Office of the Provost and Executive Vice President for Academics

Distinguished Lecture Series

Title: Toward a Science of Well-Being

Daniel Kahneman, Ph.D.
Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and Professor of Public Affairs
Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs
Princeton University

Tuesday, March 22, 2005 7:30 p.m.
Auditorium, Annenberg Presidential Conference Center
Texas A&M University

Abstract

The topic of well-being has been attracting increasing interest in several disciplines of social science in recent years. The central puzzle of this field is that the effects of life circumstances on well-being appear to be surprisingly small: paraplegics are less unhappy than most people think, and lottery winners are less happy than others might expect them to be. Because people fail to anticipate how much they will adapt to new circumstances, they often strive for goals that will do them little good. The well-being that people experience, and their judgments about their experience, can be explained by familiar principles of memory and attention. New measures of well-being will focus on how people allocate their time to activities and to interactions with others, and on the effects of their activities on current stress and future health.

About the Speaker

Daniel Kahneman is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and professor of public affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and a fellow of the Center for Rationality of Hebrew University in Jerusalem . He is an esteemed psychology professor and researcher, who has received all the most prestigious awards in the psychology field, including: The Hilgard Award for Lifetime Contribution to General Psychology, the Warren Medal of the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the APA. In April, 2003, he and longtime collaborator the late Dr. Amos Tversky won the Grawemeyer Award for Psychology.

Dr. Kahneman is a key theorist of behavioral finance and prospect theory, which integrates economics and cognitive science to explain seemingly irrational risk management behavior in human beings. With Dr. Tversky, Dr. Kahneman developed the prospect theory, which challenges mainstream economists' assumptions that people are rational and motivated by self-interest, and that they make rational financial decisions. Instead, prospect theory suggests that more psychological motives, including emotions and biases, determine people's economical behavior and that when making decisions people frequently take short-cuts, utilize cognitive heuristics, and make flawed but human choices.

In 2002, Dr. Kahneman received the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel despite the fact that he is a research psychologist and not an economist. It is interesting to note that although this prize is often called erroneously The Nobel Prize in Economics, it is different from the rest of the prizes awarded at the Nobel Prize ceremony in that it is not part of the Alfred Nobel bequest.

Dr. Kahneman earned his bachelor's in mathematics and psychology from the Hebrew Univesity in Jerusalem and his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California , Berkeley.