Daniel Kahneman

Daniel Kahneman
Kahneman in 2009
Daniel Kahneman
Born	5 3, 1934
Birthplace	Tel Aviv, British Mandate of Palestine
Died	Template:Death date and age Nunningen, Switzerland
Nationality	Israeli, American
Occupation	Psychologist, academic
Known for	Prospect theory, behavioral economics, Thinking, Fast and Slow
Education	Ph.D. in Psychology (University of California, Berkeley)
Spouse(s)	Anne Treisman (m. 1978; her death 2018)
Awards	Nobel 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. 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. He came to be known as the "grandfather of behavioral economics," a field he helped establish as a major discipline within the social sciences.

Early Life

Daniel Kahneman was born on March 5, 1934, in Tel Aviv, in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine. 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.

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.

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.

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. 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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

Kahneman held dual Israeli and American citizenship throughout his life.

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. His death prompted widespread tributes from colleagues and former students, as well as broader public discussion about end-of-life choices.

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.

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

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. Bloomberg Markets included him on its list of the 50 most influential people in global finance.

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

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

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.

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.

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." 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."

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.

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.