- Person
- Daniel Kahneman
- Lived
- 1934–2024
- Field
- Psychology, behavioural economics
- From
- Israeli-American
The story
Daniel Kahneman spent more than four decades studying how people judge and decide, much of it with Amos Tversky, who died in 1996. Their work on heuristics and biases and on prospect theory earned Kahneman the 2002 Nobel economics prize. In 2002 he and the psychologist Shane Frederick also reviewed the research in terms of two kinds of thinking, an idea he would later develop for general readers.
In 2011 Kahneman gathered a lifetime of research into a single book for general readers, Thinking, Fast and Slow. The Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Zweig helped him write and research it over two years. It describes two modes of thought: a fast, automatic and intuitive System 1, which can complete a familiar phrase or read a billboard, and a slow, effortful and deliberate System 2, needed to multiply 17 by 24 or park in a tight space. Many of the errors he and Tversky had documented, he argued, arise when System 1 jumps to conclusions and System 2 fails to check them.
The book also covers his work in the Israeli army, prospect theory and his research on happiness, and coined phrases such as WYSIATI, what you see is all there is. One line became especially famous: nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.
The book became a New York Times bestseller and made terms such as anchoring, loss aversion and the planning fallacy part of everyday language in business, government and daily life. It won the 2011 Los Angeles Times Book Award for Current Interest and the National Academies Communication Award for a work that helps the public understand behavioural science. Some of the priming studies it cites have since been questioned during psychology's replication crisis.
In 2013 President Barack Obama awarded Kahneman the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2021, at the age of eighty-seven, he co-authored another book, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, with Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein. Kahneman died in 2024, but the book continues to teach a broad public to recognise the traps in their own thinking.
Why it matters
Thinking, Fast and Slow taught a broad public to recognise the traps in their own thinking and make better decisions.
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 showed the eye's pupil tracks mental effortWith Jackson Beatty, Daniel Kahneman discovered that people's pupils dilate steadily as they hold more digits in memory, giving scientists a window onto mental effort.
- 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.
- 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 Wikipedia
- Thinking, Fast and Slow Wikipedia
- Daniel Kahneman, Biographical Nobel Prize
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.