PERSON
Amos Tversky
The cognitive psychologist who mapped natural stupidity with the precision of a cartographer—whose partnership with Daniel Kahneman produced the heuristics-and-biases research program and, in prospect theory, the most influential account of human judgment under uncertainty ever written.
Tversky once quipped that his colleagues studied artificial intelligence while he studied natural stupidity. The line is perfect—it captures both his subject and his method, which was to treat cognitive error not as moral failure but as empirical data, catalogued with the same detachment a naturalist brings to the classification of species. He and
Daniel Kahneman spent two decades documenting the systematic departures of human judgment from the predictions of rational-choice theory, departures that are not random noise but structured features of the cognitive architecture—predictable, repeatable, and present with equal force in experts as in novices. Their
prospect theory, published in 1979, replaced expected utility theory as the dominant descriptive model of choice; their 1974 paper on the
availability heuristic and the
anchoring effect established that the mental shortcuts evolution furnished us with are reliable enough to sustain life on the savanna and systematically misleading when applied to modern conditions. The particular modern condition that vindicates his framework