026-02-24}}</ref>
 
Kahneman was also elected as an academic of the [[Royal European Academy of Doctors]].<ref>{{cite web |title=The Honourable Dr. Daniel Kahneman |url=https://racef.es/en/academicians/elected/the-honourable-dr-daniel-kahneman |publisher=Royal European Academy of Doctors |access-date=2026-02-24}}</ref>


== Legacy ==
== Legacy ==


Daniel Kahneman's intellectual legacy is anchored in his role as a primary architect of the field of behavioral economics and his demonstration that systematic cognitive biases fundamentally shape human decision-making. The London School of Economics identified him as "the founder of modern behavioural science and behavioural economics," a characterization that reflects the scope of his influence.<ref name="lse" />
Daniel Kahneman's work fundamentally altered the relationship between psychology and economics and reshaped how scholars, policymakers, and practitioners understand human decision-making. His research, conducted largely in collaboration with Amos Tversky, demonstrated that the deviations of actual human behavior from the predictions of rational choice theory are not random but systematic and predictable. This insight opened the door to the field of behavioral economics and influenced a generation of researchers across multiple disciplines.<ref name="lse" />


Kahneman's work, particularly prospect theory and the heuristics and biases research program, altered the trajectory of economics by providing robust empirical challenges to the [[rational agent]] model that had dominated the discipline for much of the twentieth century. His findings influenced not only academic economics but also practical domains including public policy, medicine, law, and finance. The "nudge" approach to policy design, developed by Thaler and Sunstein and adopted by governments around the world, traces its intellectual roots directly to Kahneman and Tversky's research.
Prospect theory remains one of the most cited and applied frameworks in the social sciences, with implications for fields ranging from financial regulation to public health policy. The concepts of loss aversion, framing effects, and anchoring have entered common usage not only in academic discourse but also in business, journalism, and everyday conversation. Kahneman's distinction between System 1 and System 2 thinking, as articulated in ''Thinking, Fast and Slow'', provided a widely adopted framework for understanding the dual processes underlying human cognition.<ref name="princeton" />


Princeton University, in its memorial announcement, described Kahneman as a "giant in the field" whose work "changed how we think about thinking."<ref name="princeton" /> His book ''Thinking, Fast and Slow'' introduced millions of readers to concepts such as System 1 and System 2 thinking, loss aversion, and the anchoring effect, embedding these ideas in the broader cultural vocabulary.
The London School of Economics organized a major event in 2025 dedicated to Kahneman's legacy, describing him as "the founder of modern behavioural science and behavioural economics."<ref name="lse" /> Princeton University, in its tribute following his death, described him as "a giant in the field" whose work had "transformed our understanding of how people think and make choices."<ref name="princeton" />


The collaboration between Kahneman and Tversky is itself regarded as one of the most productive partnerships in the history of the social sciences. Their work together generated a research program that continues to be extended and refined by scholars across numerous disciplines. Tversky's death in 1996 — six years before the Nobel Prize was awarded — meant that Kahneman received the honor alone, as the Nobel Prize is not awarded posthumously. Kahneman repeatedly and publicly acknowledged Tversky's equal role in their joint achievements.<ref name="nyt-obit" />
Kahneman's influence extended beyond pure research into practical applications. Government agencies in numerous countries, including the United Kingdom's Behavioural Insights Team (often called the "Nudge Unit"), drew directly on insights from Kahneman and Tversky's research to design policies intended to improve outcomes in areas such as savings, health, and taxation. The broader "nudge" movement in public policy, popularized by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, owed a significant intellectual debt to Kahneman's empirical work on the limitations of human judgment.<ref name="nyt-obit" />


Kahneman's influence extended beyond his published research. Through his teaching at Princeton and other institutions, his public lectures, and his popular writing, he shaped the thinking of generations of researchers, policymakers, and practitioners. His insistence on empirical rigor and his willingness to challenge established assumptions — including his own — set a standard for intellectual honesty in the social sciences.<ref name="princeton" />
Kahneman's emphasis on the value of algorithms and structured procedures over unaided human judgment in high-stakes decisions—a theme he developed throughout his career and elaborated in ''Noise''—has continued to gain relevance in the age of artificial intelligence and data-driven decision-making.<ref name="fs" />


