Background

Ethnicity: His parents were Lithuanian Jews, who had immigrated to France in the early 1920s.

Daniel Kahneman was born on March 5, 1934. Born in what was then Palestine, he spent much of his childhood in France, barely escaping disaster. When Kahneman was six, the Nazis invaded France and his family was forced to wear the yellow star that marked them as Jewish. His father, Efrayim, was arrested and marked for deportation to a death camp, but released because his work as a research chemist was deemed too important to the war effort. The family escaped to Vichy France, where his father died in 1944. Daniel and his mother, Rachel, spent the rest of the war in hiding. In 1946 they returned to his birthplace in the newly formed nation of Israel.

Education

Daniel studied psychology and mathematics at Hebrew University, where he received a Bachelor of Science in 1954. In 1955 he joined a unit of the Israeli army that was responsible for sorting out recruits. He noticed that many of his colleagues based their estimates of recruits on vague impressions, which led to many false predictions of future success, and developed his own personality assessment questionnaire to force interviewers to think in more concrete terms.

After his discharge, Kahneman returned to Hebrew University to study logic, and with the support of the university, went on to earn his Doctor of Philosophy in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley in 1961.

Career

Daniel Kahneman began his academic career as a lecturer (1961-1970) and a professor (1970-1978) of psychology at Hebrew University. During this period, Kahneman was a visiting scientist at the University of Michigan (1965-1966) and the Applied Psychological Research Unit in Cambridge (1968-1969). He was a fellow at the Center for Cognitive Studies and a lecturer in psychology at Harvard University in 1966 and 1967.

From 2000 he held a fellowship at Hebrew University's Center for Rationality. After teaching at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver (1978-1986) and the University of California, Berkeley (1986-1994), Kahneman in 1993 became the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology at Princeton University and a professor of public affairs at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, eventually retiring as emeritus professor of both posts in 2007.

While at Hebrew University, Kahneman met Amos Tversky, a math whiz with a deep knowledge of probability theory. The two shared a strong interest in heuristics, the short-cuts people use to reach decisions, and began a collaboration that would last until Tversky's death. Their work focused on the ways in which framing a question changes a result, even if the underlying facts remain the same. In one experiment, they asked two sets of subjects to make a choice about a health program in a hypothetical outbreak that would kill 600 people if nothing was done. One group was told that Program A would definitely save 200 lives, whereas Program B had a one-third chance of saving 600 lives and a two-thirds chance of saving no lives. Most of this group chose Program A with its certainty of saving 200 lives. A second group was given the same choice, but with a difference. They were told that Program A would lead to 400 deaths, while Program B had a one-third chance that nobody would die. and a two-thirds chance that 600 would die. Confronted with the certainty of 400 deaths under Program A, most of the second group chose to take a chance with Program B.

The two psychologists codified a number of biases, including the tendency to make big decisions on small samples and the likelihood that something that is easy to recall will lead to overestimation of frequency. In one experiment, they read a list of male and female names to test subjects. Because more of the female names were famous, 81 percent of the subjects thought there were more female names, although there were actually more male names on the list. They even discovered that people's estimates can be influenced by numbers that are obviously irrelevant to the subject at hand. They asked one group to estimate the percentage of African countries in the United Nations. Before each guess, they spun a wheel with numbers from 1 to 100. If a low number came up, the subject was more likely to give a low estimate of African membership, with the opposite result if a high number came up on the wheel. They also discovered a strong tendency toward loss aversion. Instead of being willing to risk $100 to win $100, as many economists assume, most people apparently need the prospect of winning at least $200 before they'll wager $100.

In 1982 Kahneman and Tversky, with Paul Slovic, edited Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases to bring together some of the leading contributions in their specialty. The thirty-five papers, mostly reprints, revealed more than the fact that people often make judgments that deviate from reality. They revealed systematic, predictable biases that could be studied, and often corrected through training. Such factors as overconfidence and a false sense of control, as when people can pick their own lottery numbers rather than let a machine do it. often lead people astray. A number of reviewers noted the book's applicability to many fields. J. Frank Yates noted in Contemporary' Psychology.

In recent years, Kahneman has expanded his interests to include the question of what makes human beings happy. In Well-being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology, Kahneman and his coeditors introduced a new psychological discipline, hedonics psychology, the study of what makes life pleasant or unpleasant. The essays cover personal and social factors, both in the workplace and in private life, and the influence of such factors as mood, emotion, anticipation, and desire. The first section covers the ways in which these seemingly nebulous factors can actually be measured, with subsequent sections on factors such as the difference between mood and emotion, cross-cultural variations, and individual abnormalities. For Kyklos reviewer Bruno Frey.

Daniel Kahneman has remained an intensely active contributor in the fields of psychology and economics. Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgement, published in 2002, provides an update to the classic work published twenty years earlier, and illustrates Kahneman's continued interest in preventing people from undermining their own prospects for success and happiness.

Kahneman is a founding partner of The Greatest Good, a business and philanthropy consulting company.

Achievements

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  Daniel Kahneman is widely recognized as a psychologist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002 for his pioneering work integrating insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty.
  
  In addition to the Nobel prize, Kahneman has been the recipient of many other awards, among them the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association (1982) and the Grawemeyer Prize (2002), both jointly with Amos Tversky, the Warren Medal of the Society of Experimental Psychologists (1995), the Hilgard Award for Career Contributions to General Psychology (1995), and the Lifetime Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association (2007). In 2011, he was called by Foreign Policy magazine one of the top global thinkers. In 2013 Kahneman was awarded the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

    (From the bestselling author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, t...)

    2001
  • Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases

    (The thirty-five chapters in this book describe various ju...)

    1974
  • Choices, Values, and Frames

    (Choices, Values, and Frames present an empirical and theo...)

    2000
  • Thinking, Fast and Slow 2011
  • Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think 2014

Religion

Daniel Kahneman is a Jewish atheist.

Views

Over the years Kahneman's psychological insights, which introduce the idea of irrational responses into economic decision making, have attracted the attention and respect of economists and forced them to reevaluate their assumption of "rational agents" in economic theory. With his close friend and colleague, Amos Tversky, Kahneman studied aspects of decision making, such as attentiveness, judgment, and biases, that have a definite impact on economic factors, but it took a while for that impact to be fell.

Membership

Kahneman is a member of the American Psychological Association and the Canadian Psychological Association.

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  American Psychological Association , United States

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  Canadian Psychological Association , Canada

Connections

Kahneman was married twice. His first wife was Irah Kahneman, an Israeli educational psychologist. Two children were born from this marriage. His second wife was Anne Treisman from 1978.

Father:

Efrayim Kahneman

Mother:

Rachel Kahneman

Wife:

Anne Treisman

ex-wife:

Irah Kahneman

Friend:

Amos Tversky