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.
Decision making in an atmosphere of uncertainty
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.
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.
“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.
American Goldin was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics
Economy
