Thomas Gilovich
| Thomas Gilovich | |
|---|---|
.jpg) |
|
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Psychology |
| Institutions | Cornell University |
| Alma mater |
University of California, Santa Barbara Stanford University |
| Known for | Research in heuristics and cognitive biases |
| Influences | Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman, Lee Ross, Mark Lepper |
| Influenced | cognitive psychology, social psychology |
Thomas Dashiff Gilovich (born 1954) is the Irene Blecker Rosenfeld Professor of Psychology at Cornell University. He has conducted research in social psychology, decision making, behavioral economics, and has written popular books on these subjects. Gilovich has collaborated with Daniel Kahneman, Richard Nisbett, Lee Ross and Amos Tversky. His articles in peer-reviewed journals on subjects such as cognitive biases have been widely cited. In addition, Gilovich has been quoted in the media on subjects ranging from the effect of purchases on happiness to perception of judgment in social situations. Gilovich is a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.
Gilovich earned his B.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara and went to Stanford University originally wanting to be a lawyer. After taking psychology classes and hearing Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman give a lecture about judgment and decision making there, he decided he wanted to go into the field of psychology. He went on to earn his Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford in 1981.
Gilovich is best known for his research in heuristics and biases in the field of social psychology. He describes his research as dealing with "how people evaluate the evidence of their everyday experience to make judgments, form beliefs, and decide on courses of action, and how they sometimes misevaluate that evidence and make faulty judgments, form dubious beliefs, and embark on counterproductive courses of action." According to Google Scholar, he has an h-index of 57 for all his published academic papers, which is considered exceptional. In addition, he has written two textbooks, Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment (with Dale Griffin and Daniel Kahneman) and Social Psychology (with Serena Chen, Dacher Keltner and Robert Nisbett), both of which are used as textbooks in academic courses in psychology and social psychology throughout the USA. Summarizing the research in an interview when asked what the benefits are, he responded, "I think that field has an enormous amount to offer, because we make consequential decisions all the time, and they aren't always easy, we don't always do them well," and that his research program is about trying to figure out how the mind words so we "understand why some decisions are easy, and we tend to do certain things very well, and why some decisions are difficult, and we tend to do them poorly." He further explained that his hope is that he and his colleagues are "providing lots of information to help us understand those difficult decisions, and give people the tools so that they can make better decisions so they less often in life are going down paths that don't serve them well."
...
Wikipedia