Daniel Kahneman
Biographic Data
| ID | 168714 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Daniel Kahneman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Daniel |
| FAMILY NAME | Kahneman |
| SIGNATURE | KAHNEMAN D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Princeton University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 87 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2682 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 84 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1965 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 17 |
Income and emotional well-being: A conflict resolved
Do larger incomes make people happier? Two authors of the present paper have published contradictory answers. Using dichotomous questions about the preceding day, [Kahneman and Deaton, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 107 , 16489–16493 (2010)] reported a flattening pattern: happiness increased steadily with log(income) up to a threshold and then plateaued. Using experience sampling with a continuous scale, [Killingsworth, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.…
Une pensée, deux systèmes
Richard Michael Suzman (1942–2015)
Presents an obituary for Richard Michael Suzman, who died on April 16, 2015. Suzman was trained as a sociologist and anthropologist, but he was attracted to the approaches of demography and economics. He came to know a great deal about diverse fields of science, including health, physiology, psychology, genetics, and economics. He was a scientific leader who was on a quest to develop new transdisciplinary fields and to mobilize the best scientist…
Commentaries and Rejoinder on
While direct replications such as the “Many Labs” project are extremely valuable in testing the reliability of published findings across laboratories, they reflect the common reliance in psychology on single vignettes or stimuli, which limits the scope of the conclusions that can be reached. New experimental tools and statistical techniques make it easier to routinely sample stimuli, and to appropriately treat them as random factors. We encourage…
Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk
This paper presents a critique of expected utility theory as a descriptive model of decision making under risk, and develops an alternative model, called prospect theory. Choices among risky prospects exhibit several pervasive effects that are inconsistent with the basic tenets of utility theory. In particular, people underweight outcomes that are merely probable in comparison with outcomes that are obtained with certainty. This tendency, called …
Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases
Rencontre avec Daniel Kahneman: Pensée lente, pensée rapide
Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment
Associative processes in intuitive judgment
High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being
Recent research has begun to distinguish two aspects of subjective well-being. Emotional well-being refers to the emotional quality of an individual's everyday experience—the frequency and intensity of experiences of joy, stress, sadness, anger, and affection that make one's life pleasant or unpleasant. Life evaluation refers to the thoughts that people have about their life when they think about it. We raise the question of whether money buys ha…
International differences in well-being
A Comparison of Affect Ratings Obtained with Ecological Momentary Assessment and the Day Reconstruction Method
Memories of yesterday’s emotions: Does the valence of experience affect the memory-experience gap
Intense pain is often exaggerated in retrospective evaluations, indicating a possible divergence between experience and memory. However, little is known regarding how people retrospectively evaluate experiences with both pleasant and unpleasant aspects. The Day Reconstruction Method (DRM; Kahneman. Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, & Stone, 2004b) provides a unique opportunity to examine memory-experience gaps in recollections of individual days, which …
Conditions for intuitive expertise: A failure to disagree
This article reports on an effort to explore the differences between two approaches to intuition and expertise that are often viewed as conflicting: heuristics and biases (HB) and naturalistic decision making (NDM). Starting from the obvious fact that professional intuition is sometimes marvelous and sometimes flawed, the authors attempt to map the boundary conditions that separate true intuitive skill from overconfident and biased impressions. T…
Time Use and Subjective Well-Being in France and the U.S
Interpretations of Utility and Their Implications for the Valuation of Health
