Amos Tversky (1937–96)

Abstract

Amos Tversky was born in Haifa, Israel, on March 16, 1937. His father was a veterinarian, his mother a member of Israel’s Parliament, the Knesset. He fought in Israel’s 1956, 1967, and 1973 wars, and received its highest honor for bravery. He received his BA in psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in 1961. In 1965, he received his Ph.D from the University of Michigan’s mathematical psychology program. He worked there with Clyde Coombs (his doctoral advisor), Ward Edwards, and David Krantz, among others. He returned to Jerusalem as a faculty member in 1967, moving to Stanford in 1978. A year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences provided Tversky and Daniel Kahneman with concentrated time to develop their approach to judgment under uncertainty. Tversky died of melanoma, on June 6, 1996, in Stanford, California. At his death, he was Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, where he was also a Principal of its Center on Conflict and Negotiation. He held positions at Tel Aviv University, as Visiting Professor of Economics and Psychology and Permanent Fellow of the Sackler Institute of Advanced Studies. His wife, Barbara, is Professor of Psychology at Stanford, studying perception. He had three children, Oren, Tal, and Dona. He was known for his great energy, joy of life, and sense of humor. Tversky made fundamental contributions to the understanding of human thought processes, and the mathematical foundations of the behavioral sciences. His work was distinguished by elegant formal models, tested in simple, illustrative experiments. Throughout much of his career, he worked together with Daniel Kahneman, on studies of judgment and decision making under conditions of risk and uncertainty. On these topics and others, he also collaborated with other scholars from psychology, economics, political science,law, statistics, philosophy, and mathematics. These projects, and the personal interactions surrounding them, helped to integrate these disciplines, at a time of increasing specialization. Among his many honors were the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, a MacArthur Fellowship, and honorary doctorates at Yale, Chicago, Goteborg (Sweden), and New York at Buffalo. He was a member of the US National Academy of Sciences. It served as one venue for pursuing his life-long commitment to encouraging peace and understanding among diverse people.