March 16: Amos Tversky

Psychologist Amos Tversky, a pioneer of cognitive science who helped establish the foundations of behavioral economics, was born on this date in 1937 in Haifa, Israel. Tversky and his longtime collaborator, Daniel Kahneman, charted the cognitive biases and judgment patterns of human beings, particularly regarding risk and ambiguity, and helped explain why people sometimes make irrational economic choices. Tversky spent his last decade at Stanford University and received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1984; his research partner Kahneman received the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002, six years after Tversky had died at age 59.

“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