- Description
- A crowd at a concert
- Source
- Leonhard Lenz · original page
- Licence
- CC0 Public domain
The directory of the researchers cited
Behind every bias, a research team. Here is who the people cited in the entries are.
In brief
- An overview: all the portraits, filterable by nationality, gender and profession, and sortable.
- One entry per person: career, contribution, the site entries that cite them, sources and links.
- Illustrations: no portrait is a photograph or a likeness.
On this page
- Dan Ariely
- Hal R. Arkes
- Solomon Asch
- Jonathan Baron
- Roy Baumeister
- Colin Camerer
- Donald T. Campbell
- John Darley
- Karl Duncker
- David Dunning
- Dov Eden
- Daniel Ellsberg
- Baruch Fischhoff
- Bent Flyvbjerg
- Gerd Gigerenzer
- Eliyahu Goldratt
- Charles Goodhart
- Douglas Hofstadter
- Irving Janis
- Edward E. Jones
- Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
- Daniel Kahneman
- Abraham Kaplan
- Ralph Katz
- Gary Klein
- Justin Kruger
- Ellen Langer
- Bibb Latané
- George Loewenstein
- Abraham S. Luchins
- Abraham Maslow
- Stanley Milgram
- Bennet B. Murdock
- Charlan Nemeth
- Michael Norton
- Matthew Rabin
- Max Ringelmann
- Ilana Ritov
- Lauren A. Rivera
- Everett Rogers
- Robert Rosenthal
- Lee Ross
- William Samuelson
- Muzafer Sherif
- Barry Staw
- Marilyn Strathern
- Cass Sunstein
- Henri Tajfel
- Philip Tetlock
- Richard Thaler
- Edward L. Thorndike
- Amos Tversky
- Abraham Wald
- Peter Wason
- Neil D. Weinstein
- Roberta Wohlstetter
- Robert Zajonc
- Richard Zeckhauser
The portraits are stylized avatars: they are sometimes inspired by a few traits of the person (hair color, glasses, beard), otherwise they are drawn at random. They never try to look like anyone.
Dan ArielyBehavioral economist
Hal R. ArkesPsychologist
Solomon AschPsychologist
Jonathan BaronPsychologist
Roy BaumeisterPsychologist
Colin CamererEconomist
Donald T. CampbellPsychologist
John DarleyPsychologist
Karl DunckerPsychologist
David DunningPsychologist
Dov EdenPsychologist
Daniel EllsbergEconomist
Baruch FischhoffPsychologist
Bent FlyvbjergResearcher
Gerd GigerenzerPsychologist
Eliyahu GoldrattPhysicist and consultant
Charles GoodhartEconomist
Douglas HofstadterCognitive scientist
Irving JanisPsychologist
Edward E. JonesPsychologist
Frederick P. Brooks Jr.Computer scientist
Daniel KahnemanPsychologist
Abraham KaplanPhilosopher
Ralph KatzManagement researcher
Gary KleinPsychologist
Justin KrugerPsychologist
Ellen LangerPsychologist
Bibb LatanéPsychologist
George LoewensteinEconomist
Abraham S. LuchinsPsychologist
Abraham MaslowPsychologist
Stanley MilgramPsychologist
Bennet B. MurdockPsychologist
Charlan NemethPsychologist
Michael NortonPsychologist
Matthew RabinEconomist
Max RingelmannAgricultural engineer
Ilana RitovPsychologist
Lauren A. RiveraSociologist
Everett RogersSociologist
Robert RosenthalPsychologist
Lee RossPsychologist
William SamuelsonEconomist
Muzafer SherifPsychologist
Barry StawPsychologist
Marilyn StrathernAnthropologist
Cass SunsteinJurist
Henri TajfelPsychologist
Philip TetlockPsychologist
Richard ThalerEconomist
Edward L. ThorndikePsychologist
Amos TverskyPsychologist
Abraham WaldStatistician
Peter WasonPsychologist
Neil D. WeinsteinPsychologist
Roberta WohlstetterHistorian
Robert ZajoncPsychologist
Richard ZeckhauserEconomist
Nobody matches these filters.
