Amos Nathan Tversky (1937–96) was an Israeli cognitive and mathematical psychologist. A collaborator of Nobel economics laureate Daniel Kahneman, Tversky was instrumental in the understanding of systematic human cognitive bias and handling of risk in judgment and decision-making.
Born in Haifa, Israel, to parents who had emigrated from Poland via Russia to Israel, Tversky graduated from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1961, majoring in philosophy and psychology. He received a PhD degree from the University of Michigan in 1965. Subsequently, he taught at Hebrew University before joining the faculty of Stanford University in 1978, where he spent the rest of his career.
Tversky made profound contributions to the study of human judgment and decision-making and the foundations of measurement. He published more articles in Psychological Review than anyone else in the journal’s history did.
Tversky is celebrated for his collaboration with Daniel Kahneman—the two laid the foundations of new fields of research into heuristics and biases, behavioral decision theory, and judgment under uncertainty.
Kahneman’s Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (1982) and Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) describe their body of work—it has inspired later generations of researchers in judgment and decision making and added significantly to the development of behavioral economics as a new field of research.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Amos Tversky
He who sees the past as surprise free is bound to have a future full of surprises.
—Amos Tversky
It’s frightening to think that you might not know something, but more frightening to think that, by and large, the world is run by people who have faith that they know exactly what is going on.
—Amos Tversky
Whenever there is a simple error that most laymen fall for, there is always a slightly more sophisticated version of the same problem that experts fall for.
—Amos Tversky
When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice. Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens.
—Amos Tversky
Chance is commonly viewed as a self-correcting process in which a deviation in one direction induces a deviation in the opposite direction to restore the equilibrium. In fact, deviations are not “corrected” as a chance process unfolds, they are merely diluted.
—Amos Tversky
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