Daniel Kahneman

Daniel Kahneman (1934–2024) was an Israeli-American psychologist who transformed the social sciences by proving that human judgement deviates systematically from rationality. With his lifelong collaborator Amos Tversky, he developed prospect theory and other landmark accounts of decision-making under uncertainty, earning the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences — despite never having taken an economics course.

Kahneman's bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) distilled a lifetime of research into a sweeping portrait of two systems of thought — the fast, intuitive System 1 and the slow, deliberate System 2 — and popularised concepts such as anchoring, loss aversion and the planning fallacy across psychology, economics and public policy. His final major work, Noise (2021), written with Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein, examined the everyday variability that corrupts professional judgement. He died in 2024, leaving a legacy that forever changed how the world thinks about thinking.