== References ==
== References ==
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Daniel Kahneman
Kahneman in 2009
Daniel Kahneman
Born5 3, 1934
BirthplaceTel Aviv, British Mandate of Palestine
DiedTemplate:Death date and age
Nunningen, Switzerland
NationalityIsraeli, American
OccupationPsychologist, academic
Known forProspect theory, behavioral economics, Thinking, Fast and Slow
EducationPh.D. in Psychology (University of California, Berkeley)
Spouse(s)Anne Treisman (m. 1978; her death 2018)
AwardsNobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2002)

Daniel Kahneman (Template:Lang-he; March 5, 1934 – March 27, 2024) was an Israeli-American psychologist whose research on judgment and decision-making fundamentally reshaped the understanding of human rationality and its limits. Born in Tel Aviv during the period of the British Mandate of Palestine, Kahneman spent much of his childhood in France during World War II before returning to what would become Israel. Over a career spanning more than five decades, he produced a body of work that bridged psychology and economics in ways that had not previously been attempted at such scale. Together with his long-time collaborator Amos Tversky, Kahneman developed prospect theory and identified a range of cognitive biases and heuristics that systematically influence human judgment. For this work, he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, shared with Vernon L. Smith, making him one of the very few non-economists to receive the prize.[1] His 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow became an international best seller and introduced his ideas to a broad popular audience. At the time of his death, Kahneman held the title of Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology, Emeritus, and Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs, Emeritus, at Princeton University's Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.[1] He came to be known as the "grandfather of behavioral economics," a field he helped establish as a major discipline within the social sciences.[2]

Early Life

Daniel Kahneman was born on March 5, 1934, in Tel Aviv, in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine.[1] His parents were Lithuanian Jews who had emigrated to Palestine but were visiting Paris at the time of his birth, and the family remained in France. Kahneman spent his formative childhood years in Paris, where his father worked as a research chemist in a large cosmetics company. The German occupation of France during World War II had a defining impact on Kahneman's early life. As a Jewish family living under the Vichy regime and the German occupation, the Kahnemans faced persecution and were forced into hiding. Kahneman later recounted experiences of narrowly avoiding capture and living under constant threat during this period. His father was briefly detained in what appeared to be an early roundup of Jews but was released; however, he died of untreated diabetes in 1944, before the liberation of France.[3]

After the war ended, Kahneman and his surviving family moved to the British Mandate of Palestine in 1948, shortly before the establishment of the State of Israel. The experiences of his childhood—the constant assessment of danger, the need to read people and situations for signs of threat—left a lasting impression on Kahneman and, by his own account, contributed to his lifelong interest in the workings of the human mind and the errors to which it is prone. Growing up in a context of existential uncertainty shaped his intellectual curiosity about how people perceive risk and make judgments under conditions of ambiguity.[3]

Education

Kahneman pursued his undergraduate studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he earned a bachelor's degree in psychology with a minor in mathematics in 1954. His early academic training in Israel included mandatory service in the Israel Defense Forces, where he worked in the psychology department. During his military service, Kahneman was tasked with evaluating candidates for officer training, an experience that gave him early insight into the shortcomings of intuitive judgment and the superiority of structured assessment methods—themes that would recur throughout his career.[3]

Kahneman subsequently moved to the United States for his graduate education. He enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his Ph.D. in psychology in 1961.[4] His doctoral work focused on relationships between specific adjectives in the semantic differential, a topic in psychophysics and the psychology of perception. At Berkeley, Kahneman was exposed to the rigorous experimental traditions of American psychology, which complemented the theoretical foundations he had built at the Hebrew University.

