Daniel Kahneman
Photo: Denise Applewhite / Princeton University

Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist whose insightful research on human behavior earned him a share of the 2002 Nobel Prize in economic sciences, died March 27 at age 90. Kahneman famously never took an economics course, but his work on topics such as decision-making and loss aversion made a lasting mark on how economists view the world. He also taught hundreds of budding social scientists in Princeton’s Introduction to Psychology course (aka Psych 101). After 14 years on the faculty, he transferred to emeritus status in 2007 and published Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), a bestselling book that shared his research with a broad audience. Kahneman and his longtime collaborator Amos Tversky were the subjects of another bestseller, The Undoing Project (2016), by Michael Lewis ’82. Princeton’s Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science and Public Policy was created in honor of Kahneman and his wife, fellow psychology professor Anne Treisman, who died in 2018.