The Psychologist Who Changed Economics

Daniel Kahneman never took an economics course, yet he revolutionized the entire field. His research proved that human decision-making is systematically biased in ways traditional economics could not explain. He won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics — the first psychologist to receive the honor.

Working with Amos Tversky from the 1970s, Kahneman ran deceptively simple experiments that exposed deep flaws in rational choice theory. A few questions about coins, gambles, and word problems were enough to show that people break the rules economists assumed they followed.