Intro
Eldar Shafir is an Israeli-American behavioral scientist, whose research explores the variety of ways that context affects our reasoning and judgments. In particular, Shafir has focused on decision-making under situations of scarcity, conflict, and uncertainty. He is currently the William Stewart Tod Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.1 Shafir is best known for his work on the behavioral implications of poverty, which forms the basis of his 2013 book Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (co-authored with Sendhil Mullainathan). Moreover, Shafir’s research encompasses wider topics of interest within the field of Behavioral Economics, including; choice overload, the ‘money illusion’, and the impact of cognitive biases on decision-making.
While American thought-leaders and policymakers insist on ‘personal responsibility,’ there’s a collective failure to appreciate the extent to which behavior is shaped by contextual factors, which, as in the case of poverty, can be persistent and overpowering.2
– Herbert Gintis in “Five Principles for the Unification of the Behavioral Sciences”