Career

Early Academic Career and Collaboration with Amos Tversky

After completing his doctorate at Berkeley, Kahneman returned to Israel and joined the faculty of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he held a position in the psychology department. It was during this period that he began his collaboration with Amos Tversky, a fellow Israeli psychologist who had also studied at the Hebrew University before earning his doctorate at the University of Michigan. The Kahneman-Tversky partnership, which began in the late 1960s, became one of the most productive and influential collaborations in the history of the social sciences.[3]

Together, Kahneman and Tversky embarked on a systematic investigation of the ways in which people deviate from the predictions of rational choice theory when making judgments and decisions. Their early work focused on identifying heuristics—mental shortcuts that people use to simplify complex problems—and the systematic biases these heuristics produce. In a series of landmark papers published in the early 1970s, they described phenomena including the availability heuristic (the tendency to judge the likelihood of events based on how easily examples come to mind), the representativeness heuristic (the tendency to judge probabilities based on resemblance to stereotypes), and anchoring (the tendency for initial exposure to a number to influence subsequent estimates).[1]

Their 1974 paper "Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases," published in the journal Science, became one of the most cited papers in the social sciences. It demonstrated through a series of elegant experiments that human judgment systematically departs from the norms of probability theory and statistics, not because of ignorance or stupidity, but because of the inherent architecture of human cognition.[3]

Prospect Theory

In 1979, Kahneman and Tversky published "Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk" in Econometrica, a paper that would become the most cited work in the history of that journal and one of the most cited papers in all of economics. Prospect theory offered a descriptive model of how people actually make decisions involving risk, in contrast to the normative model of expected utility theory that had dominated economics.[3]

The theory introduced several key concepts that challenged prevailing economic assumptions. Among these was the idea of loss aversion—the finding that losses loom larger than equivalent gains in people's psychological experience. According to prospect theory, the pain of losing a given amount of money is roughly twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining the same amount. The theory also described the certainty effect, which refers to people's tendency to overweight outcomes that are considered certain relative to outcomes that are merely probable, and the framing effect, which demonstrates that the way a choice is presented—whether in terms of gains or losses—can reverse people's preferences.[1]

Prospect theory's empirical findings directly challenged the assumption of human rationality that underpinned much of modern economic theory. By demonstrating that people's choices are systematically influenced by the framing of options and by reference points rather than absolute outcomes, Kahneman and Tversky provided a more psychologically realistic foundation for understanding economic behavior.[2]

Move to North America

In 1978, Kahneman moved to Canada to take a position at the University of British Columbia. He subsequently held positions at the University of California, Berkeley, before joining the faculty of Princeton University in 1993, where he would remain for the rest of his career. At Princeton, he was appointed the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and held a joint appointment at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs (formerly the Woodrow Wilson School).[1]

The geographical separation from Tversky (who was based at Stanford University) did not initially end their collaboration, though the frequency and intensity of their joint work diminished over time. Tversky died of metastatic melanoma in 1996 at the age of 59, six years before the Nobel Prize was awarded for work to which he had been a central contributor. Because the Nobel Prize is not awarded posthumously, Tversky did not share in the honor, though Kahneman consistently and publicly acknowledged Tversky's equal contribution to their joint work.[3]

Behavioral Economics and Broader Contributions

Kahneman's research extended beyond the heuristics and biases program and prospect theory into several other areas of psychology and economics. He made contributions to the study of hedonic psychology—the science of what makes experiences and life pleasant or unpleasant. His work on experienced utility versus decision utility drew attention to the distinction between what people choose and what actually brings them satisfaction, revealing systematic discrepancies between the two.

Kahneman also developed influential ideas about the "experiencing self" versus the "remembering self," demonstrating that people's memories of experiences are governed by different rules than the experiences themselves. His research showed, for example, that the duration of an experience has surprisingly little effect on how it is remembered, a phenomenon he termed "duration neglect," while the peak intensity and the ending of an experience disproportionately shape memory—a finding known as the peak-end rule.[5]

Throughout his career, Kahneman's empirical findings challenged the assumption of human rationality prevailing in modern economic theory. His work provided much of the intellectual foundation for the field of behavioral economics, which integrates psychological research into economic analysis. Economists including Richard Thaler, who would himself win the Nobel Prize in 2017 for his contributions to behavioral economics, explicitly credited Kahneman and Tversky's research as foundational to the discipline.[2]

