The Essential Tversky

The Essential Tversky
Author: Amos Tversky
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 397
Release: 2018-07-17
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0262535106

Some of the best and most influential papers by Amos Tversky, one of the most brilliant social science thinkers of the twentieth century. Amos Tversky (1937–1996) was a towering figure in the cognitive and decision sciences. His work was ingenious, exciting, and influential, spanning topics from intuition to statistics to behavioral economics. His long and extraordinarily productive collaboration with his friend and colleague Daniel Kahneman was the subject of Michael Lewis's best-selling book, The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds. The Essential Tversky offers a selection of Tversky's best, most influential and accessible papers, “classics” chosen to capture the essence of Tversky's thought. The impact of Tversky's work is far reaching and long-lasting. In 2002, Kahneman, who drew on their joint work in his much-praised 2013 book, Thinking, Fast and Slow (and who contributes an afterword to this collection), was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for work done with Tversky. In The Undoing Project, Lewis (who contributes a foreword to this collection) describes his discovery that Tversky and Kahneman's thinking laid the foundation for Moneyball, his own ode to number-crunching. The papers collected in The Essential Tversky cover topics that include cognitive and perceptual bias, misguided beliefs, inconsistent preferences, risky choice and loss aversion decisions, and psychological common sense. Together, they offer nonspecialist readers an introduction to one of the most brilliant social science thinkers of the twentieth century.

Preference, Belief, and Similarity

Preference, Belief, and Similarity
Author: Amos Tversky
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 1046
Release: 2003-11-21
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9780262700931

Amos Tversky (1937–1996), a towering figure in cognitive and mathematical psychology, devoted his professional life to the study of similarity, judgment, and decision making. He had a unique ability to master the technicalities of normative ideals and then to intuit and demonstrate experimentally their systematic violation due to the vagaries and consequences of human information processing. He created new areas of study and helped transform disciplines as varied as economics, law, medicine, political science, philosophy, and statistics. This book collects forty of Tversky's articles, selected by him in collaboration with the editor during the last months of Tversky's life. It is divided into three sections: Similarity, Judgment, and Preferences. The Preferences section is subdivided into Probabilistic Models of Choice, Choice under Risk and Uncertainty, and Contingent Preferences. Included are several articles written with his frequent collaborator, Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman.

An Analysis of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman's Judgment Under Uncertainty

An Analysis of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman's Judgment Under Uncertainty
Author: Camille Morvan
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 93
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1351350609

Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman’s 1974 paper ‘Judgement Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases’ is a landmark in the history of psychology. Though a mere seven pages long, it has helped reshape the study of human rationality, and had a particular impact on economics – where Tversky and Kahneman’s work helped shape the entirely new sub discipline of ‘behavioral economics.’ The paper investigates human decision-making, specifically what human brains tend to do when we are forced to deal with uncertainty or complexity. Based on experiments carried out with volunteers, Tversky and Kahneman discovered that humans make predictable errors of judgement when forced to deal with ambiguous evidence or make challenging decisions. These errors stem from ‘heuristics’ and ‘biases’ – mental shortcuts and assumptions that allow us to make swift, automatic decisions, often usefully and correctly, but occasionally to our detriment. The paper’s huge influence is due in no small part to its masterful use of high-level interpretative and analytical skills – expressed in Tversky and Kahneman’s concise and clear definitions of the basic heuristics and biases they discovered. Still providing the foundations of new work in the field 40 years later, the two psychologists’ definitions are a model of how good interpretation underpins incisive critical thinking.

Mind in Motion

Mind in Motion
Author: Barbara Tversky
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 389
Release: 2019-05-21
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0465093078

An eminent psychologist offers a major new theory of human cognition: movement, not language, is the foundation of thought When we try to think about how we think, we can't help but think of words. Indeed, some have called language the stuff of thought. But pictures are remembered far better than words, and describing faces, scenes, and events defies words. Anytime you take a shortcut or play chess or basketball or rearrange your furniture in your mind, you've done something remarkable: abstract thinking without words. In Mind in Motion, psychologist Barbara Tversky shows that spatial cognition isn't just a peripheral aspect of thought, but its very foundation, enabling us to draw meaning from our bodies and their actions in the world. Our actions in real space get turned into mental actions on thought, often spouting spontaneously from our bodies as gestures. Spatial thinking underlies creating and using maps, assembling furniture, devising football strategies, designing airports, understanding the flow of people, traffic, water, and ideas. Spatial thinking even underlies the structure and meaning of language: why we say we push ideas forward or tear them apart, why we're feeling up or have grown far apart. Like Thinking, Fast and Slow before it, Mind in Motion gives us a new way to think about how--and where--thinking takes place.

Judgment Under Uncertainty

Judgment Under Uncertainty
Author: Daniel Kahneman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 574
Release: 1982-04-30
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9780521284141

Thirty-five chapters describe various judgmental heuristics and the biases they produce, not only in laboratory experiments, but in important social, medical, and political situations as well. Most review multiple studies or entire subareas rather than describing single experimental studies.

Scarcity

Scarcity
Author: Sendhil Mullainathan
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2013-09-03
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0805092641

A surprising and intriguing examination of how scarcity—and our flawed responses to it—shapes our lives, our society, and our culture

Critical Thinking

Critical Thinking
Author: Varda Liberman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2020-06-30
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780231187688

Critical Thinking examines how we make judgments under uncertainty and how various biases can distort our consideration of evidence. Via everyday examples, Varda Liberman and Amos Tversky explore the insights of probability, causal relationships, and making inferences from samples with the goal of helping readers improve their intuitive reasoning.

The Undoing Project

The Undoing Project
Author: Michael Lewis
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017-10-31
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0393354776

“Brilliant. . . . Lewis has given us a spectacular account of two great men who faced up to uncertainty and the limits of human reason.” —William Easterly, Wall Street Journal Forty years ago, Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky wrote a series of breathtakingly original papers that invented the field of behavioral economics. One of the greatest partnerships in the history of science, Kahneman and Tversky’s extraordinary friendship incited a revolution in Big Data studies, advanced evidence-based medicine, led to a new approach to government regulation, and made much of Michael Lewis’s own work possible. In The Undoing Project, Lewis shows how their Nobel Prize–winning theory of the mind altered our perception of reality.

Heuristics and Biases

Heuristics and Biases
Author: Thomas Gilovich
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 884
Release: 2002-07-08
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780521796798

This book, first published in 2002, compiles psychologists' best attempts to answer important questions about intuitive judgment.

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Thinking, Fast and Slow
Author: Daniel Kahneman
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 511
Release: 2011-10-25
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1429969350

*Major New York Times Bestseller *More than 2.6 million copies sold *One of The New York Times Book Review's ten best books of the year *Selected by The Wall Street Journal as one of the best nonfiction books of the year *Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient *Daniel Kahneman's work with Amos Tversky is the subject of Michael Lewis's best-selling The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds In his mega bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, world-famous psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions. Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Topping bestseller lists for almost ten years, Thinking, Fast and Slow is a contemporary classic, an essential book that has changed the lives of millions of readers.