Dan Ariely#
- Dates
- born in 1967
- Nationality
- Israeli-American
- Role
- Psychologist and behavioral economist, Duke University
Dan Ariely, born in 1967, is an Israeli-American psychologist and behavioral economist, professor at Duke University (James B. Duke Professor). He grew up in Israel and earned doctorates in cognitive psychology (North Carolina) and in business administration (Duke). He popularized behavioral economics through “Predictably Irrational” (2008) and his experiments on anchoring and the IKEA effect. His work is controversial: a 2012 article he co-authored on honesty, based on insurance data, was retracted in 2021 for falsified data.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him for his experiments on anchoring, the IKEA effect and “predictably irrational” decisions.
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Hal R. Arkes#
- Dates
- date of birth not published
- Nationality
- American
- Role
- Psychologist, decision-making specialist
Hal R. Arkes is professor emeritus of psychology at Ohio State University, a specialist in judgment and decision-making, notably medical and economic. With Catherine Blumer, he published in 1985 the reference study on the sunk cost effect: we pursue an undertaking because we have already invested in it, out of a wish not to appear wasteful. He also worked on hindsight bias.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him for the sunk cost effect and its illustrations.
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Solomon Asch#
- Dates
- September 14, 1907 – February 20, 1996
- Nationality
- American (born in Poland)
- Role
- Social psychologist
Solomon Asch (1907–1996), born in Warsaw, emigrated to the United States in 1920. He earned his doctorate at Columbia in 1932, influenced by Gestalt psychology and Max Wertheimer. Among other places, he taught at Brooklyn College, Swarthmore College, Rutgers and then the University of Pennsylvania. He studied impression formation (1946) and then, in the 1950s, carried out his experiments on conformity. He supervised Stanley Milgram’s thesis at Harvard.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him for the line-judgment conformity experiments: an individual contradicts his own perceptual judgment under the pressure of a unanimous group.
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Jonathan Baron#
- Dates
- date of birth not published
- Nationality
- American
- Role
- Psychologist, University of Pennsylvania, judgment and decision-making
Jonathan Baron is an American psychologist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in judgment and decision-making. He is the author of the textbook “Thinking and Deciding” and has worked on normative thinking, morality and protected values. He has studied the gap between what people do and what they should do to achieve their goals. With Ilana Ritov, he published studies in the 1990s on omission bias and the status quo bias.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him, with Ritov, for the studies on omission bias, the preference for harm caused by inaction over harm caused by action.
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Roy Baumeister#
- Dates
- born in 1953
- Nationality
- American
- Role
- Social psychologist
Roy Baumeister, born in Cleveland in 1953, is an American social psychologist educated at Princeton and Duke. He taught at Case Western Reserve (1979–2003), Florida State University and then the University of Queensland. He has worked on self-control, the need to belong, sexuality and free will, and published Willpower (2011). He popularized ego depletion, whose effect the 2016 multi-lab replication did not find; he disputes its methodology.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him for ego depletion, an example of a famous result weakened by the replication crisis.
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Colin Camerer#
- Dates
- born in 1959
- Nationality
- American
- Role
- Behavioral economist, California Institute of Technology (Caltech)
Colin Camerer, born in 1959, is an American behavioral economist and professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He is one of the leading figures of behavioral game theory and neuroeconomics, which studies the brain bases of decision-making. He co-edited “Advances in Behavioral Economics” and published “Behavioral Game Theory” (2003). His research also deals with financial markets and judgment biases.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him among the behavioral economists who have documented decision biases, notably in markets and strategic games.
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Donald T. Campbell#
- Dates
- 1916 – 1996
- Nationality
- American
- Role
- Social psychologist and methodologist
Donald T. Campbell (1916–1996) was an American social psychologist and methodologist, known for his work on social science methodology. He co-developed the multitrait-multimethod matrix (with Donald Fiske) and the thinking on quasi-experiments (with Julian Stanley), then proposed a selectionist theory of creativity and evolutionary epistemology. A 2002 survey ranks him 33rd most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Why they are cited here: The site cites his “Campbell’s law”: the more a quantitative indicator is used for decision-making, the more it is subject to corruption pressures and the more it distorts the process it was meant to measure.
