Andreas Müller/Visum/Redux
Portrait of Daniel Kahneman, Israeli-American psychologist and 2002 Nobel Prize winner in economics, at the DLD 2009 conference in Munich on January 27, 2009.
New Delhi
CNN
—
Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winner for his pioneering theories of behavioral economics, has died. He was 90 years old.
The Israeli-American psychologist died peacefully on Wednesday, according to a statement from Princeton University, where he joined the faculty in 1993. His cause of death was not provided.
Kahneman, who also wrote the best-selling book thinking fast and slow, Assist Debunking the idea that people's behavior is driven by rational decision-making, and instead often relies on instinct.
“Danny was a giant in the field,” Eldar Shafir, a former Princeton colleague, said in the statement. “Many areas of the social sciences have not been the same since he arrived. He will be greatly missed.”
Kahneman was He was born in Tel Aviv in 1934But his French parents returned to Paris when he was three months old.
Six years later, when Kahneman was finishing first grade, the Nazis invaded France, and his family was forced to wear the yellow star that marked Jews for mass deportations to concentration camps.
His father, a research chemist, was taken in but was later released and the family fled to unoccupied France and spent the rest of the war in hiding. His father died in 1944, and the 12-year-old Kahneman moved with his mother to British-ruled Palestine two years later, just before the creation of the State of Israel.
Kahneman studied mathematics and psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and earned a Ph.D. At Berkeley, I was studying statistics, the psychology of visual perception—why things look the way they do—and how people interact in groups.
Then, at 27, he returned to Hebrew University to teach statistics and psychology and began his famous partnership with Amos Tversky, also a professor of psychology at Hebrew University.
In 2002, six years after Tversky's death, Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics For their models that show how intuitive thinking is flawed in predictable ways.
Kahneman incorporated insights from psychology into economics, especially regarding human judgment and decision making under uncertainty, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences He said in his quote on time.