Daniel Kahneman
March 5, 1934 – March 27, 2024
ORI mourns the loss of Daniel Kahneman, a renowned scholar who was the ‘grandfather of behavioral economics’. He passed away on March 27 at the age of 90. Kahneman and his close colleague Amos Tversky spent a memorable sabbatical year at ORI in 1971-1972. In the biographical piece Kahneman submitted when he won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2002, he referred to the sabbatical year he and Amos Tversky spent at ORI.
“From 1971 to 1972, Amos and I were at the Oregon Research Institute (ORI) in Eugene, Oregon a year that was by far the most productive of my life. We did a considerable amount of research and writing on the availability heuristic, on the psychology of prediction, and on the phenomena of anchoring and overconfidence… I also completely rewrote my book on Attention and Effort… which remains my most significant independent contribution to psychology.
At ORI, I came into contact for the first time with an exciting community of researchers that Amos had known since his student days at Michigan: Paul Slovic, Sarah Lichtenstein, and Robyn Dawes. Lewis Goldberg was also there, and I learned much from his work on clinical and actuarial judgment, and from Paul Hoffman’s ideas about paramorphic modeling.”
For their seminal articles on judgmental heuristics and biases, Kahneman and Tversky received the award for a Distinguished Scientific Contribution by the American Psychological Association. Kahneman went on to receive the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics, shared with Vernon L. Smith, Ph.D. Kahneman’s dear friend and professional colleague, Amos Tversky, died in 1996 at age 59.