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John Darley#
- Dates
- born in 1938
- Nationality
- American
- Role
- Social psychologist, Princeton University
John Darley (1938–2018), an American social psychologist born in Minneapolis, studied at Swarthmore College (1960) and Harvard (doctorate 1965). He taught at Princeton University from 1968 and chaired its psychology department. He was president of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology (1989) and of the American Psychological Society (2002). With Bibb Latané, he studied the bystander effect, and later worked on moral psychology and justice.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him for the bystander effect and the diffusion of responsibility, studied with Latané after the Kitty Genovese case.
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Karl Duncker#
- Dates
- 1903 – 1940
- Nationality
- German
- Role
- Gestalt psychologist, author of On problem-solving (1945)
Karl Duncker (1903–1940) was a German psychologist of the Gestalt school, a student of Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka in Berlin. Driven out of Germany by Nazism in 1935, he worked in Cambridge and then in the United States, notably at Swarthmore College with Köhler. He described functional fixedness and devised the candle problem. He died by suicide in 1940, at the age of 37, after a depression under medical care.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him for functional fixedness: the habitual use of an object prevents us from considering another, hence the candle problem.
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David Dunning#
- Dates
- born in 1960
- Nationality
- American
- Role
- Social psychologist, University of Michigan
David Dunning is an American social psychologist with a Stanford doctorate who taught at Cornell University before joining the University of Michigan. His research deals with self-assessment, self-knowledge and how people judge their own abilities. He is best known for the 1999 article “Unskilled and Unaware of It,” written with Justin Kruger, which gave its name to the Dunning-Kruger effect. This work received an Ig Nobel Prize in psychology in 2000 and the Grawemeyer Award in Psychology in 2023.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him as co-author of the 1999 study showing that low-skilled people overestimate their performance and poorly recognize their incompetence.
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Dov Eden#
- Dates
- date of birth not published
- Nationality
- Israeli
- Role
- Organizational psychologist, Tel Aviv University, specialist in the Pygmalion effect in business
Dov Eden is professor emeritus of corporate leadership at the Coller School of Management at Tel Aviv University, an organizational psychologist. He transposed the Pygmalion effect from the school setting to the workplace, with field experiments notably in the Israeli army, and developed the “Pygmalion” training for managers. He is a member of several learned societies (SIOP, Academy of Management, APA, APS) and received the SIOP Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award in 2018.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him for the demonstration of the Pygmalion effect in business: positive expectations from superiors improve team performance.
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Daniel Ellsberg#
- Dates
- April 7, 1931 – June 16, 2023
- Nationality
- American
- Role
- Analyst and economist, author of the Ellsberg paradox
Daniel Ellsberg (1931–2023) was an American military analyst and economist with a Harvard doctorate. In his 1961 article on risk, ambiguity and the Savage axioms, he showed that people prefer bets with known probabilities to bets with unknown probabilities, which contradicts expected utility theory. An analyst at the Pentagon and then at the RAND Corporation, he made the Pentagon Papers public in 1971, becoming a major figure of whistleblowing.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him for the Ellsberg paradox and ambiguity aversion.
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Baruch Fischhoff#
- Dates
- born in 1946
- Nationality
- American
- Role
- Psychologist, specialist in decision-making and risk perception, Carnegie Mellon University
Baruch Fischhoff, born in Detroit in 1946, studied at Wayne State University and then at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he worked with Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. He is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University (Howard Heinz University Professor) in the Department of Engineering and Public Policy. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine and has chaired the Society for Judgment and Decision Making. His work deals with risk perception, science communication and decision competence.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him for his 1975 article on hindsight bias (“Hindsight ≠ foresight”), which established the effect of knowing the outcome on judgment.
