Amos Tversky

Amos Nathan Tversky (born March 16, 1937, in Haifa, British Mandate Palestine; died June 2, 1996, in Stanford, California) was an Israeli cognitive and mathematical psychologist who, with his lifelong collaborator Daniel Kahneman, reshaped the understanding of human judgment and decision-making.

Trained in psychology with a strong mathematical bent, Tversky held positions at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and later at Stanford University. Beginning in the late 1960s, he and Kahneman launched a research program demonstrating that people do not reason like ideal statisticians but rely on a small set of mental shortcuts, or heuristics, that work well in many cases yet produce systematic, predictable errors.

Their 1974 Science paper, “Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases,” catalogued mechanisms such as representativeness, availability, and anchoring and adjustment, and showed how each generates characteristic biases.

The pair went on to develop prospect theory (1979), a description of how people actually evaluate risk and loss that became a foundation of behavioral economics. The work earned the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences — awarded to Kahneman, who noted the prize was shared in spirit with Tversky, who had died of melanoma six years earlier and was therefore ineligible.

Tversky’s findings are a precise account of how belief and intuition systematically misfire, the rigorous check against naive faith in the mind’s reliability.