Daniel Kahneman: biography and main theories of the Israeli psychologist – Online Psychologists

Daniel Kahneman (Tel Aviv, 1934) is a psychologist of Israeli origin recognized for his dazzling career in the field of psychology.

His research into human judgment and decision making earned him the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 (an award he won together with economist Vernon Smith).

The works he has developed throughout his career have served as influence for various fields and have paved the way for various disciplines.

It is worth noting that in 2012, Daniel Kahneman joined the Academy of Economic and Financial Sciences of Spain as an academic and was included in the list of 100 Most Influential Global Thinkers by the magazine Foreign Policy.

Daniel Kahneman was born on March 5, 1934 in Tel Aviv, although he spent his early years in Paris, where he moved with his family.

Son of Jewish parents, he lived through the horror of the Second World War and his stay in Paris was marked by the political context of the Nazi occupationHis father was arrested during the first major raid against Jews in Paris in 1942. He was held for six weeks before being released.

Kahneman himself claims that living in that political context and having been a victim of the horror exercised by the Nazis,and marked in an important way in his later interest in sociology.

In 1948, before the creation of the State of Israel, Daniel and his family moved to Palestinewhere began his academic training in mathematics and psychology at the university.

Daniel Kahneman became interested in psychology during his adolescence, the topics that most attracted him were those related to God and the reasons why people believed or did not believe in him.

After completing his academic training he was forced to serve the military service mandatory while He worked as a psychologist for the State of Israel, with which it collaborated to improve the interview system for recruiting new people.

At the end of this period, in 1956 Kahneman moved to the United States thanks to a scholarship that he was awarded.

Daniel Kahneman moved to the United States to continue his training in psychology and in 1958, He received his PhD in Psychology from the University of Berkeley, California.

After finishing his university studies, he decided to return to his family to teach at his old university in Israel, where he held various positions. But in 1974 he returned to the United States, where he taught at various universities, including Berkeley. He currently works as a professor. professor in the Department of Psychology of the Princeton Universitya renowned Ivy League university.

Although Kahneman focused his research on the study of attention and perception, he later focused on two issues for which he is recognized as one of the most influential psychologists of his time: judgment and decision-making.

But it was towards the 90s when Daniel changed his studies and began to focus on hedonistic psychology.

Some of the theories developed by Kahneman are:

Together with another Israeli psychologist, Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman developed theories on behavioral economics such as the law of small numbers.

This new concept helped psychologists to verify a common tendency based on evaluating the distribution of a sample as population-based, regardless of the sample size; in this way, hasty and biased conclusions are obtained.

One of Daniel Kahneman's most recognized theories is the Prospect Theory, also called Prospect theory or loss aversion.

But what is this theory based on? It develops the hypothesis of expected utility, a concept of economic science that states that people We choose the alternative that we consider most useful among those available to address a specific situation.

According to this theory developed by Kahneman, when there is uncertainty regarding the results, human beings tend to choose safe rewards, even if their value is lower than the other available options.

Furthermore, it shows that we give more importance to small losses than to moderate gains, the authors call it «loss aversion»We prefer to avoid losses than to make profits.

Thinking fast, thinking slow is the work with which Daniel Kahneman has achieved synthesize the knowledge acquired throughout his career as a psychologist on the intuitive and rational behavior of human beings.

In this book, the author focuses on those false beliefs that people intuitively accept as true and also states that although we have only one brain, we have two systems of thought.

According to Kahneman, the System 1 It is fast, intuitive and emotional, it is responsible for providing us with conclusions automatically. However, the System 2is slower and more rational, the one that offers us conscious responses.

Although the truth is that even though we have these two systems, it is difficult to know which one has taken the reins of our actions. In our daily life, most of the judgments and thoughts we have come from System 1, since they are intuitive and automatic.

But the complication or problem is that humans should not be able to think through this system all the time. Because it can lead us to erroneous intuitions and, as Kahneman himself states, people tend to have a lot of confidence in judgments that we make based on little information.

In 2002 Daniel Kahneman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics along with Vernon Smith for the influence of their research, which showed that our decisions are not as rational as we think.

Although it is surprising that he received such recognition in a discipline that is apparently not his own, Kahneman received the Nobel Prize for managing to integrate aspects of psychological research into economic science.