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Bent Flyvbjerg#
- Dates
- date of birth not published
- Nationality
- Danish
- Role
- Megaproject researcher, University of Oxford
Bent Flyvbjerg is a Danish economic geographer and professor at the IT University of Copenhagen after teaching at the University of Oxford for a long time. He is a specialist in megaprojects, whose systematic cost and schedule overruns he documents. He advocates reference class forecasting to correct planning optimism, and published How Big Things Get Done (2023) with Dan Gardner.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him for the cost and schedule overruns of megaprojects and for reference class forecasting.
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Gerd Gigerenzer#
- Dates
- born September 3, 1947
- Nationality
- German
- Role
- Psychologist, director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, specialist in risk perception
Gerd Gigerenzer, born in 1947 in Wallersdorf, is a German psychologist with a doctorate from the University of Munich (1977). He taught in Chicago before directing the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, of which he is now director emeritus. He heads the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the University of Potsdam. He defends the ecological rationality of simple heuristics and the presentation of probabilities as natural frequencies.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him as a counterpoint to the approach of Kahneman and Tversky: heuristics are not only biases, and understanding risks depends on how they are presented.
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Eliyahu Goldratt#
- Dates
- March 31, 1947 – June 11, 2011
- Nationality
- Israeli
- Role
- Physicist and management consultant, author of The Goal and creator of the theory of constraints
Eliyahu Goldratt (1947–2011) was an Israeli physicist and consultant, born in Mandatory Palestine. A graduate of Tel Aviv University, he earned a doctorate at Bar-Ilan University. He created the theory of constraints (TOC) and associated methods such as Drum-Buffer-Rope and critical chain. His management novel The Goal (1984) has sold more than five million copies. He died of lung cancer on June 11, 2011.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him for the theory of constraints and the lesson of The Goal: a poorly chosen local measure distorts behavior and degrades overall performance.
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Charles Goodhart#
- Dates
- born in 1936
- Nationality
- British
- Role
- Economist, London School of Economics, former adviser to the Bank of England
Charles Goodhart, born in London in 1936, is a British economist educated at Trinity College (Cambridge) and Harvard (PhD 1963). He advised the Bank of England from 1969 to 1985 and sat on its Monetary Policy Committee (1997–2000). A professor at the London School of Economics, where he co-founded the Financial Markets Group with Mervyn King, he has been professor emeritus there since 2002. He is known for the law that bears his name, formulated in 1975 about monetary targeting.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him for Goodhart’s law: a measure that becomes a target ceases to be a good measure.
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Douglas Hofstadter#
- Dates
- born February 15, 1945
- Nationality
- American
- Role
- Cognitive scientist, author of Gödel, Escher, Bach
Douglas Hofstadter, born on February 15, 1945, is an American cognitive scientist and professor at Indiana University. He is the author of Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979), Pulitzer Prize 1980, on self-reference, intelligence and consciousness. He later wrote about analogy as the engine of thought, notably in Surfaces and Essences (with Emmanuel Sander).
Why they are cited here: The site cites him for Hofstadter’s law: a task always takes longer than expected, even when you take this law into account.
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Irving Janis#
- Dates
- May 26, 1918 – November 15, 1990
- Nationality
- American
- Role
- Psychologist, Yale University, author of Victims of Groupthink (1972)
Irving Janis (1918–1990), born in Buffalo, studied at the University of Chicago and then at Columbia (PhD 1950). He was a professor at Yale for nearly forty years (1947–1985), then professor emeritus at Berkeley. He worked with Carl Hovland on persuasion and the sleeper effect. In Victims of Groupthink (1972), he analyzes fiascos of American policy such as the Bay of Pigs. He died of lung cancer.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him for groupthink: the pursuit of cohesion stifles critical thinking and leads to poor collective decisions.
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Edward E. Jones#
- Dates
- 1926 – 1993
- Nationality
- American
- Role
- Social psychologist, attribution theorist
Edward E. Jones (1926–1993), born in Buffalo, was an American social psychologist with a Harvard doctorate (1953) under Jerome Bruner. He taught at Duke from 1953 to 1977, then at Princeton. With Keith Davis, he formulated correspondent inference theory. He studied ingratiation and self-presentation, as well as the actor-observer asymmetry in attribution. He received the APA Award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution in 1977.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him for attribution: correspondent inference and the tendency to attribute other people’s behavior to their dispositions rather than to the situation.
