Amos Tversky
Intro
Amos Tversky was one of the most influential psychologists when it comes to changing the way that people thought about decision-making. He not only helped found behavioral science but also revolutionized the field of economics. He was even a pioneer of prospect theory, alongside long-time colleague Daniel Kahneman.
Together with Kanehman, Tversky’s work showed that people did not behave according to perfect rationality and logic. Instead, they revealed a number of heuristics and cognitive biases that influence people’s decision-making, especially under uncertainty. His matriculate observations of people showed that many of the hypotheses traditional economists modelled did not uphold in real-life behavior. He opened economists’ eyes to the fact that humans are not robots and that their emotions need to be taken into account if we are to truly understand human behavior. Unfortunately, his untimely death at the age of only 59 cut short the career of an ingenious man, brave thinker and bold psychologist, but his contributions advanced human understanding nonetheless.
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 1
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