The term 'utility' can be interpreted in terms of the hedonic experience of an outcome (experienced utility) or in terms of the preference or desire for that outcome (decision utility). It is this second interpretation that lies at the heart of the methods that economists have developed to value non-market goods, such as health. In this article, we argue that decision utility is unlikely to generate meaningful data on the utility associated with …
Would You Be Happier If You Were Richer? A Focusing Illusion
The belief that high income is associated with good mood is widespread but mostly illusory. People with above-average income are relatively satisfied with their lives but are barely happier than others in moment-to-moment experience, tend to be more tense, and do not spend more time in particularly enjoyable activities. Moreover, the effect of income on life satisfaction seems to be transient. We argue that people exaggerate the contribution of i…
A population approach to the study of emotion: Diurnal rhythms of a working day examined with the day reconstruction method
To date, diurnal rhythms of emotions have been studied with real-time data collection methods mostly in relatively small samples. The Day Reconstruction Method (DRM), a new survey instrument that reconstructs the emotions of a day, is examined as a method for enabling large-scale investigations of rhythms. Diurnal cycles were observed for 12 emotion adjectives in 909 women over a working day. Bimodal patterns with peaks at noon and evenings were …
Anomalies: Utility Maximization and Experienced Utility
In this column, we discuss a version of the utility maximization hypothesis that can be tested-and we find that it is false. We review empirical challenges to utility maximization, which return to the old question of whether preferences optimize the experience of outcomes. Much of this work has focused on a necessary condition for utility-maximizing choices: an ability of economic agents to make accurate, or at least unbiased, forecasts of the he…
Developments in the Measurement of Subjective Well-Being
Direct reports of subjective well-being may have a useful role in the measurement of consumer preferences and social welfare, if they can be done in a credible way. Can well-being be measured by a subjective survey, even approximately? In this paper, we discuss research on how individuals' responses to subjective well-being questions vary with their circumstances and other factors. We will argue that it is fruitful to distinguish among different …
The Boundaries of Loss Aversion
In this article, the authors propose some psychological principles to describe the boundaries of loss aversion. A key idea is that exchange goods that are given up “as intended” do not exhibit loss aversion. For example, the authors propose that money given up in purchases is not generally subject to loss aversion. The results of several experiments provide preliminary support for the hypotheses. The authors find that, consistent with prospect th…
Experienced Utility as a Standard of Policy Evaluation
Toward National Well-Being Accounts
Toward National Well-Being Accounts by Daniel Kahneman, Alan B. Krueger, David Schkade, Norbert Schwarz and Arthur Stone. Published in volume 94, issue 2, pages 429-434 of American Economic Review, May 2004
A Survey Method for Characterizing Daily Life Experience: The Day Reconstruction Method
The Day Reconstruction Method (DRM) assesses how people spend their time and how they experience the various activities and settings of their lives, combining features of time-budget measurement and experience sampling. Participants systematically reconstruct their activities and experiences of the preceding day with procedures designed to reduce recall biases. The DRM's utility is shown by documenting close correspondences between the DRM report…
A perspective on judgment and choice: Mapping bounded rationality.
Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability
Experimental Tests of the Endowment Effect and the Coase Theorem
Contrary to theoretical expectations, measures of willingness-to-accept greatly exceed measures of willingness-to-pay. This paper reports several experiments that demonstrate that this "endowment effect" persists even in market settings with opportunities to learn. Consumption objects (e.g., coffee mugs) are randomly given to half the subjects in an experiment. Markets for the mugs are then conducted. The Coase theorem predicts that about half th…
Developments in the Measurement of Subjective Well-Being
Direct reports of subjective well-being may have a useful role in the measurement of consumer preferences and social welfare, if they can be done in a credible way. Can well-being be measured by a subjective survey, even approximately? In this paper, we discuss research on how individuals' responses to subjective well-being questions vary with their circumstances and other factors. We will argue that it is fruitful to distinguish among different …
Anomalies: The Endowment Effect, Loss Aversion, and Status Quo Bias
