Editing Amos Tversky (section)

==Academic career==

===Academic roles===
After his doctorate, Tversky taught at Hebrew University. He then joined the faculty in the Department of Psychology of [[Stanford University]] in 1978, where he spent the rest of his career.

===Academic work===

====Work with Daniel Kahneman====
Amos Tversky's most influential work was done with his longtime collaborator, [[Daniel Kahneman]], in a partnership that began in the late 1960s. Their work explored the biases and failures in rationality continually exhibited in human decision-making.<ref name=":1" /> Starting with their first paper together, "Belief in the Law of Small Numbers", Kahneman and Tversky laid out eleven "cognitive illusions" that affect human judgment, frequently using small-scale empirical experiments that demonstrate how subjects make irrational decisions under uncertain conditions. (They introduced the notion of [[cognitive bias]] in 1972.<ref>{{cite book|vauthors=Kahneman D, Frederick S|chapter=Representativeness Revisited: Attribute Substitution in Intuitive Judgment|veditors=Gilovich T, Griffin DW, Kahneman D|title=Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment|publisher=Cambridge University Press|location=Cambridge|year=2002|pages=51–52|isbn=978-0-521-79679-8}}</ref>) This work was highly influential in the field of [[economics]], which had largely presumed rationality of all actors.<ref>{{Cite news|url=https://news.stanford.edu/pr/96/960605tversky.html|title=Amos Tversky, leading decision researcher, dies at 59|date=1996-06-05|work=Stanford University News Service|access-date=2017-12-25|archive-date=2021-03-03|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210303034115/https://news.stanford.edu/pr/96/960605tversky.html}}</ref>

According to Kahneman the collaboration 'tapered off' in the early 1980s, although they tried to revive it.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2002/kahneman/biographical/|title=The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2002}}</ref> Factors included Tversky receiving most of the external credit for the output of the partnership, and a reduction in the generosity with which Tversky and Kahneman interacted with each other.<ref>Michael Lewis. "The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World". Penguin, 2016 (ISBN 9780141983035)</ref>

====Comparative ignorance====
Tversky and Fox (1995)<ref>{{cite journal|doi=10.2307/2946693|last=Fox|first=Craig R.|author2=Amos Tversky|year=1995|title=Ambiguity Aversion and Comparative Ignorance|jstor=2946693|journal=Quarterly Journal of Economics|volume=110|issue=3|pages=585–603|citeseerx=10.1.1.395.8835}}</ref> addressed [[ambiguity aversion]], the idea that people do not like ambiguous gambles or choices with ambiguity, with the comparative ignorance framework. Their idea was that people are only ambiguity averse when their attention is specifically brought to the ambiguity by comparing an ambiguous option to an unambiguous option. For instance, people are willing to bet more on choosing a correct colored ball from an urn containing equal proportions of black and red balls than an urn with unknown proportions of balls when evaluating both of these urns at the same time. However, when evaluating them separately, people are willing to bet approximately the same amount on either urn. Thus, when it is possible to compare the ambiguous gamble to an unambiguous gamble people are averse&nbsp;— but not when one is ignorant of this comparison.

====Notable contributions====
[[File:Value function in Prospect Theory Graph.jpg|thumb|350px|right|The shape of the value ([[utility]]) function in [[prospect theory]]. The asymmetry of the function corresponds to [[loss aversion]].]]
* foundations of measurement
* [[anchoring and adjustment]]
* [[availability heuristic]]
* [[base rate fallacy]]
* [[conjunction fallacy]]
* [[framing (social sciences)|framing]]
* [[behavioral finance]]
* [[clustering illusion]]
* [[loss aversion]]
* [[prospect theory]]
* [[cumulative prospect theory]]
* [[representativeness heuristic]]
* [[Tversky index]]
* support theory
* contrast model
* [[Similarity (philosophy)#Numerical|feature matching account of similarity]]

===Approach to research===
Kahneman said that Tversky "had simply perfect taste in choosing problems, and he never wasted much time on anything that was not destined to matter. He also had an unfailing compass that always kept him going forward.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2002/kahneman/biographical/|title=The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2002}}</ref>

Tversky's 1974 Science article with Kahneman on cognitive illusions triggered a "cascade of related research," Science News wrote in a 1994 article tracing the recent history of research on reasoning. Decision theorists in economics, business, philosophy and medicine as well as psychologists cited their work.<ref name="news.stanford.edu">{{Cite web|url=https://news.stanford.edu/pr/96/960605tversky.html|title=Amos Tversky, leading decision researcher, dies at 59|access-date=2017-12-26|archive-date=2021-03-03|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210303034115/https://news.stanford.edu/pr/96/960605tversky.html}}</ref>

===Recognition===
In 1980, he became a fellow of the [[American Academy of Arts and Sciences]].<ref name=":1" />

In 1984 he was a recipient of the [[MacArthur Fellowship]], and in 1985 he was elected to the [[National Academy of Sciences]].<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://nas.nasonline.org/site/Dir/1658783591?pg=vprof&mbr=1005584&returl=http://nas.nasonline.org/site/Dir/1658783591?pg=srch&view=basic&retmk=search_again_link|title=National Academy of Sciences|website=nas.nasonline.org}}</ref> Tversky, as a co-recipient with Daniel Kahneman, earned the 2003 [[University of Louisville]] [[Grawemeyer Award]] for Psychology.<ref name="grawemeyer.org">{{cite web|title=2002- Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky|url=http://grawemeyer.org/psychology/previous-winners/2003-daniel-kahneman-and-amos-tversky.html|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150723084412/http://grawemeyer.org/psychology/previous-winners/2003-daniel-kahneman-and-amos-tversky.html|archive-date=2015-07-23}}</ref>

After Tversky's death, Kahneman was awarded the 2002 [[Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences]] for the work he did in collaboration with Tversky. Nobel prizes are not awarded posthumously.<ref name="Altman"/>