Daniel Kahneman

Psychologist, and with Amos Tversky the founder of the heuristics-and-biases programme. Won the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences — for work in psychology, which is the useful biographical fact: his findings reached the world through economics, because that is the field whose model of a rational chooser they contradicted.

Author of Thinking, Fast and Slow and the popularizer of the System 1 / System 2 framing that now turns up far outside psychology, including in this hub’s own security spoke (soc-fast-slow-thinking in ../defensive-security-wiki).

Asked to compress a career, he offered what he called a fortune-cookie maxim: “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it” kahneman-focusing-illusion — the focusing-illusion, stated so it survives being remembered.

Worth recording alongside the work: Kahneman publicly acknowledged having placed too much confidence in social-priming studies he cited in Thinking, Fast and Slow when those results failed to replicate. That is the standard this spoke’s evidence caveat asks for, set by the person with the most to lose from it.

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heuristics-and-biases · focusing-illusion · thinking-fast-and-slow · replication-crisis · kahneman-focusing-illusion · synthesis