A wine-loving economist we know purchased some nice Bordeaux wines years ago at low prices. The wines have greatly appreciated in value, so that a bottle that cost only $10 when purchased would now fetch $200 at auction. This economist now drinks some of this wine occasionally, but would neither be willing to sell the wine at the auction price nor buy an additional bottle at that price. Thaler (1980) called this pattern-the fact that people often…
Conditions for intuitive expertise: A failure to disagree
This article reports on an effort to explore the differences between two approaches to intuition and expertise that are often viewed as conflicting: heuristics and biases (HB) and naturalistic decision making (NDM). Starting from the obvious fact that professional intuition is sometimes marvelous and sometimes flawed, the authors attempt to map the boundary conditions that separate true intuitive skill from overconfident and biased impressions. T…
Belief in the law of small numbers
People have erroneous intuitions about the laws of chance. In particular, they regard a sample randomly drawn from a population as highly representative, that is, similar to the population in all essential characteristics. The prevalence of the belief and its unfortunate consequences for psychological research are illustrated by the responses of professional psychologists to a questionnaire concerning research decisions. Apparently, most psycholo…
Duration neglect in retrospective evaluations of affective episodes
Two experiments documented a phenomenon of duration neglect in people's global evaluations of past affective experiences. In Study 1, 32 Ss viewed aversive film clips and pleasant film clips that varied in duration and intensity. Ss provided real-time ratings of affect during each clip and global evaluations of each clip when it was over. In Study 2, 96 Ss viewed these same clips and later ranked them by their contribution to an overall experienc…
Choosing Less-Preferred Experiences For the Sake of Variety
Data from several experiments show that, contrary to traditional models of variety seeking, individuals choose to switch to less-preferred options even though they enjoy those items less than they would have enjoyed repeating a more-preferred option. Two explanations for this finding are tested. Results indicate no evidence of a benefit to more-preferred options due to the contrast to less-preferred alternatives. However, the results of three stu…
Predicting a changing taste: Do people know what they will like
A distinction is made between decision utility, experienced utility, and predicted utility and an experiment is reported addressing people's ability to forecast experienced utility. Subjects in two experiments made predictions of their future liking for stimuli to which they were then exposed daily for one week. The stimuli were ice cream in a pilot study, plain yogurt in the main study, and short musical pieces in both studies. Decreased liking …
Interpretations of Utility and Their Implications for the Valuation of Health
The term 'utility' can be interpreted in terms of the hedonic experience of an outcome (experienced utility) or in terms of the preference or desire for that outcome (decision utility). It is this second interpretation that lies at the heart of the methods that economists have developed to value non-market goods, such as health. In this article, we argue that decision utility is unlikely to generate meaningful data on the utility associated with …
A Psychological Perspective on Economics
My first exposure to the psychological assumptions of economics was in a report that Bruno Frey wrote on that subject in the early 1970's. Its first or second sentence stated that the agent of economic theory is rational and selfish, and that his tastes do not change. I found this list quite startling, because I had been professionally trained as a psychologist not to believe a word of it. The gap between the assumptions of our disciplines appear…
Anomalies: Utility Maximization and Experienced Utility
In this column, we discuss a version of the utility maximization hypothesis that can be tested-and we find that it is false. We review empirical challenges to utility maximization, which return to the old question of whether preferences optimize the experience of outcomes. Much of this work has focused on a necessary condition for utility-maximizing choices: an ability of economic agents to make accurate, or at least unbiased, forecasts of the he…
Experiences extended across time: Evaluation of moments and episodes
Intuitions relating to outcomes extended over time are examined. Utility integration is proposed as a normative rule for the evaluation of extended episodes. In Experiment 1, subjects explicitly compared aversive experiences of varying durations. By several measures, disutility was a marginally decreasing function of episode duration, even for experiences that were thought to become increasingly aversive. This pattern is a qualitative violation o…
A Comparison of Affect Ratings Obtained with Ecological Momentary Assessment and the Day Reconstruction Method
Time Use and Subjective Well-Being in France and the U.S
Correlations, causes and heuristics in surveys of life satisfaction
Propensities and counterfactuals: The loser that almost won
Experiences of collaborative research
The author's personal history of the research that led to his recognition in economics is described, focusing on the process of collaboration and on the experience of controversy. The author's collaboration with Amos Tversky dealt with 3 major topics: judgment under uncertainty, decision making, and framing effects. A subsequent collaboration, with the economist Richard Thaler, played a role in the development of behavioral economics. Procedures …
Commentaries and Rejoinder on
While direct replications such as the “Many Labs” project are extremely valuable in testing the reliability of published findings across laboratories, they reflect the common reliance in psychology on single vignettes or stimuli, which limits the scope of the conclusions that can be reached. New experimental tools and statistical techniques make it easier to routinely sample stimuli, and to appropriately treat them as random factors. We encourage…
How the Scope and Method of Public Funding Affect Willingness to Pay for Public Goods
This article examines the sensitivity of survey measures of willingness to pay for public goods. Visitors to a science museum in San Francisco were asked to provide estimates of their willingness to pay for saving seabirds from oil spills and for teaching English to immigrants under various experimental conditions. Willingness to pay was substantially reduced by a seemingly innocuous reminder about how many individuals would be affected by a tax …
Control of spurious association and the reliability of the controlled variable
Predictably Incoherent Judgments
When people make moral or legal judgments in isolation, they produce a pattern of outcomes that they would themselves reject, if only they could see that pattern as a whole.A major reason is that human thinking is category-bound.When people see a case in isolation, they spontaneously compare it to other cases that are mainly drawn from the same category of harms.When people are required to compare cases that involve different kinds of harms, judg…
Debate: “Biopolitics” and the Missing Political Scientists
Obituary: Amos Tversky (1937–1006)
Method, findings, and theory in studies of visual masking
Classifies the various paradigms in the study of visual masking and relates them to cases of interference among cotemporaneous stimuli. The dependent variables in masking studies are described. A distinction between criterion content and criterion level is introduced in the discussion of detection under masking and metacontrast. Various conceptions of identification of forms under masking and the contributions of masking effects to the study of p…
Control of spurious association and the reliability of the controlled variable
Pupil Diameter and Load on Memory
During a short-term memory task, pupil diameter is a measure of the amount of material which is under active processing at any time. The pupil dilates as the material is presented and constricts during report. The rate of change of these functions is related to task difficulty.
Training Agents of Social Change in Israel: Definition of Objectives and a Training Approach
Many sectors of Israeli life are characterized, not only by a rapid rate of change but also by the relative prevalence of planned social change. In response to the economic and social problems ultimately related to the achievement of statehood and the absorption of mass immigration, most public institutions are engaged in inducing and/or controlling change in many spheres of behavior. Recent years have witnessed an increase in the awareness on th…
Method, findings, and theory in studies of visual masking
Classifies the various paradigms in the study of visual masking and relates them to cases of interference among cotemporaneous stimuli. The dependent variables in masking studies are described. A distinction between criterion content and criterion level is introduced in the discussion of detection under masking and metacontrast. Various conceptions of identification of forms under masking and the contributions of masking effects to the study of p…
Belief in the law of small numbers
People have erroneous intuitions about the laws of chance. In particular, they regard a sample randomly drawn from a population as highly representative, that is, similar to the population in all essential characteristics. The prevalence of the belief and its unfortunate consequences for psychological research are illustrated by the responses of professional psychologists to a questionnaire concerning research decisions. Apparently, most psycholo…
Subjective probability: A judgment of representativeness
On the psychology of prediction.
