- Person
- Daniel Kahneman
- Lived
- 1934–2024
- Field
- Psychology, behavioural economics
- From
- Israeli-American
The story
In 1968 to 1969 Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, invited his younger colleague Amos Tversky to speak to his graduate seminar. Tversky described research suggesting that people revise their beliefs in roughly the right direction when given new evidence, only too cautiously. Kahneman doubted it, since people seemed to jump to conclusions all the time. Their argument that day led to a lunch at which they swapped stories of their own errors of judgment, and to one of the most productive partnerships in social science.
Their first paper, Belief in the Law of Small Numbers (1971), was based on a questionnaire Tversky gave to participants at a meeting of mathematical psychologists, and showed that even trained researchers trust small samples far too much. They tossed a coin to decide whose name came first and alternated after that. They worked almost entirely side by side, talking for hours each day, and Kahneman later wrote that he probably shared more than half the laughs of his life with Tversky.
After a highly productive year at the Oregon Research Institute in 1971 to 1972, they spent a whole year in an office at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem writing their next major paper, often advancing by only a sentence or two a day. Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases was published in Science in 1974. It argued that when people judge probabilities they rely on a few mental shortcuts, representativeness, availability and anchoring. These shortcuts usually work, but they produce systematic, predictable errors. The paper introduced the idea of anchoring, in which an initial number skews later estimates.
They published in Science hoping that scholars outside psychology might take notice, and the article soon became a standard reference, spawning a large literature in cognitive science, philosophy and psychology. They had not anticipated that outcome. Many readers wrongly took it as a claim that people cannot think straight; Kahneman stressed that it challenged only an unrealistic model of rationality.
In 1982 Kahneman, Tversky and Paul Slovic edited a collection of research under the same title. The heuristics-and-biases programme went on to influence economics, medicine, law and public policy, and it formed a central part of the work for which Kahneman received the 2002 Nobel economics prize.
Why it matters
The heuristics-and-biases programme changed how psychologists, economists, doctors and policymakers understand human judgment and its pitfalls.
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.
- 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'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
- Daniel Kahneman: Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Amos Tversky 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.