Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winner who wrote Thinking, Fast and Slow, dies aged 90

New Delhi
CNN
—

Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking behavioral economics theory, has died. He is 90 years old.

The Israeli-American psychologist died peacefully on Wednesday, according to a news release from Princeton University. He joined Princeton University in 1993. No cause of his death was provided.

Kahneman, also the best-selling author of Thinking, fast and slow, helped Debunking that human behavior is driven by rational decisions and often based on instinctive concepts.

“Danny was a giant in the field,” former Princeton University colleague Eldar Shafir said in a press release. “Many areas of the social sciences have changed dramatically since he arrived on the scene. He will be greatly missed.”

Kahneman was born in Tel Aviv in 1934, but his French parents returned home 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 yellow stars, signaling the mass deportations of Jews to concentration camps.

His father, a research chemist, was taken away but later released, and the family fled to unoccupied France and spent the remainder of the war in hiding. His father died in 1944, and two years later, at the age of 12, Kahneman moved with his mother to British-ruled Palestine, just before the creation of the state of Israel.

Kahneman studied mathematics and psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and went on to earn a Ph.D. At Berkeley, study statistics, the psychology of visual perception—why things look the way they do—and how people interact in groups.

Then, at the age of 27, he returned to the Hebrew University to teach statistics and psychology and began his famous collaboration with Amos Tversky, also a professor of psychology at the Hebrew University.

In 2002, six years after Tversky’s death, Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his model of the predictability shortcomings of intuitive reasoning.

Kahneman integrates insights from psychology into economics, especially regarding human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a citation at the time.