RESEARCH_FILE
Amos Tversky
Stanford University
Known for:Co-developer (with Daniel Kahneman) of heuristics-and-biases research and Prospect Theory; foundational to the cognitive science of gambling distortions
Key findings
- 1983
Tversky, Gilovich, and Vallone's 'hot hand' study demonstrated that the belief in winning streaks in basketball — streaks that statistical analysis revealed were random — shows how pattern-detection drives illusory control in sequential events directly relevant to gambling runs. The Hot Hand in Basketball: On the Misperception of Random Sequences ↗
- 1974
The heuristics-and-biases program documented in Science established the representativeness heuristic as the mechanism by which people misjudge probability in sequential random events — the theoretical foundation of the gambler's fallacy. Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases ↗