Amos Tversky: Biography Of This Cognitive Psychologist
Amos Tversky (1937-1996) was a cognitive psychologist, with significant training in mathematics, who contributed much of the fundamental knowledge in cognitive sciences. Among other things, he studied cognitive biases and risk management, issues that were applied in an important way in other disciplines, such as economics or law.
In this article we will see a biography of Amos Tversky as 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. He is the son of veterinarian Yosef Tversky, and Genia, a female 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 psychologies of our time, Barbara Tversky with whom he also had two sons and a daughter.
From a young age, Tversky served in the Israeli army forces, initially as part of the elite paratrooper unit, and later as a captain serving during three wars.
In 1961, Amos Tversky obtained his undergraduate studies from Hebrew University, and later, in 1965, he completed a doctorate from the University of Michigan. At the same university, as well as at Tel Aviv, he worked as a professor and researcher in psychology and economics, and later He carried out different works at the Advanced Center for Studies in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University where he served 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 commercial context. For example, consumer decisions and reactions to some market strategies such as offers, discounts or the use of credit cards. For the same, 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. Over the course of the 1970s and early 1980s, they developed theories about judgment in situations of uncertainty; decision making under risk situations, and rational choice
According to Tversky, when people make decisions, we remain active in the exercise of rationally understanding and justifying what we have chosen (reason-based choice theory). In turn, elections are built in the same 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 occurs, especially faced with 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 of human judgment occur. The latter has an important impact on subsequent studies on reasoning, both in psychology, economics, business, philosophy and medicine.
Based on different studies, both psychologists suggest that people tend to make decisions without taking probabilities into account, that is, through 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 indeed people reported greater liking for the product when its brand had a high price ; compared to another product whose price was low. They called this bias the “perception bias between price and quality.”
On the other hand, Tversky carried out important work on decision-making under conditions of uncertainty, and observed that frequently, the limited understanding of the laws of chance is wrongly 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 in financial economics, since it addresses 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 various awards and recognitions. For example, in 1980 He was elected to the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences and later, in 1985, he was an associate researcher at the National Academy of Sciences.
On the other hand, he won the APA award for distinguished scientific contribution in 1982, and was recognized as an honorary doctor from the universities of Chicago, Tale, Gothenburg and the State University of New York at Buffalo.
