Daniel Kahneman – Author Biography
Early Life
Daniel Kahneman was born on 5 March 1934 in Tel Aviv, then part of Mandatory Palestine, and spent his childhood in Paris before the family returned to Palestine. He studied psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and earned his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.
Career
Kahneman taught at the Hebrew University, where he began a decades-long collaboration with Amos Tversky. Together they founded behavioural economics, demonstrating through elegant experiments that human judgment systematically violates the rules of rationality — work crystallised in prospect theory. In 2002 Kahneman received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for this research. Late in his career he wrote Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), a magisterial tour of his life’s work on the two systems of thought: fast intuition and slow deliberation. He taught at Princeton and died in 2024.
Major Works
Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) is his landmark book for general readers, built on the academic papers — including the 1979 prospect theory paper with Tversky — that reshaped economics.
Writing Style and Themes
Kahneman wrote with unusual humility for a Nobel laureate, presenting his own errors as happily as his discoveries. His recurring themes are the two systems of thinking, cognitive biases (anchoring, loss aversion, the planning fallacy), the unreliability of intuition, and the gap between the experiencing self and the remembering self.
Legacy
Kahneman is the most influential psychologist of the modern era; behavioural economics, “nudge” policy, and modern decision science all descend from his work with Tversky. Thinking, Fast and Slow became one of the best-selling science books of all time.
