Kahneman

Daniel Kahneman (born March 5, 1934) is an Israeli-American psychologist and economist renowned for his work on judgment, decision-making, and behavioral economics. He is a professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University and has held positions at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of California, Berkeley.

With his longtime collaborator Amos Tversky, Kahneman helped establish prospect theory (1979), which describes how people think in terms of gains and losses relative to a reference point and how people overweight small probabilities while underweighting large ones. This work challenged the classical rational-agent model in economics and laid the foundation for behavioral economics. Together with Tversky, he also identified systematic cognitive biases and heuristics that shape judgments under uncertainty.

In his two-system view of the mind, Kahneman distinguishes fast, intuitive thinking (System 1) from slow, deliberate reasoning (System 2). His insights into how these processes influence risk assessment, evaluation, and choice have influenced economics, finance, policy, and psychology.

His contributions were recognized with the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002, shared with Vernon L. Smith, for integrating psychological insights into economic science. He published Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), a comprehensive popular science treatment of his research, and more recently co-authored Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment (2021), which examines variability in expert judgments.