Daniel Kahneman remembered by Daniel J Levitin

5 March 1934 – 27 March 2024
The neuroscientist celebrates the Nobel-winning author of Thinking, Fast and Slow – a psychologist whose elegance of thought helped reveal the foibles of human reasoning

Read the Observer’s obituaries of 2024 in full

Daniel Kahneman was a brilliant scientist who marvelled at his own errors in thinking. “The essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution”, he wrote in Thinking, Fast and Slow. He turned that fascination into a career, becoming one of the founders of the field in modern psychology known as judgment and decision making.

I first met Danny when I was a student at Stanford, working in the laboratory of his longtime collaborator Amos Tversky. Danny worked across the bay at University of California, Berkeley, and he and Amos alternated visits on a regular basis, just as they alternated authorship on their papers. It was Danny’s turn to come to Stanford.

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