Amos Tversky

Main ideas

• With Daniel Kahneman he described heuristics and biases: shortcuts in thinking (availability, representativeness, anchoring) that usually serve us well, and that fail in ways you can predict.
• Prospect theory (with Kahneman): on average, losses hurt about twice as much as gains of the same size please — between individuals this varies a great deal — and so we decide differently when there is "something to lose".
• How a decision is framed matters more than we like to admit.

What we take

When we word the dilemmas, we watch the framing — the same story told as a loss, or told as a gain, draws different answers. And we also read the layers Survival and Benefit through his lens: sensitivity to a loss is one of the strongest motivations there is.

What we do differently

Tversky showed departures from a rational choice in laboratory tasks. We work with stories that carry values, where a "rational answer" does not exist.

Recommended books

• Judgment under Uncertainty (1982, with Kahneman and Slovic)
• Michael Lewis: The Undoing Project (2016) — the story of the collaboration between Tversky and Kahneman, in Czech Zrušený projekt

Sources

• Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185, 1124–1131 — availability, representativeness, anchoring.
• Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica, 47, 263–291.
• Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1981). The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice. Science, 211, 453–458.
• Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1992). Advances in prospect theory. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 5, 297–323 — the estimate of loss aversion, λ ≈ 2.25, which is where "about twice" comes from.