Daniel Kahneman
Daniel Kahneman passed away on March 27, 2024 following a life dedicated to scholarship that has had a profound and broad impact beyond his chosen field of psychology. In 2002 he received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his pioneering work integrating insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty. Much of this work was carried out collaboratively with Amos Tversky, who had passed away a few years prior. In 2013, Kahneman was a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He was Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Princeton University, Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs Emeritus at the Woodrow Wilson School, and a fellow of the Center for Rationality at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Kahneman was born in Tel Aviv but spent his childhood years in France, before returning to Palestine in 1946. He received his bachelor’s degree in psychology (with a minor in mathematics) from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and in 1954 he was drafted into the Israeli Defense Forces, serving principally in its psychology branch. In 1958, he came to the United States and earned his PhD in Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1961. He went on to hold the position of professor of psychology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (1970-1978), the University of British Columbia (1978-1986), and the University of California, Berkeley (1986-1994).
Kahneman was the author of Thinking Fast and Slow and co-author of Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment with Cass R. Sunstein and Olivier Sibony. He was a member of the National Academy of Science, the Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the Econometric Society. Kahneman was a recipient of many awards, among them the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association (1982) and the Grawemeyer Prize (2002), both jointly with Amos Tversky, the Warren Medal of the Society of Experimental Psychologists (1995), the Hilgard Award for Career Contributions to General Psychology (1995), and the Lifetime Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association (2007). He held honorary degrees from numerous universities.