Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Hebrew University of Jerusalem is the institutional setting where Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky first moved from intellectual encounter to sustained collaboration. Its psychology department provided the seminar in which they tested whether people possessed an intuitive grasp of statistical principles, and the university became the point of origin for a partnership whose later work helped establish behavioral economics and earned Daniel Kahneman the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.

Institutional Setting

Hebrew University of Jerusalem appears not as a passive backdrop but as the academic environment that made the collaboration possible. In 1969, Daniel Kahneman was teaching a seminar in the Department of Psychology there when he invited Amos Tversky to speak as a guest. Tversky was thirty-two and Kahneman thirty-five. Tversky was already regarded as a rising star in decision research and was remembered as brilliant, voluble, charismatic, exceptionally funny, and capable of using jokes to sharpen an argument.

The university setting brought together two researchers who were both critical and argumentative but whose intellectual strengths differed. Tversky was the more logical thinker, strongly oriented toward theory and endowed with an unfailing sense of direction; Kahneman was more intuitive. Their exchange at Hebrew University created the conditions for a method based not on abstract allegiance to rationality but on repeated examination of their own judgments and preferences.

The Seminar and Its Question

Tversky’s seminar presentation concerned an ongoing research program at the University of Michigan asking whether people were good intuitive statisticians. The comparison was with intuitive grammar: a four-year-old can follow grammatical rules effortlessly without knowing that the rules exist. The question was whether people had a similarly intuitive feel for basic statistical principles.

The discussion initially produced a qualified yes, but the lively debate led Kahneman and Tversky to a qualified no. The reversal was important because it made their own intuitions part of the problem. They did not treat statistical error as a defect belonging only to uninformed subjects; they recognized that years of teaching and using statistics had not given them a reliable intuitive sense of the evidential weakness of small samples.

From University Debate to Research Collaboration

After the seminar, Kahneman and Tversky decided that intuitive statistics was an interesting subject to investigate together. That Friday they met at Café Rimon, a favored Jerusalem gathering place for bohemians and professors, and planned a study of the statistical intuitions of sophisticated researchers. Their immediate objective was to discover whether other researchers suffered from the same tendency they had identified in themselves: believing research findings based on inadequate evidence and collecting too few observations in their own work.

They prepared a survey built around realistic statistical problems arising in research. Tversky collected responses from expert participants at a meeting of the Society of Mathematical Psychology, including two authors of statistical textbooks. The results confirmed the suspicion formed at the university. The experts substantially exaggerated the likelihood that an experimental result based on a small sample would successfully replicate, and they gave poor advice to a fictitious graduate student about the number of observations required. Even statisticians were not good intuitive statisticians.

The university therefore functions as the point at which a general question became a self-implicating research program. The collaboration did not begin with confidence in the researchers’ own rationality; it began with their recognition that their intuitions were deficient. That recognition became a productive discipline: they spent many days inventing problems, testing preferences, and examining whether intuitive responses conformed to statistical or logical standards.

Intellectual Consequences

The work initiated at Hebrew University developed into the broader research program on judgment and decision making associated with Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Their collaboration produced systematic accounts of judgmental biases and later a psychological theory of decision making under uncertainty. Their paper “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk” became one of the foundations of behavioral economics and is described as, by some measures, even more influential than their work on judgment.

The collaboration’s unusual productivity also depended on its interpersonal character. Kahneman recalled that the two men enjoyed working together, spent hours working amid continuous amusement, and became unusually patient because the work was never boring. They did not reject one another’s ideas out of hand; Tversky often saw the point of Kahneman’s vague ideas more clearly than Kahneman himself did. The intellectual achievement associated with the university’s seminar setting thus arose from a relationship in which criticism was preserved but defensiveness was suspended.

Institutional Significance

Hebrew University of Jerusalem is significant because it marks the beginning of a chain linking teaching, debate, self-criticism, empirical testing, and institutional consequence. The university seminar exposed a weakness in expert intuition; the subsequent study demonstrated that the weakness was widespread; and the resulting partnership transformed that discovery into a durable language for discussing errors of judgment and choice.

The later fate of the collaboration gives the institution’s role an added historical weight. Geographical separation eventually made continued joint work too difficult, but Kahneman described the partnership as a shared mind superior to either individual mind and as a relationship that made research both fun and productive. Their collaboration was the reason Kahneman received the 2002 Nobel Prize, an honor Amos Tversky would have shared had he not died in 1996 at the age of fifty-nine. Hebrew University consequently stands at the origin of a collaboration whose intellectual effects extended far beyond its original seminar room.