Textbook of Usability

1937 to 1996, Israel and USA · Mathematical psychologist; collaborator of Daniel Kahneman

Also known as: Amos Tversky

Amos Nathan Tversky trained as a mathematical psychologist and taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Stanford. His more than thirty-year collaboration with Daniel Kahneman, beginning in Jerusalem in 1969, produced the heuristics and biases programme that reshaped psychology, economics, and decision research.

Tversky's 1974 paper with Kahneman, Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, set out the original list of mental shortcuts (representativeness, availability, anchoring) and the systematic errors they produce. His 1981 paper The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice showed that simple changes in wording reverse preferences in ways that violate the assumptions of rational choice. Tversky died of melanoma at fifty-nine, and the 2002 Nobel was awarded to Kahneman alone with explicit acknowledgement that the prize-winning work was joint.