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Daniel KahnemanIsraeli-American psychologist
Date of Birth: 05.03.1934
Country:  Israel |
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Biography of Daniel Kahneman
Daniel Kahneman is an Israeli-American psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics for his application of psychological methodology in economic science. He was awarded the prize in 2002 alongside Vernon L. Smith. Kahneman is well-known for his work in the psychology of judgment and decision-making, behavioral economics, and hedonic psychology. Alongside other scholars, including Amos Tversky, Kahneman established the cognitive basis for common human errors resulting from heuristics and biases. He also contributed to the development of prospect theory.
Early Life
Daniel Kahneman was born on March 5, 1934, in Tel Aviv, Israel while his mother was visiting relatives. He spent his childhood in France, where his parents had emigrated from Lithuania in the early 1920s. When Paris was occupied by the Nazis in 1940, his father was captured during the first major roundup of French Jews but was released after six weeks due to his employer's intervention. The family remained in hiding for the rest of the war. Kahneman lost his father in 1994 due to complications related to diabetes.
Education and Career
In 1948, Kahneman and his family arrived in British Mandate Palestine, just before the creation of the State of Israel. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree with a specialization in psychology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1954. He then worked in the psychological services of the Israeli Defense Forces, where his responsibilities included assessing candidates for officer training and developing tests. In 1958, he traveled to the United States to pursue a Ph.D. in psychology at the University of California at Berkeley.
Kahneman's academic career began with lecturing on psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1961. He rose to senior lecturer in 1966. His early work focused on visual perception and attention. In 1978, he joined the University of British Columbia. While being a member of Stanford University's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences from 1977 to 1978, Kahneman met Richard Thaler, with whom he quickly became friends and had a significant influence on each other. Together with David Schkade, Kahneman developed the concept of the "focus illusion" to partially explain the errors people make when evaluating the consequences of different future scenarios. This concept, also known as "affective forecasting," has been well-studied by Daniel Gilbert.
Current Work
Currently, Kahneman is an honorary professor of psychology and professor of public affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. He is also a founding partner of the consulting company TGG Group. He is married to Anne Treisman, a specialist in attention psychology and a member of the Royal Society. In 2011, Foreign Policy magazine included Kahneman in its list of top global thinkers. The same year, his best-selling book, "Thinking, Fast and Slow," was published, summarizing much of his research.