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Frederick P. Brooks Jr.#
- Dates
- April 19, 1931 – November 17, 2022
- Nationality
- American
- Role
- Computer scientist, author of The Mythical Man-Month
Frederick P. Brooks Jr. (1931–2022) was an American computer architect and software engineer. He led the development of the IBM System/360 family and its OS/360 system, then founded the computer science department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. From this experience he drew The Mythical Man-Month (1975), which states in particular that adding staff to a late project makes it later still.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him for Brooks’s law and the chronic delays of software projects.
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Daniel Kahneman#
- Dates
- March 5, 1934 – March 27, 2024
- Career path
- Tel Aviv → Nunningen (Switzerland)
- Nationality
- Israeli-American
- Role
- Psychologist, 2002 Nobel laureate in economics
Daniel Kahneman (1934–2024) was an Israeli-American psychologist, born in Tel Aviv and educated at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and then at Berkeley, where he earned his doctorate in 1961. He went on to teach in Jerusalem, at Berkeley and at Princeton. With Amos Tversky, he founded the research program on judgment heuristics and biases and developed prospect theory. He received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 and published “Thinking, Fast and Slow” in 2011.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him as the main founder of the modern study of cognitive biases, notably with Tversky on heuristics, anchoring and loss aversion.
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- The contrast effect
- Negativity bias
- The pre-mortem
- Reference class forecasting
- The endowment effect
- Loss aversion
- The Planning Fallacy
- Anchoring
- Availability heuristic
- The framing effect
- The representativeness heuristic
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Abraham Kaplan#
- Dates
- 1918 – 1993
- Nationality
- American
- Role
- Philosopher of science
Abraham Kaplan (1918–1993) was an American philosopher, known as the first to have systematically examined the behavioral sciences in The Conduct of Inquiry (1964). His thinking was influenced by the pragmatists Peirce, James and Dewey. In this book, he formulates the “law of the instrument”: give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him for the “law of the instrument,” a cousin of Maslow’s hammer saying.
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Ralph Katz#
- Dates
- date of birth not published
- Nationality
- American
- Role
- Innovation management researcher, co-author with Thomas Allen of the 1982 study on the NIH syndrome
Ralph Katz is an American researcher in innovation and organizational management, long affiliated with the MIT Sloan School of Management and later with Northeastern University. With Thomas J. Allen, he studied communication within research and development teams. Their 1982 study, published in R&D Management, covers 50 R&D project groups. It shows that performance declines after about five years of collaboration, as the groups become more closed to outside sources of information. Open-access biographical sources are scarce.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him for the 1982 study on the “not invented here” (NIH) syndrome, illustrating the rejection of ideas that come from outside.
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Gary Klein#
- Dates
- date of birth not published
- Nationality
- American
- Role
- Psychologist, specialist in decision-making in real-world situations
Gary Klein is an American psychologist, a pioneer of naturalistic decision-making. By studying experts such as firefighters in real situations, he showed that laboratory models poorly describe decision-making under time pressure and uncertainty. His recognition-primed decision (RPD) model has influenced the training of US Army and Marine officers. He is also known for the pre-mortem technique.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him for the pre-mortem, a method that consists of imagining a project’s failure in order to spot its causes in advance.
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Justin Kruger#
- Dates
- date of birth not published
- Nationality
- American
- Role
- Social psychologist, former professor at NYU Stern
Justin Kruger is an American social psychologist with a bachelor’s degree from Santa Clara University (1993) and a doctorate from Cornell University (1999). He later became a professor of marketing at the NYU Stern School of Business. He has worked on self-assessment, social comparison and judgments about oneself. His 1999 article with David Dunning is the origin of the Dunning-Kruger effect, which was awarded the Grawemeyer Award in Psychology in 2023.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him as co-author, with Dunning, of the 1999 study on the overestimation of their abilities by the lowest performers.
