Daniel Kahneman

Daniel Kahneman was born in Tel Aviv in 1934 and spent his early childhood in Paris, where his family lived through the German occupation and his father died of untreated diabetes. The family reached Palestine in 1948.

He studied psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and took his doctorate at Berkeley, then returned to Israel, where he worked on the psychological evaluation systems used by the Israeli Defense Forces, an experience that shaped his lifelong scepticism about expert judgment.

His career is inseparable from his collaboration with Amos Tversky, which began in the late 1960s and produced the work on heuristics and biases that reshaped economics, medicine, law, and public policy. Their 1974 paper in Science on judgment under uncertainty and their 1979 paper on prospect theory are among the most cited in the social sciences.

He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002 for that work. Tversky had died in 1996 and would have shared it, and Kahneman said so repeatedly and publicly.

Thinking, Fast and Slow, published in 2011, is his summary of that career for a general readership, organized around two systems: one fast, automatic, and always running, and one slow, effortful, and reluctant to engage. It covers loss aversion, the planning fallacy, anchoring, availability, and the tendency to build confident stories from whatever information happens to be present.

He wrote publicly in 2017 that he had placed too much faith in underpowered studies in the social priming chapter and that readers should not accept that section, which is an unusual thing for an author to say about his own bestseller and is characteristic.

He later published Noise with Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein. He died in 2024 at ninety.