Daniel Kahneman born March 5, 1934 is an Israeli psychologist and economist notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, as well as behavioral economics, for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (shared with Vernon L. Smith). His empirical findings challenge the assumption of human rationality prevailing in modern economic theory.

With Amos Tversky and others, Kahneman established a cognitive basis for common human errors that arise from heuristics and biases, and developed prospect theory.

In 2011, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine in 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 In 2015, The Economist listed him as the seventh most influential economist in the world.

He is professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University‘s Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. Kahneman is a founding partner of TGG Group, a business and philanthropy consulting company. He was married to cognitive psychologist and Royal Society Fellow Anne Treisman, who died in 2018.

Early life

Daniel Kahneman was born in Tel Aviv, Mandatory Palestine, in 1934, where his mother, Rachel, 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, Efrayim, was picked up in the first major round-up of French Jews, but he was released after six weeks due to the intervention of his employer, Eugène Schueller. The family was on the run for the remainder of the war, and survived, except for the death of Kahneman’s father due to diabetes in 1944. Kahneman and his family then moved to British Mandatory Palestine in 1948, just before the creation of the state of Israel (Kahneman, 2003).

Kahneman has written of his experience in Nazi-occupied France, explaining in part why he entered the field of psychology:

It must have been late 1941 or early 1942. Jews were required to wear the Star of David and to obey a 6 p.m. curfew. I had gone to play with a Christian friend and had stayed too late. I turned my brown sweater inside out to walk the few blocks home. As I was walking down an empty street, I saw a German soldier approaching. He was wearing the black uniform that I had been told to fear more than others – the one worn by specially recruited SS soldiers. As I came closer to him, trying to walk fast, I noticed that he was looking at me intently. Then he beckoned me over, picked me up, and hugged me. I was terrified that he would notice the star inside my sweater. He was speaking to me with great emotion, in German. When he put me down, he opened his wallet, showed me a picture of a boy, and gave me some money. I went home more certain than ever that my mother was right: people were endlessly complicated and interesting. (Kahneman, 2003, p. 417)

Education and early career

Kahneman received his Bachelor of Science degree with a major in psychology, and a minor in mathematics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1954.

He served in the psychology department of the Israeli Defense Forces. One of his responsibilities was to evaluate candidates for officer’s training school, and to develop tests and measures for this purpose.

In 1958, he went to the United States to study for his PhD in Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. His 1961 dissertation, advised by Susan Ervin, examined relations between adjectives in the semantic differential and allowed him to “engage in two of [his] favorite pursuits: the analysis of complex correlational structures and FORTRAN programming.”

Academic career

Cognitive psychology

Kahneman began his academic career as a lecturer in psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1961.^[5] He was promoted to senior lecturer in 1966. His early work focused on visual perception and attention. For example, his first publication in the prestigious journal Science was entitled “Pupil Diameter and Load on Memory” (Kahneman & Beatty, 1966). During this period, Kahneman was a visiting scientist at the University of Michigan (1965–66) and the Applied Psychology Research Unit in Cambridge (1968/1969, summers). He was a fellow at the Center for Cognitive Studies, and a lecturer in cognitive psychology at Harvard University in 1966/1967.

Judgment and decision-making

This period marks the beginning of Kahneman’s lengthy collaboration with Amos Tversky. Together, Kahneman and Tversky published a series of seminal articles in the general field of judgment and decision-making, culminating in the publication of their prospect theory in 1979 (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). Following this, the pair teamed with Paul Slovic to edit a compilation entitled “Judgement Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases” (1982) that proved to be an important summary of their work and of other recent advances that had influenced their thinking. Kahneman was ultimately awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2002 for his work on prospect theory.

In his Nobel biography, Kahneman states that his collaboration with Tversky began after Kahneman had invited Tversky to give a guest lecture to one of Kahneman’s seminars at Hebrew University in 1968 or 1969.^[5] Their first jointly written paper, “Belief in the Law of Small Numbers,” was published in 1971 (Tversky & Kahneman, 1971). They published seven articles in peer-reviewed journals in the years 1971–1979. Aside from “Prospect Theory,” the most important of these articles was “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases” (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974), which was published in the prestigious journal Science and introduced the notion of anchoring.

Kahneman left Hebrew University in 1978 to take a position at the University of British Columbia.

