Textbook of Usability

1934 to 2024, Israel and USA · Cognitive psychologist; founder of behavioural economics

Also known as: Daniel Kahneman

Daniel Kahneman, with Amos Tversky, mapped the systematic departures of human judgement from the predictions of expected-utility theory, and won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2002 (Tversky had died in 1996 and was therefore not eligible). The Kahneman-Tversky programme catalogued heuristics and biases: anchoring, availability, representativeness, framing, loss aversion, and the planning fallacy, each documented with carefully controlled experimental designs.

His 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow gave the resulting framework its working vocabulary of System 1 (fast, automatic, intuitive) and System 2 (slow, effortful, deliberate). The framework has shaped behavioural economics, public policy nudges, medical decision-making and the user-experience literature on choice architecture. Kahneman's Noise (2021), with Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein, extended the analysis from systematic bias to random variability in expert judgement.