Intuitive predictions follow a judgmental heuristic—representativeness. By this heuristic, people predict the outcome that appears most representative of the evidence. Consequently, intuitive predictions are insensitive to the reliability of the evidence or to the prior probability of the outcome, in violation of the logic of statistical prediction. The hypothesis that people predict by representativeness is supported in a series of studies with …
Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability
Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases
Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases
On the interpretation of intuitive probability: A reply to Jonathan Cohen
Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk
This paper presents a critique of expected utility theory as a descriptive model of decision making under risk, and develops an alternative model, called prospect theory. Choices among risky prospects exhibit several pervasive effects that are inconsistent with the basic tenets of utility theory. In particular, people underweight outcomes that are merely probable in comparison with outcomes that are obtained with certainty. This tendency, called …
The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice
The psychological principles that govern the perception of decision problems and the evaluation of probabilities and outcomes produce predictable shifts of preference when the same problem is framed in different ways. Reversals of preference are demonstrated in choices regarding monetary outcomes, both hypothetical and real, and in questions pertaining to the loss of human lives. The effects of frames on preferences are compared to the effects of…
The Psychology of Preferences
The simulation heuristic
Our original treatment of the availability heuristic (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973, 11) discussed two classes of mental operations that “bring things to mind”: the retrieval of instances and the construction of examples or scenarios. Recall and construction are quite different ways of bringing things to mind; they are used to answer different questions, and they follow different rules. Past research has dealt mainly with the retrieval of instances fr…
Variants of uncertainty
Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases
Many decisions are based on beliefs concerning the likelihood of uncertain events such as the outcome of an election, the guilt of a defendant, or the future value of the dollar. These beliefs are usually expressed in statements such as “I think that ...,” “chances are ...,” “it is unlikely that ...,” and so forth. Occasionally, beliefs concerning uncertain events are expressed in numerical form as odds or subjective probabilities. What determine…
Judgments of and by representativeness
Several years ago, we presented an analysis of judgment under uncertainty that related subjective probabilities and intuitive predictions to expectations and impressions about representativeness. Two distinct hypotheses incorporated this concept: (i) people expect samples to be highly similar to their parent population and also to represent the randomness of the sampling process (Tversky & Kahneman, 1971, 2; 1974, 1); (ii) people often rely on re…
Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases
The thirty-five chapters in this book describe various judgmental heuristics and the biases they produce, not only in laboratory experiments but in important social, medical, and political situations as well. Individual chapters discuss the representativeness and availability heuristics, problems in judging covariation and control, overconfidence, multistage inference, social perception, medical diagnosis, risk perception, and methods for correct…
Extensional versus intuitive reasoning: The conjunction fallacy in probability judgment.
Perhaps the simplest and the most basic qualitative law of probability is the conjunction rule: The probability of a conjunction, P (A&B) cannot exceed the probabilities of its constituents, P (A) and P (B), because the extension (or the possibility set) of the conjunction is included in the extension of its constituents. Judgments under uncertainty, however, are often mediated by intuitive heuristics that are not bound by the conjunction rule. A…
Choices, values, and frames
This book presents the definitive exposition of 'prospect theory', a compelling alternative to the classical utility theory of choice. Building on the 1982 volume, Judgement Under Uncertainty, this book brings together seminal papers on prospect theory from economists, decision theorists, and psychologists, including the work of the late Amos Tversky, whose contributions are collected here for the first time. While remaining within a rational cho…
Norm theory: Comparing reality to its alternatives.
A theory of norms and normality is presented and applied to some phenomena of emotional responses, social judgment, and conversations about causes. Norms are assumed to be constructed ad hoc by recruiting specific representations. Category norms are derived by recruiting exemplars. Specific objects or events generate their own norms by retrieval of similar experiences stored in memory or by construction of counterfactual alternatives. The normali…
Rational Choice and the Framing of Decisions
Fairness and the Assumptions of Economics
Daniel Kahneman, Jack L. Knetsch, Richard H. Thaler, Fairness and the Assumptions of Economics, The Journal of Business, Vol. 59, No. 4, Part 2: The Behavioral Foundations of Economic Theory (Oct., 1986), pp. S285-S300
Experimental Tests of the Endowment Effect and the Coase Theorem
Contrary to theoretical expectations, measures of willingness-to-accept greatly exceed measures of willingness-to-pay. This paper reports several experiments that demonstrate that this "endowment effect" persists even in market settings with opportunities to learn. Consumption objects (e.g., coffee mugs) are randomly given to half the subjects in an experiment. Markets for the mugs are then conducted. The Coase theorem predicts that about half th…
Psychology (61 works) · Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics (52 works) · Computer Science (32 works) · Social Psychology (32 works) · Economics (28 works) · Cognitive psychology (22 works) · Mathematics (19 works) · Microeconomics (17 works) · Political science (15 works) · Artificial Intelligence (13 works)