Behavioral economics

Kahneman and Tversky were both fellows at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University in the academic year 1977–1978. A young economist named Richard Thaler was a visiting professor at the Stanford branch of the National Bureau of Economic Research during that same year. According to Kahneman, “[Thaler and I] soon became friends, and have ever since had a considerable influence on each other’s thinking” (Kahneman, 2003, p. 437). Building on prospect theory and Kahneman and Tversky’s body of work, Thaler published “Toward a Positive Theory of Consumer Choice” in 1980, a paper which Kahneman has called “the founding text in behavioral economics” (Kahneman, 2003, p. 438).

Kahneman and Tversky became heavily involved in the development of this new approach to economic theory, and their involvement in this movement had the effect of reducing the intensity and exclusivity of their earlier period of joint collaboration. They would continue to publish together until the end of Tversky’s life, but the period when Kahneman published almost exclusively with Tversky ended in 1983, when he published two papers with Anne Treisman, his wife since 1978.

Hedonic psychology

In the 1990s, Kahneman’s research focus began to gradually shift in emphasis towards hedonic psychology.

According to Kahneman and colleagues,

Hedonic psychology…is the study of what makes experiences and life pleasant or unpleasant. It is concerned with feelings of pleasure and pain, of interest and boredom, of joy and sorrow, and of satisfaction and dissatisfaction. It is also concerned with the whole range of circumstances, from the biological to the societal, that occasion suffering and enjoyment.

(This subfield is closely related to the positive psychology movement, which was steadily gaining in popularity at the time.)

It is difficult to determine precisely when Kahneman’s research began to focus on hedonics, although it likely stemmed from his work on the economic notion of utility. After publishing multiple articles and chapters in all but one of the years spanning the period 1979–1986 (for a total of 23 published works in 8 years), Kahneman published exactly one chapter during the years 1987–1989. After this hiatus, articles on utility and the psychology of utility began to appear (e.g., Kahneman & Snell, 1990; Kahneman & Thaler, 1991; Kahneman & Varey, 1991).

In 1992, Varey and Kahneman introduced the method of evaluating moments and episodes as a way to capture “experiences extended across time”. While Kahneman continued to study decision-making (e.g., Kahneman, 1992, 1994; Kahneman & Lovallo, 1993), hedonic psychology was the focus of an increasing number of publications (e.g., Fredrickson & Kahneman, 1993; Kahneman, Fredrickson, Schreiber & Redelemeier, 1993; Kahneman, Wakker & Sarin, 1997; Redelmeier & Kahneman, 1996), culminating in a volume co-edited with Ed Diener and Norbert Schwarz, scholars of affect and well-being.

Focusing illusion

With David Schkade, Kahneman developed the notion of the focusing illusion (Kahneman & Schkade, 1998; Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz & Stone, 2006) to explain in part the mistakes people make when estimating the effects of different scenarios on their future happiness (also known as affective forecasting, which has been studied extensively by Daniel Gilbert). The “illusion” occurs when people consider the impact of one specific factor on their overall happiness, they tend to greatly exaggerate the importance of that factor, while overlooking the numerous other factors that would in most cases have a greater impact.

A good example is provided by Kahneman and Schkade’s 1998 paper “Does living in California make people happy? A focusing illusion in judgments of life satisfaction”. In that paper, students in the Midwest and in California reported similar levels of life satisfaction, but the Midwesterners thought their Californian peers would be happier. The only distinguishing information the Midwestern students had when making these judgments was the fact that their hypothetical peers lived in California. Thus, they “focused” on this distinction, thereby overestimating the effect of the weather in California on its residents’ satisfaction with life.

Happiness and life satisfaction

Kahneman has defined happiness as “what I experience here and now“, but said that in reality humans pursue life satisfaction, which “is connected to a large degree to social yardsticks–achieving goals, meeting expectations.“

Peak–end rule and remembered pleasure

One of the cognitive biases in hedonic psychology discovered by Kahneman is called the peak–end rule. It affects how we remember the pleasantness or unpleasantness of experiences. It states that our overall impression of past events is determined for the most part not by the total pleasure and suffering it contained but by how it felt at its peaks and at its end. For example, the memory of a painful colonoscopy is improved if the examination is extended by three minutes in which the scope is still inside but not moved anymore, resulting in a moderately uncomfortable sensation. This extended colonoscopy, despite involving more pain overall, is remembered less negatively due to the reduced pain at the end. This even increases the likelihood for the patient to return for subsequent procedures. Kahneman explains this distortion in terms of the difference between two selves: the experiencing self, which is aware of pleasure and pain as they are happening, and the remembering self, which shows the aggregate pleasure and pain over an extended period of time. The distortions due to the peak–end rule happen on the level of the remembering self. Our tendency to rely on the remembering self can often lead us to pursue courses of action that are not in our best self-interest.

