Daniel Kahneman
1 book analyzed
Biography
Daniel Kahneman was born on March 5, 1934, in Tel Aviv, British Mandate Palestine, and grew up in Paris during the Nazi occupation. His family was Jewish, and his childhood experience of hiding from the Gestapo gave him an early, visceral understanding of how quickly civilized norms can collapse — an experience he has cited as formative for his interest in human irrationality. Kahneman studied psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1961. His career-defining collaboration with Amos Tversky began in 1969 at the Hebrew University, where both were faculty. Over the next two decades, they produced the body of work on judgment and decision-making that fundamentally changed psychology and economics. Their partnership was intense and intellectually symbiotic — they wrote their papers by literally composing sentences together, laughing at their own formulations, and finishing each other's thoughts. The collaboration was strained in later years by the asymmetry of public recognition — Tversky, more charismatic and socially confident, often received disproportionate credit. Their personal relationship deteriorated before Tversky's death from metastatic melanoma in 1996, at age 59. Kahneman has described this as one of the great sorrows of his life. Kahneman received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002 — shared with Vernon Smith — for his work integrating psychological research into economic science. Kahneman has noted repeatedly that Tversky would have shared the prize had he lived, and dedicated the Nobel lecture to Tversky's memory. Kahneman died on March 27, 2024, at age 90. Thinking, Fast and Slow, published when he was 77, was both his magnum opus and his farewell gift to the reading public — a synthesis of everything he and Tversky had learned about the architecture of human thought.