Nobel Prize-winning psychologist who pioneered theories in behavioural economics, Daniel Kahneman, has passed on at 90.
He died ‘peacefully’ on Wednesday, March 27 according to a release from Princeton University, whose faculty he had joined in 1993. His 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 instead is often based on instinct.
“Danny was a giant in the field,” Eldar Shafir, a former colleague at Princeton University said in the release.
“Many areas in 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 home 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 deportations to concentration camps.
His father, a research chemist, was taken away but then released and the family escaped to unoccupied France and spent the rest of the war in hiding. His father died in 1944, and 12-year-old Kahneman moved to British-ruled Palestine with his mother two years later, just before the creation of the state of Israel.
In 2002, six years after Tversky’s death, Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics for their models of how intuitive reasoning is flawed in predictable ways.
Kahneman integrated insights from psychology into economics, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in its citation at the time.
