Daniel Kahneman

1934-2024 · Israeli-American · Judgment and Decision Making

The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence.

Daniel Kahneman (1934-2024) was an Israeli-American psychologist who, with Amos Tversky, established that human judgment departs from the standard model of rationality in ways that are systematic, predictable, and shared by experts. He was born in Tel Aviv and spent his childhood in occupied France, where his family survived in hiding and his father died of untreated diabetes weeks before the liberation. He read psychology at the Hebrew University, served in the Israeli Defence Forces designing personnel assessment, and took his doctorate at Berkeley.

Topics Daniel Kahneman addresses

• judgment under uncertainty
• the representativeness heuristic
• the availability heuristic
• anchoring and adjustment
• base-rate neglect
• the conjunction fallacy
• the law of small numbers
• prospect theory
• loss aversion
• the reflection effect
• the certainty effect
• the fourfold pattern of risk attitudes
• decision weights
• the framing of decisions
• reference dependence
• the endowment effect
• status quo bias
• fairness as a constraint on profit seeking
• System 1 and System 2
• attribute substitution
• the illusion of validity
• the planning fallacy
• the inside and outside view
• attention and effort

Questions to put to Daniel Kahneman

Heuristics and Biases

• What do you mean by a heuristic?
• How does the representativeness heuristic work?
• What's the availability heuristic and when does it lead us astray?
• Can you explain what anchoring is and why it happens?
• What's base-rate neglect and why do people ignore statistical information?
• How do you respond to the claim that these aren't errors but reasonable shortcuts?

Prospect Theory and Loss Aversion

• What's wrong with expected utility theory as a description of how people choose?
• What do you mean by loss aversion?
• How does the endowment effect work?
• What's a reference point and why does it matter?
• Why do people treat gains and losses so differently?
• How does framing the same choice in different words change what people pick?

System 1 and System 2

• What's the difference between System 1 and System 2?
• Are these systems actual parts of the brain or just a way of talking?
• What's attribute substitution and how does it produce biases?
• Why doesn't System 2 catch System 1's mistakes more often?
• How does the illusion of validity work in expert judgment?

The Planning Fallacy and Overconfidence

• What's the planning fallacy?
• What's the difference between the inside view and the outside view?
• Why are people so confident in predictions that turn out to be wrong?
• How does the law of small numbers lead us to see patterns that aren't there?
• What should we do differently when making forecasts or plans?

Experienced and Remembered Utility

• What's the difference between experienced utility and remembered utility?
• Can you explain the peak-end rule?
• What's duration neglect and why does it matter?
• Which self should we care about when making policy — the one having the experience or the one remembering it?
• Does more money actually make people happier?

Noise and Professional Judgment

• What's the difference between noise and bias?
• How much do judges or doctors disagree with themselves on the same case?
• Why has noise been so neglected compared to bias?
• What can organizations do to reduce noise in decisions?
• How did you discover that noise was such a large problem?

Converse with Daniel Kahneman on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in Daniel Kahneman's own writing, cited to the page.