Daniel Kahneman

His parents were Lithuanian Jews who had emigrated to France in the early 1920s.

He spent his childhood years in Paris.

Daniel Kahneman (דניאל כהנמן; born March 5, 1934) is an Israeli-American author, psychologist and economist notable for his work on hedonic psychology, psychology of judgment and decision-making.

Daniel Kahneman was born in Tel Aviv, Mandatory Palestine, in 1934, where his mother, Rachel, was visiting relatives.

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, La Cagoule backer Eugène Schueller.

"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."

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

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

Israeli intellectual Yeshayahu Leibowitz, whom Kahneman describes as influential in his intellectual development, was Kahneman's chemistry teacher at Beit-Hakerem High School, and Kahneman's physiology professor at university.

Kahneman was average in mathematics, but he thrived in psychology.

Kahneman was led to psychology when he discovered in his teens that he was more interested in why people believe in God than in whether God exists, and more interested in indignation than in ethics.

In 1954 he began his military service as a second lieutenant, serving for a year in infantry.

He then served in the psychology department of the Israeli Defense Forces.

He developed a structured interview for combat recruits, which remained in use in the IDF for several decades.

Kahneman describes his military service as a "very important period" in his life.

In 1958 he went to the United States to study for his PhD in Psychology at 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."

Kahneman began his academic career as a lecturer in psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1961.

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 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).

He was a fellow at the Center for Cognitive Studies, and a lecturer in cognitive psychology at Harvard University in 1966/1967.

His work on attention led to a book, Attention and Effort, in which he presented a theory of effort based on studies of pupillary changes during mental tasks.

 Much later Kahneman developed rules of counterfactual thinking, and published "Norm Theory" with Dale Miller.

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.

He is also known for his work in 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.