2024-03-28 19:14:03
Israeli-American psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize for his pioneering theories in behavioral economics, has died at the age of 90. This was reported by the AP agency with reference to a statement from Princeton University, where Kahneman worked. His insights into human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty influenced most of the social sciences, as well as medicine and politics.
Kahneman and his longtime collaborator Amos Tversky reshaped the field of economics, which before their work had largely assumed that people were “rational actors” capable of clearly evaluating decisions such as what car to buy or what job to take.
The pair’s research, which Kahneman described to the lay public in his 2011 bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow, focused on how much decision-making is shaped by subliminal quirks and mental shortcuts that can distort our thoughts in irrational but predictable ways.
The Israeli-American academic was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 for bringing elements of psychological research into this field, especially when it comes to evaluating the situation and making decisions of an economic subject in an atmosphere of uncertainty. Economists say that Tversky would have won the prize with him if he had not died in 1996. The Nobel Prize is not awarded posthumously.
“Since his arrival on the scene, many areas of the social sciences are simply not what they used to be,” his former colleague and behavioral scientist Eldar Shafir said in a press statement. Canadian-American experimental psychologist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker once called Kahneman “the world’s most influential living psychologist.”
Kahneman was born in 1934 in Tel Aviv. He lived in France during the Second World War and returned to Israel in 1946. He completed his bachelor’s studies in psychology and mathematics in 1954 at the Jewish University in Jerusalem. He received his doctorate in psychology in 1961 from the University of California, Berkeley. Meanwhile, he served in the Israeli army, where he introduced a system of entrance interviews for conscripts. This system was used for several decades. From 1993 he worked at Princeton University.
His partner, Barbara Tversky, widow of Amos Tversky and professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford University, said the family would not release the place or cause of death.
“I had limited ambitions, I didn’t want to be very successful,” Kahneman told The Guardian in 2015. “I was very hardworking, but I didn’t expect to be a famous psychologist,” he added.