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Daniel Kahneman’s career as a psychologist began in 1954, when he was a young lieutenant in the Israeli army, helping assess candidates for officer training. While in the army he met Amos Tversky, three years his junior. The two men eventually became colleagues at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, and began collaborating in 1969. Kahneman was traditional in his approach to research, while Tversky was fond of mathematical techniques gradually coming into favor. Together, the men established prospect theory, an attempt to model human decision-making more realistically than the dominant paradigm, expected utility theory, is able to do.

The partnership of the two men eventually withered, as Kahneman grew resentful over the outsize share of attention Tversky attracted with his sparkling intellect and outgoing personality. The ups and downs of Kahneman and Tversky’s relationship are the subject of a widely praised book by Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds (2016). In recent years, prospect theory has become one of the cornerstone ideas of behavioral economics, a branch of economics that seeks to learn from research on human psychology.

Thinking, Fast and Slow is a highly readable compendium of what Kahneman and Tversky learned together, from each other and from fellow researchers. Parts of the book, however, have come in for criticism. Just one year after the book was published, Kahneman himself wrote an open email to the authors of a study on priming (see Chapter 4 on the so-called Florida effect), warning of a “train wreck” if the team’s findings could not be replicated. See this article for a fuller treatment of possible problems with Thinking, Fast and Slow. The article also touches on the tumultuous replication crisis that engulfed the field of Social Psychology at about the same time Kahneman’s book was published in 2011.

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