Daniel Kahneman
Daniel Kahneman (1934–2024) was an Israeli-American psychologist and the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Princeton University. He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002 — awarded to a psychologist, not an economist — for his work with amos-tversky on decision-making under uncertainty.
Work Appearing in This Wiki
- kahneman-2011-thinking-fast-and-slow — Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011): comprehensive synthesis of his career’s research on judgement, decision-making, heuristics, biases, and prospect-theory
Career and Collaboration
Kahneman’s most productive period was his ~14-year collaboration with amos-tversky (1969–1983), which began at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and continued when both moved to North American institutions. Their partnership produced:
- Heuristics-and-biases programme — systematic documentation of cognitive shortcuts and the predictable errors they generate
- prospect-theory (1979) — the most cited paper in economics; replaced Expected Utility Theory as the standard descriptive model of risky choice
- Work on anchoring, availability, representativeness, framing, and loss aversion
After Tversky’s death in 1996, Kahneman continued research on well-being, the experiencing self vs. remembering self, and the peak-end rule.
Key Concepts
- system-1-system-2 — the dual-process framework of fast/automatic and slow/deliberate cognition
- cognitive-biases — systematic errors in judgement from heuristic misfires
- prospect-theory — reference dependence, loss-aversion, probability weighting
- overconfidence — illusion of validity, planning fallacy, hindsight bias
- WYSIATI (What You See Is All There Is) — System 1’s confidence-without-completeness problem
Nobel Prize Citation
The Nobel Committee cited Kahneman “for having integrated insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty.”