Works
- On the Psychology of Prediction (with Daniel Kahneman), Psychological Review, 1973
- Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, Science, 1974
- Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk, Econometrica, 1979
- Intuitive Prediction: Biases and Corrective Procedures (with Daniel Kahneman), TIMS Studies in the Management Sciences, 1979
- The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice, Science, 1981
- Loss Aversion in Riskless Choice: A Reference-Dependent Model, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1991
In Tactics of Organizational Politics
Ideas
Loss aversion and reference dependence. People judge outcomes as gains or losses relative to a reference point, usually the current position, and losses weigh more than gains of the same size; the 1979 paper puts it as losses looming larger than gains. Because the reference point can be moved by how a choice is described, the same option can be made to look like a gain or a loss. Caveat: The often quoted figure that losses count about twice as much as gains comes from later estimates, notably a median coefficient of 2.25 in Tversky and Kahneman's 1992 paper, and is not a constant. Gal and Rucker (Journal of Consumer Psychology, 2018) argue that the evidence for a general loss-gain asymmetry is weaker than usually assumed; reference dependence itself is less disputed.
Loss aversion in riskless choice. The 1991 paper extends loss aversion from gambles to ordinary choices between goods: preferences depend on a reference point, and losses and disadvantages have greater impact than gains and advantages. This helps explain why people are reluctant to give up what they already have.
Framing effects. Equivalent descriptions of the same choice produce predictable reversals of preference: in the best-known example, a public health program described in terms of lives saved draws risk-averse choices, and the same program described in terms of lives lost draws risk-seeking ones. The frame a decision-maker adopts is controlled partly by how the problem is put to them.
Availability and anchoring. People judge likelihood with a few mental shortcuts that are usually useful and sometimes badly wrong. Availability means judging how frequent or probable something is by how easily instances come to mind; anchoring means estimating by adjusting from a starting value, and the adjustment is usually too small.
What it explains
Tversky's work with Kahneman explains why people inside organizations defend what they hold more fiercely than they pursue what they might gain, and why the description of a proposal can change the decision. It also shows how vivid examples and opening numbers steer judgment.
Tactics that draw on Amos Tversky (27)
- Appeal to Company History
- Calibration Doubt Planting
- Context Stripping
- Cost Center Labeling
- Early Adopter Trap
- Engineered Failure
- Ethical Fade
- Exception Anxiety
- Flight Risk Label
- Future Obsolescence Threat
- Ghost Deliverable
- High Anchor and Retreat
- Identity Shield
- Inflated Cost of Delay
- Pipeline Poisoning
- Poisoned Briefing
- Poisoning the Well
- Radical Flank Effect
- Reckless Versus Paralyzed Frame
- Relocation With Known Attrition
- Sabotage by Praise
- Selective Flexibility
- Severance Hostage
- Showcase Pilot
- Story-Led Case
- Success Paradox
- Vivid Risk Case
In Thinking Tools
Known for
With Daniel Kahneman he showed that people predict by representativeness, how well a case resembles a category, and so neglect base rates. Their 1979 paper distinguished singular information about the case at hand from distributional information about similar cases, and proposed correcting forecasts by starting from the distribution, the idea later named the outside view.