Eldar Shafir
The mental consequences of not having enough
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”
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.
