11 ideas from Amos Tversky, each explained in a minute and credited to the original work. Free on Savvy.
In experiments, most people refuse a coin flip unless they stand to win roughly double what they could lose. This asymmetry — loss aversion — quietly shapes everything from why we …
— Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky, Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk
Given a disease expected to kill 600 people, most chose a certain option over a gamble when it was framed as 'saves 200 lives' — but chose the gamble when the identical option was …
— Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman, The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice
Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman showed that people judge how common something is by how easily examples spring to mind, not by actual frequency. Vivid, widely reported events — a …
— Amos Tversky & Daniel Kahneman, Availability: A Heuristic for Judging Frequency and Probability
Ask people how long a project will take and they'll lowball it — even after admitting past projects like it ran long. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky named this the 'planning fall…
— Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky, Intuitive Prediction: Biases and Corrective Procedures
Told that Linda is a philosophy graduate outspoken about social justice, most people rated 'bank teller and active feminist' as more likely than 'bank teller' alone — even though a…
— Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman, Extensional versus Intuitive Reasoning: The Conjunction Fallacy in Probability Judgment
In a city with 85% green cabs and 15% blue cabs, a witness who identifies cab colors correctly 80% of the time says a hit-and-run cab was blue. Most people guess it probably was bl…
— Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, On prediction and judgment
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's 1979 prospect theory found that people weigh losses roughly twice as heavily as equivalent gains — losing £100 takes about £200 of gain to offset…
— Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk
Gamblers watched black come up again and again and grew certain red was 'due,' piling money onto red as the streak grew. Every spin was independent of the last, so the odds of red …
— Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman (naming); Monte Carlo Casino incident, 1913, Gambler's fallacy
Shown a description of 'Linda' as a bright, outspoken philosophy graduate concerned with social justice, most people asked to rank likely careers rate 'bank teller and active in th…
— Amos Tversky & Daniel Kahneman, Representativeness Heuristic
Tversky and Kahneman told people 600 lives were at risk from a disease and offered two identical programs, one phrased as lives saved and one as lives lost. When framed as '200 peo…
— Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman, The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice
In a classic experiment, people spun a rigged wheel that landed on either 10 or 65, then guessed what percentage of UN countries were African. Those who saw 65 guessed far higher t…
— Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases