daniel-kahneman

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Daniel Kahneman

[entity_type::person] [role::cognitive-psychologist-economist]

Israeli-American psychologist and Nobel laureate (Economics, 2002). With Amos Tversky, founded the heuristics and biases research program — the empirical foundation for virtually all of the individual bias pages in this wiki.

Key Contributions

Heuristics and Biases Program (with Tversky, 1970s–1990s):

  • Documented the systematic, predictable ways human judgment departs from rational models
  • Identified availability heuristic, anchoring and adjustment, representativeness heuristic as the three core judgment shortcuts
  • Showed that experts are not immune — domain expertise reduces but does not eliminate systematic bias

Prospect Theory (with Tversky, 1979):

  • People weigh losses more heavily than equivalent gains (loss aversion)
  • Reference-point dependence — outcomes are evaluated relative to a reference, not absolutely
  • Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded for this work (Tversky had died in 1996)

Dual-Process Theory (synthesized in Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011):

  • Organized the entire research program into the System 2 framework
  • System 1: fast, automatic, heuristic-based → source of systematic bias
  • System 2: slow, deliberate, effortful → capable of correcting System 1 but requires activation

Key Works

  • Kahneman, D. & Tversky, A. (1974). “Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.” Science, 185(4157), 1124–1131. — the foundational paper
  • Tversky, A. & Kahneman, D. (1979). “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk.” Econometrica, 47(2), 263–291.
  • Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. — the popular synthesis; most cited source for the bias library in this wiki

Relevance to This Wiki

The entire Cognitive Bias library in this wiki — Anchoring Bias, Availability Heuristic, Framing Effect, Overconfidence Bias, Confirmation Bias, and others — traces its empirical grounding to the Kahneman/Tversky research program.

The System 2 framework explains why Structured Analytic Techniques work: they impose System 2 structure on processes that System 1 handles automatically and badly.

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