- Person
- Daniel Kahneman
- Lived
- 1934–2024
- Field
- Psychology, behavioural economics
- From
- Israeli-American
The story
Before his famous work on judgment, Daniel Kahneman spent years studying vision and attention. After earning his doctorate at Berkeley in 1961 he returned to teach at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he set up a vision laboratory, feeling he needed to learn the basic skills of experimental science before he could aspire to more.
His first truly successful research, as he later called it, came in 1965, during a sabbatical at the University of Michigan. He had been invited by Jerry Blum, whose laboratory studied people performing mental tasks while in emotional states induced by hypnosis. Because the pupil of the eye widens with emotional arousal, Kahneman became interested in the causes and consequences of changes in pupil size.
Working with Blum's graduate student, Jackson Beatty, and using primitive equipment, he made what he called a real discovery. When people listened to a series of digits they had to remember, their pupils dilated steadily as the digits came in, and contracted steadily as they recited them back. A harder task, adding 1 to each of four digits, caused a much larger dilation. The size of the pupil seemed to track how hard the mind was working at each moment. Within a year the pair had completed four articles, two of them in the journal Science.
Mental effort remained his focus during the following year at Harvard, where he also heard a talk on attention by the English psychologist Anne Treisman, who later became his wife. He committed himself to write a chapter on attention, which grew into his 1973 book Attention and Effort. It set out a theory of attention as a limited resource, drawing on these studies of pupil size, and Kahneman considered it his most significant independent contribution to psychology.
The work helped establish changes in pupil size as a measure of mental effort. The idea that thinking takes effort, and that effort is limited, would later become central to his account of fast and slow thinking, in which effortful System 2 is called on only when needed.
Why it matters
Kahneman's pupil studies gave researchers a simple physical measure of mental workload, used in studies of learning, fatigue and attention.
About Daniel Kahneman
Child survivor of Nazi-occupied France who, with Amos Tversky, mapped the systematic errors of human judgment, founded behavioural economics and won the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics.
More about Daniel Kahneman
- Daniel Kahneman showed how framing flips our choicesKahneman and Tversky showed that two logically identical descriptions of a choice, such as lives saved versus lives lost, can lead people to opposite decisions.
- Daniel Kahneman named the illusion of validityWatching army officer candidates, Daniel Kahneman noticed that assessors stayed confident despite proof their predictions failed. He called it the illusion of validity, his first cognitive illusion.
- Daniel Kahneman built the Israeli army's recruit interviewAt 21, Daniel Kahneman designed a structured interview for all Israeli combat recruits. It roughly tripled the interviews' predictive power and stayed in use for decades.
- Daniel Kahneman found how we remember painDaniel Kahneman showed that memories of painful experiences depend mostly on their worst moment and their end, the peak-end rule, a finding that can make medical procedures easier to bear.
- Prospect theory became the most cited paper in economicsDaniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's 1979 paper on prospect theory, showing how people really weigh gains and losses, became the most cited paper in economics.
- Daniel Kahneman's eureka moment about praise and blameWhen an Israeli flight instructor insisted that shouting worked better than praise, Daniel Kahneman realised he was seeing regression to the mean, the most satisfying eureka of his career.
- Thinking, Fast and Slow brought Kahneman's ideas to millionsDaniel Kahneman's 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow, describing fast intuitive and slow deliberate thinking, became an international bestseller and won major book awards.
- Kahneman and Tversky mapped the mind's shortcutsIn 1974 Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky published Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, showing how mental shortcuts lead to predictable errors.
- Kahneman's theory helped launch behavioural economicsWhen a 1975 draft of prospect theory reached the young economist Richard Thaler, it explained his puzzles, such as the endowment effect, and helped launch behavioural economics.
- Daniel Kahneman championed adversarial collaborationDaniel Kahneman urged scientists who disagree to run joint experiments instead of trading hostile rebuttals, a practice he called adversarial collaboration.
Sources
- Daniel Kahneman: Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Daniel Kahneman Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.