Thinking, Fast and Slow

In 2011, Kahneman published Thinking, Fast and Slow, a comprehensive account of his life's work aimed at a general audience. The book organized his research around the metaphor of two systems of thought: "System 1," which is fast, automatic, intuitive, and largely unconscious; and "System 2," which is slow, deliberate, analytical, and conscious. Kahneman argued that many cognitive biases and errors in judgment arise from the dominance of System 1 thinking and from people's tendency to rely on its outputs without adequate scrutiny by System 2.[1]

The book became a major international best seller, translated into dozens of languages, and received extensive critical acclaim. It won the 2012 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest.[6] Thinking, Fast and Slow brought Kahneman's ideas to audiences far beyond academia, influencing fields including public policy, medicine, law, and business strategy. In a 2015 interview with The Guardian, Kahneman discussed the book's themes and his broader views on human cognition.[7]

Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

In 2021, Kahneman co-authored Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment with Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein. The book addressed the problem of variability in judgments that should be identical—a phenomenon the authors termed "noise," as distinguished from "bias." While biases cause judgments to deviate systematically in one direction, noise refers to the unwanted scatter in judgments made by different individuals or by the same individual at different times. Kahneman and his co-authors argued that noise is a pervasive and underappreciated problem in fields including medicine, law, insurance, and business, and that algorithms and structured decision procedures could reduce it significantly.[8]

Consulting and Applied Work

Beyond his academic career, Kahneman was a founding partner of TGG Group, a business and philanthropy consulting company that applied behavioral science insights to organizational decision-making. This work reflected his long-standing interest in translating psychological research into practical improvements in how institutions and individuals make decisions.[1]

Personal Life

Daniel Kahneman was married to Anne Treisman, a cognitive psychologist and Fellow of the Royal Society, known for her influential work on attention and feature integration theory. The couple married in 1978 and remained together until Treisman's death on February 9, 2018. Both held positions at Princeton University, making them one of the more prominent academic couples in the cognitive sciences.[1]

Kahneman held dual Israeli and American citizenship throughout his life.[1]

On March 27, 2024, Kahneman died at the age of 90 in Nunningen, Switzerland. It was subsequently reported that he had ended his life through assisted suicide, which is legal in Switzerland.[9][10] His death prompted widespread tributes from colleagues and former students, as well as broader public discussion about end-of-life choices.[11]

Recognition

Kahneman received numerous awards and honors over the course of his career. The most prominent was the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, which he shared with Vernon L. Smith. The prize was awarded to Kahneman "for having integrated insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty." Kahneman was one of the few psychologists ever to receive the economics Nobel, and the award was seen as a landmark recognition of the relevance of psychological research to economics.[1]

Kahneman was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States.[12] He was also recognized by the American Psychological Association for his contributions to the field.[13]

In 2011, Foreign Policy magazine named Kahneman to its list of top global thinkers. In 2015, The Economist listed him as the seventh most influential economist in the world, a remarkable distinction for someone who had never taken a formal course in economics.[14] Bloomberg Markets included him on its list of the 50 most influential people in global finance.[15]

Kahneman was also elected as an academician of the Royal Academy of Economics and Financial Sciences of Spain.[16]

In 2014, Kahneman was featured prominently in BBC coverage of research on cognitive biases and decision-making, further extending his public profile.[17]

Legacy

Daniel Kahneman's work fundamentally altered the relationship between psychology and economics and reshaped how scholars, policymakers, and practitioners understand human decision-making. His research, conducted largely in collaboration with Amos Tversky, demonstrated that the deviations of actual human behavior from the predictions of rational choice theory are not random but systematic and predictable. This insight opened the door to the field of behavioral economics and influenced a generation of researchers across multiple disciplines.[2]

Prospect theory remains one of the most cited and applied frameworks in the social sciences, with implications for fields ranging from financial regulation to public health policy. The concepts of loss aversion, framing effects, and anchoring have entered common usage not only in academic discourse but also in business, journalism, and everyday conversation. Kahneman's distinction between System 1 and System 2 thinking, as articulated in Thinking, Fast and Slow, provided a widely adopted framework for understanding the dual processes underlying human cognition.[1]

The London School of Economics organized a major event in 2025 dedicated to Kahneman's legacy, describing him as "the founder of modern behavioural science and behavioural economics."[2] Princeton University, in its tribute following his death, described him as "a giant in the field" whose work had "transformed our understanding of how people think and make choices."[1]

