New Release Books by Amos Tversky

Life is fundamentally uncertain. We do not know whether it will rain, whether the market will go up or down, whether our unhealthy eating choices will have serious consequences, or whether terrorists will strike our city. To make matters worse, we also lack a tried and true procedure for evaluating the likelihood of such events. Yet we are required to make decisions great and small that depend on these events. In the absence of certainty or an objective procedure for estimating probabilities, we must rely on our own reasoning, which a great deal of research has shown to be less rational than we would like to believe. In Critical Thinking, Varda Liberman and Amos Tversky examine how we make judgments under uncertainty and explain how various biases can distort our consideration of evidence. Using everyday examples, they detail how to examine data and their implications with the goal of helping readers improve their intuitive reasoning and judgment. From the courtroom to the basketball court, cholesterol count to the existence of the supernatural, Liberman and Tversky explore the fundamental insights of probability, causal relationships, and making inferences from samples. They delve into the psychology of judgment, explaining why first impressions are often wrong and correct answers go against our intuitions. Originally written in Hebrew and published by the Open University in 1996, Critical Thinking is an essential guide for students and interested readers alike that teaches us to become more critical readers and consumers of information.

Some of the best and most influential papers by Amos Tversky, one of the most brilliant social science thinkers of the twentieth century. Amos Tversky (1937–1996) was a towering figure in the cognitive and decision sciences. His work was ingenious, exciting, and influential, spanning topics from intuition to statistics to behavioral economics. His long and extraordinarily productive collaboration with his friend and colleague Daniel Kahneman was the subject of Michael Lewis's best-selling book, The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds. The Essential Tversky offers a selection of Tversky's best, most influential and accessible papers, “classics” chosen to capture the essence of Tversky's thought. The impact of Tversky's work is far reaching and long-lasting. In 2002, Kahneman, who drew on their joint work in his much-praised 2013 book, Thinking, Fast and Slow (and who contributes an afterword to this collection), was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for work done with Tversky. In The Undoing Project, Lewis (who contributes a foreword to this collection) describes his discovery that Tversky and Kahneman's thinking laid the foundation for Moneyball, his own ode to number-crunching. The papers collected in The Essential Tversky cover topics that include cognitive and perceptual bias, misguided beliefs, inconsistent preferences, risky choice and loss aversion decisions, and psychological common sense. Together, they offer nonspecialist readers an introduction to one of the most brilliant social science thinkers of the twentieth century.

Amos Tversky (1937–1996), a towering figure in cognitive and mathematical psychology, devoted his professional life to the study of similarity, judgment, and decision making. He had a unique ability to master the technicalities of normative ideals and then to intuit and demonstrate experimentally their systematic violation due to the vagaries and consequences of human information processing. He created new areas of study and helped transform disciplines as varied as economics, law, medicine, political science, philosophy, and statistics. This book collects forty of Tversky's articles, selected by him in collaboration with the editor during the last months of Tversky's life. It is divided into three sections: Similarity, Judgment, and Preferences. The Preferences section is subdivided into Probabilistic Models of Choice, Choice under Risk and Uncertainty, and Contingent Preferences. Included are several articles written with his frequent collaborator, Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman.

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