Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman dies at 90

Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and pioneer of behavioral economics theories, has died. He was 90 years old.

He died “peacefully” on Wednesday, March 27, according to a statement from Princeton University, whose faculty he joined in 1993. A cause of death was not provided by the university.

Kahneman wrote the best-selling book Thinking, Fast and Slow, and helped debunk the notion that people's behavior is driven by rational decision-making and is instead often based on instinct.

“Danny was a giant in the field,” former Princeton University colleague Eldar Shafir said in the release.

“Many areas of the social sciences simply have not been the same since he arrived on the scene. He will be greatly missed.”

Kahneman was born in Tel Aviv in 1934, but his French parents returned to Paris when he was three months old.

Six years later, as Kahneman was finishing first grade, the Nazis invaded France and his family was forced to wear the yellow star that marked Jews for mass deportation to concentration camps.

His father, a research chemist, was taken but later released and the family fled to unoccupied France and spent the rest of the war in hiding. His father died in 1944, and 12-year-old Kahneman moved with his mother to British-ruled Palestine two years later, shortly before the creation of the State of Israel.

In 2002, six years after Tversky's death, Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his models of how intuitive reasoning is flawed in predictable ways.

Kahneman integrated insights from psychology into economics, especially with regard to human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in its citation at the time.

Source: www.lindaikejisblog.com