Israeli American author and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman breathed his last at the age of 90.
Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who bagged the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002, passed away on Wednesday, March 27, 2024, at the age of 90. Kahneman, who gained recognition for his best-selling book ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’ voiced against the notion that people’s behavior is rooted in a rational decision-making process. The book focused on how much decision-making is shaped by the instinct of a person.
The World of Science Grieves the Loss of Kahneman
Kahneman’s employer, Princeton University, where he worked until his last time, confirmed his death on Wednesday in a statement posted on its website. He was a professor at Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.
His colleague, Professor Eldar Shafir said: “Many areas in the social science have changed since the arrival of Kahneman. He will be greatly missed.
More than two decades ago, Kahneman was honored with the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in recognition of his unparalleled contributions to the fields of economics and psychology.
The psychologist and his long-time pal Amos Tversky introduced new theories into economics. They reshaped the field of economics by changing the perspective of people. Before their interference, people assumed that they were “rational actors” who had the potential of clearly evaluating choices.
Kahneman’s partnership with Tversky kicked off in 1969 when the two recognized psychologists collaborated on a research paper. In Kahneman’s Nobel autobiography, he wrote that his experience working with Tversky was “magical.” He further added that Tversky was commonly described by people as a “funny man, “and we used to spend hours and hours of work together.” A source close to the two said that they used to flip coins to determine whose name to write as the lead author.
“Amos and I together owned a goose that laid golden eggs,” Kahneman said referring to the joint minds they had, which benefitted them better than their separate minds.
The two began studying decision-making in 1974. They were quick to find that people react more intensely to losses than to equivalent gains. This theory is now known as “loss aversion.” Combined with a few other findings, the pair together developed a theory of risky choice and they eventually named it “prospect theory.”
Kahneman, who was born in Tel Aviv, Palestine, on March 5, 1939. He completed his Israeli national services in the 1950s. Following the death, his consort, Barbara Tversky, widow of his long-time collaborator, Amos Tversky, who is a Stanford University emerita professor of psychology-said that the family was not interested in disclosing the cause of death.
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The Canadian cognitive psychologist and psycholinguist Steven Pinker once described Kahneman as “the most influential living psychologist in the world.”
“ I am quite capable of great enjoyment, and I have had a great life,” Kahneman said in a 2015 statement. “ I had limited ambitions,’ he continued, ‘I did not aspire to become successful. I was, indeed, very hardworking, but I was genuinely not expecting to become a famous psychologist.”
Besides his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, Kahneman is also notable for his contribution to hedonic psychology. In 2011, the Foreign Policy magazine named him in the list of top global thinkers. In 2015, he was listed as the seventh most influential economist in the world.