Teaching

Kahneman is a senior scholar and faculty member emeritus at Princeton University‘s Department of Psychology and Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. He is also a fellow at Hebrew University and a Gallup Senior Scientist.^[19]

Personal life

Kahneman’s first wife was Irah Kahneman,  an Israeli educational psychologist, with whom he had two children. His son has schizophrenia, and his daughter works in technology.

His second wife was the cognitive psychologist Anne Treisman from 1978 until her death in 2018. As of 2014, they lived part-time in Berkeley, California.  As of 2021, he lives with Barbara Tversky, Amos Tversky’s widow.

In 2015 Kahneman described himself as a very hard worker, as “a worrier” and “not a jolly person”. But, despite this, he said, “I’m quite capable of great enjoyment, and I’ve had a great life.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kahneman

Ons feilbare denken – Daniel Kahneman

Zomertijd, boekentijd. Ons feilbare denken (Thinking fast en slow) herlezen van Nobelprijswinnaar Daniel Kahneman. Kern van zijn betoog: mensen verwerken bij voorkeur informatie via het intuïtieve, associatieve systeem, het systeem van de eerste indrukken (S1). Het andere systeem, S2, is het bewuste, cognitieve, trage systeem.

S1 kost nauwelijks energie, S2 kost veel energie. Wat betekent dit voor bestuurders die een voorstel lezen? Dat zij er een beetje overheen scannen en dan hun oordeel opmaken – een S1-strategie dus? Terwijl ze door beleidsadviseurs geschreven worden alsof ze via de S2-strategie worden verwerkt, regel voor regel, veel info, veel cijfers. Bevestigt mijn idee dat je de kern van een voorstel toch maar in 12 tot 15 zinnen of bullets moet samenvatten. Dat verleidt misschien tot een S2-strategie. https://belangenfabriek.wordpress.com/2015/08/10/ons-feilbare-denken-daniel-kahneman/

Samenvatting

Waarom beoordelen we dezelfde situatie anders voor en na de lunch? Waarom denken we dat knappe mensen competenter zijn dan anderen? Daniel Kahneman toont in ‘Ons feilbare denken’ aan dat we veel irrationeler zijn dan we denken.

Hij legt uit dat we twee denksystemen hebben: een snelle, intuïtieve manier en een langzame, weloverwogen manier. Beide zijn uitermate praktisch, maar het gaat vaak fout omdat we – zonder dat we het doorhebben – de verkeerde manier van denken gebruiken.

In deze moderne klassieker legt Daniel Kahneman uit waarom we zo vaak verkeerde inschattingen maken en geeft tips om deze valkuilen te vermijden en betere beslissingen te nemen.

‘Kahneman neemt de lezer mee op een ontdekkingsreis door de krochten van ons brein in dit zeer toegankelijke boek, dat leest als een trein. Hij presenteert theorieën, lepelt verrukkelijke anekdotes op, onderwerpt de lezer aan testjes.’ – de Volkskrant

‘Op bijna elke bladzijde getuigt het van een jaloersmakende hoeveelheid kennis, inzichten en ervaring. Geen wonder dat Thinking, Fast and Slow in de Amerikaanse pers met veel gejuich en sterren werd begroet.’ – Trouw

‘Verplicht huiswerk voor het kabinet. Lees het boek van
Kahneman van a tot z.’ – nrc Handelsblad

‘In ons denken gaat van alles fout, en er is geen auteur die deze ontnuchterende constatering op zo’n diepgravende, heldere en veelomvattende manier heeft uitgelegd […] Zijn boek mag met recht een monument heten.’ – Intermediair

‘Voor wie zijn luie hersenen eens goed wil laten kraken is Ons feilbare denken een waar genot. Met veel interessante, weldoorwrochte onderzoeken ontmaskert hij de mens als rationeel wezen.’ – Psychologie Magazine

‘Kahnemans meesterwerk.’ – Vrij Nederland

‘Een verbazingwekkend rijk boek: helder, diepgravend, vol verrassende inzichten en waardevolle zelfhulptips. […] Iedereen moet dit kopen en lezen.’ – The New York Times Book Review https://www.managementboek.nl/boek/9789047013044/ons-feilbare-denken-daniel-kahneman