Daniel Kahneman

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Daniel Kahneman : biography

March 5, 1934 –

Daniel Kahneman () (born March 5, 1934) is an Israeli-American psychologist and winner of the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He is notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, behavioral economics and hedonic psychology.

With Amos Tversky and others, Kahneman established a cognitive basis for common human errors which arise from heuristics and biases (Kahneman & Tversky, 1973; Kahneman, Slovic & Tversky, 1982; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974), and developed prospect theory (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). He was awarded the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his work in prospect theory.

In 2011, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers. In the same year, his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, which summarizes much of his research, was published and became a best seller.

Currently, he is professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School. Kahneman is a founding partner of , a business and philanthropy consulting company. He is married to Royal Society Fellow Anne Treisman.

Notable contributions

  • Anchoring and adjustment
  • Attribute substitution
  • Availability heuristic
  • Base rate fallacy
  • Conjunction fallacy
  • Framing (economics)
  • Loss aversion
  • Optimism bias
  • Peak-end rule
  • Planning fallacy
  • Preference reversal
  • Prospect theory
  • Cumulative prospect theory
  • Reference class forecasting
  • Representativeness heuristic
  • Simulation heuristic
  • Status quo bias

Awards and recognition

  • In 2002, Kahneman received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, despite being a research psychologist, for his work in Prospect theory. Kahneman states he has never taken a single economics course – that everything that he knows of the subject he and Tversky learned from their collaborators Richard Thaler and Jack Knetsch.
  • Kahneman, co-recipient with Amos Tversky, earned the 2003 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Psychology.
  • In 2005, he was voted the 101st-greatest Israeli of all time, in a poll by the Israeli news website Ynet to determine whom the general public considered the 200 Greatest Israelis.
  • In 2007, he was presented with the American Psychological Association’s Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contributions to Psychology.
  • On November 6, 2009, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the department of Economics at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. In his acceptance speech Kahneman said, "when you live long enough, you see the impossible become reality." He was referring to the fact that he would never have expected to be honored as an economist when he started his studies into what would become Behavioral Economics.
  • In both 2011 and 2012, he made the Bloomberg 50 most influential people in global finance.
  • On November 9, 2011, he was awarded the Talcott Parsons Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. To see his lecture, click the link below.
  • His book, Thinking, Fast and Slow was the winner of the 2011 Los Angeles Times Book Award for Current Interest.
  • In 2012 his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, was awarded the National Academy of Sciences Communication Award for the best book published in 2011.
  • In 2012 he was accepted as corresponding academician at the Real Academia Española (Economic and Financial Sciences).

Biography

Daniel Kahneman was born in Tel Aviv in 1934, where his mother was visiting relatives. He spent his childhood years in Paris, France, where his parents had emigrated from Lithuania in the early 1920s. Kahneman and his family were in Paris when it was occupied by Nazi Germany in 1940. His father was picked up in the first major round-up of French Jews, but was released after six weeks due to the intervention of his employer. The family was on the run for the remainder of the war, and survived intact except for the death of Kahneman’s father of diabetes in 1944. Daniel Kahnemann and his family then moved to British Mandatory Palestine in 1948, just prior to Israel’s independence (Kahneman, 2003).