Kahneman's influence extended beyond pure research into practical applications. Government agencies in numerous countries, including the United Kingdom's Behavioural Insights Team (often called the "Nudge Unit"), drew directly on insights from Kahneman and Tversky's research to design policies intended to improve outcomes in areas such as savings, health, and taxation. The broader "nudge" movement in public policy, popularized by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, owed a significant intellectual debt to Kahneman's empirical work on the limitations of human judgment.[3]

Kahneman's emphasis on the value of algorithms and structured procedures over unaided human judgment in high-stakes decisions—a theme he developed throughout his career and elaborated in Noise—has continued to gain relevance in the age of artificial intelligence and data-driven decision-making.[8]

References

  1. ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 "Daniel Kahneman, pioneering behavioral psychologist, Nobel laureate and 'giant in the field,' dies at 90".Princeton University.2024-03-28.https://www.princeton.edu/news/2024/03/28/daniel-kahneman-pioneering-behavioral-psychologist-nobel-laureate-and-giant-field.Retrieved 2026-02-24.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 "Daniel Kahneman: a legacy".The London School of Economics and Political Science.2025-11-18.https://www.lse.ac.uk/events/daniel-kahneman-a-legacy.Retrieved 2026-02-24.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 "Daniel Kahneman, Who Plumbed the Psychology of Economics, Dies at 90".The New York Times.2024-03-28.https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/27/business/daniel-kahneman-dead.html.Retrieved 2026-02-24.
  4. ↑ "Daniel Kahneman catalog record".University of California, Berkeley Library.http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b12138684~S1.Retrieved 2026-02-24.
  5. ↑ "Daniel Kahneman — Speaker".TED.https://www.ted.com/speakers/daniel_kahneman.Retrieved 2026-02-24.
  6. ↑ "Alex Shakar, Stephen King win Times book prizes".Los Angeles Times.2012-04-20.http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2012/04/alex-shakar-stephen-king-win-times-book-prizes.html.Retrieved 2026-02-24.
  7. ↑ "Daniel Kahneman: 'What would I eliminate if I had a magic wand? Overconfidence'".The Guardian.2015-07-18.https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/18/daniel-kahneman-books-interview.Retrieved 2026-02-24.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 "Daniel Kahneman: Algorithms Make Better Decisions Than You".Farnam Street.2025-07-22.https://fs.blog/knowledge-project-podcast/daniel-kahneman-2/.Retrieved 2026-02-24.
  9. ↑ "Daniel Kahneman, Israeli-American Nobel Prize winner, died last year by assisted suicide".The Jerusalem Post.2025-03-15.https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-846140.Retrieved 2026-02-24.
  10. ↑ "Daniel Kahneman's Decision: A Debate About Choice in Dying".The New York Times.2025-05-04.https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/04/opinion/daniel-kahneman-dying-assisted-suicide.html.Retrieved 2026-02-24.
  11. ↑ "There's a Lesson to Learn From Daniel Kahneman's Death".The New York Times.2025-04-14.https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/opinion/daniel-kahneman-death-suicide.html.Retrieved 2026-02-24.
  12. ↑ "Daniel Kahneman — Member Directory".National Academy of Sciences.http://www.nasonline.org/member-directory/members/892035.html.Retrieved 2026-02-24.
  13. ↑ "A towering figure".American Psychological Association.2007-04.http://www.apa.org/monitor/apr07/towering.html.Retrieved 2026-02-24.
  14. ↑ "The most influential economists".The Economist.2015-01.https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2015/01/influential-economists.Retrieved 2026-02-24.
  15. ↑ "The 50 Most Influential People in Global Finance".Bloomberg.http://topics.bloomberg.com/the-50-most-influential-people-in-global-finance/.Retrieved 2026-02-24.
  16. ↑ "The Honourable Dr. Daniel Kahneman".Royal Academy of Economics and Financial Sciences.https://racef.es/en/academicians/elected/the-honourable-dr-daniel-kahneman.Retrieved 2026-02-24.
  17. ↑ "Daniel Kahneman".BBC News.2014-02-18.https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-26258662.Retrieved 2026-02-24.

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