Amos Tversky: biography of this cognitive psychologist

This researcher dedicated to cognitive psychology was devoted to the study of decision making.

Amos Tversky (1937-1996) was a cognitive psychologist, with significant training in mathematics, who contributed much of the fundamental knowledge in cognitive science. Among other things, he studied cognitive biases and risk management, issues that were applied in important ways in other disciplines, such as economics or law.

In this article we will look at a biography of Amos Tverskyas well as some of his contributions to the development of cognitive psychology.

Biography of Amos Tversky: pioneer in cognitive psychology.

Amos Tversky was born on March 16, 1937 in Haifa, Israel. Son of veterinarian Yosef Tversky, and Genia, a woman member of the Israeli parliament for almost twenty years. Both Yosef and Genia had migrated to Israel from Poland and Russia. In the 1960s he formed a couple with one of the most representative cognitive psychologists of our time, Barbara Tversky, with whom he had two children and two sons.with whom he had two sons and a daughter.

As a young man, Tversky served in the Israeli army forces, initially as part of the elite paratrooper unit, and later as a captain in service during three wars.

In 1961, Amos Tversky received his undergraduate degree from Hebrew University, followed by a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1965. At the same university, as well as at the University of Tel Aviv, he worked as a professor and researcher in psychology and economics, and later on as a researcher at the University of Michigan. He worked at the Advanced Center for Behavioral Science Studies at Stanford University, where he worked from the late 1970's until his death.where he worked from the late 70's until his death.

Among his main contributions is having laid the foundations for the understanding of psychological phenomena that occur in the market context. For example, the decisions and reactions of consumers to some market strategies such as offers, discounts or the use of credit cards. For the same reason, his contributions were relevant not only for cognitive psychology but also for economics..

Main theoretical contributions

For a long time, Amos Tversky worked hand in hand with another Israeli psychologist and later Nobel Prize winner in economics, Daniel Kahneman. During the 1970s and early 1980s, they developed theories on judgment under uncertainty; decision making under risky situations, and rational choice.

According to Tversky, when people make decisions, we are active in the exercise of rationally understanding and justifying what we have chosen (reason-based choice theory). In turn, choices are constructed in the very process of solving complex problems.

This means that the justification of a choice, and the preference for it, do not occur before the problem-solving process, but are generated while the process itself is taking place, especially the need to make trade-offs between values and goals for each decision..

Cognitive biases

Together with Kahneman, Tversky explained how "cognitive illusions" or biases in human judgment occur. The latter has important implications for further studies on reasoning in psychology, economics, business, philosophy and medicine.

From different studies, both psychologists suggest that people tend to make decisions without taking probabilities into account, i.e., by means of intuitive rules that often lead to systematic cognitive biases.

For example, the belief that the higher the price, the better the quality of a product. In fact, as part of his studies, Tversky observed that people did indeed report a greater taste for a product. people reported a greater liking for the product when its brand had a high price tagcompared to another product whose price was low. This bias was called the "price-quality perception bias".

On the other hand, Tversky did important work on decision making under uncertainty, and observed that often the limited understanding of the laws of chance is erroneously transferred to the understanding of other processes marked by uncertainty.

From there, Tversky, together with Kahneman, developed the Prospect Theory, which had a very important impact on financial economics, since it deals with decision making in relation to variables such as time, uncertainty and alternatives.

Awards and distinctions

For his contributions to cognitive psychology, Amos Tversky was awarded several prizes and awards. For example, in 1980 he was elected a member of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences.and later, in 1985, he was a research associate of the National Academy of Sciences.

In addition, he won the APA Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award in 1982, and was recognized as an honorary doctor of the universities of Chicago, Tale, Gothenburg and the State University of New York at Buffalo.