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Ellen Langer#
- Dates
- born March 25, 1947
- Nationality
- American
- Role
- Psychologist, Harvard University
Ellen Langer, born on March 25, 1947, is an American psychologist and professor at Harvard, where in 1981 she was the first woman to be granted tenure in psychology. Nicknamed the “mother of mindfulness,” she studies the illusion of control, decision-making, aging and mindful attention. Her books include Counterclockwise (2009) and The Mindful Body (2023).
Why they are cited here: The site cites her for the illusion of control: we overestimate the influence we have on events that are a matter of chance.
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Bibb Latané#
- Dates
- born in 1937
- Nationality
- American
- Role
- Social psychologist
Bibb Latané, born on July 19, 1937, is an American social psychologist. A Yale graduate (1958) with a doctorate from the University of Minnesota (1963) under Stanley Schachter, he taught at Columbia, Ohio State, Florida Atlantic University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He developed social impact theory and studied the bystander effect with John Darley. He twice received the AAAS Prize for Behavioral Science Research (1968 and 1980).
Why they are cited here: The site cites him for the bystander effect with Darley and for social loafing, which he studied following Ringelmann.
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George Loewenstein#
- Dates
- date of birth not published
- Nationality
- American
- Role
- Behavioral economist, Carnegie Mellon University
George Loewenstein is an American behavioral economist and professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University (Herbert A. Simon University Professor). He is one of the founders of behavioral economics, with work on intertemporal choice, visceral emotions, the hot-cold empathy gap and curiosity. He co-edited “Choice over Time” and “Advances in Behavioral Economics” with Colin Camerer. He is also recognized for his research on how emotions influence decision-making.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him for the hot-cold empathy gap and the role of emotional and visceral states in decisions.
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Abraham S. Luchins#
- Dates
- 1914 – 2005
- Nationality
- American
- Role
- Psychologist
Abraham S. Luchins (1914–2005) was an American psychologist in the Gestalt tradition, born in Brooklyn, and a pioneer of group psychotherapy. His water jar problem experiments (1942) showed that a repeated solving method becomes a mental habit and prevents seeing a simpler solution. He also studied the effect of the order in which information is presented on judgments about a person.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him for the Einstellung effect (fixation on a known method) and for the primacy effect in impression formation.
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Abraham Maslow#
- Dates
- April 1, 1908 – June 8, 1970
- Nationality
- American
- Role
- Psychologist
Abraham Maslow (1908–1970) was an American psychologist, a founding figure of humanistic psychology and a professor at Brandeis University. In “A Theory of Human Motivation” (1943) he proposed the hierarchy of needs, from survival to self-actualization. In The Psychology of Science (1966), he writes that if the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him for the hammer saying (the single-tool bias) and for the pyramid of needs.
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Stanley Milgram#
- Dates
- August 15, 1933 – December 20, 1984
- Nationality
- American
- Role
- Social psychologist, Yale University and then City University of New York
Stanley Milgram (1933–1984), born in the Bronx to Jewish immigrant parents, studied at Queens College and then at Harvard (PhD 1960, under Solomon Asch). He worked mainly at Yale and then at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His obedience experiments (1960–1963) sparked a lasting ethical debate. He is also the author of the small-world experiment (1967), the lost-letter experiment and the cyranoids.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him for the experiment on obedience to authority, in which a majority of participants delivered shocks up to the maximum.
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Bennet B. Murdock#
- Dates
- date of birth not published
- Nationality
- American
- Role
- Memory psychologist
Bennet B. Murdock Jr. (1925–2022) was an American psychologist specializing in human memory, known for his pioneering research on short-term memory. His 1962 article on serial position in the free recall of word lists is a classic: it shows that the first and last items of a list are the best recalled. He later developed mathematical models of memory.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him for the serial position curve, the basis of the primacy and recency effects.
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Charlan Nemeth#
- Dates
- date of birth not published
- Nationality
- American
- Role
- Social psychologist, specialist in dissent, University of California, Berkeley
Charlan Nemeth is an American social psychologist, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley from 1977 until her retirement in 2015. Her research on juries, companies and crews shows that dissent improves group thinking, whether or not the dissenter is right. She is the author of In Defense of Troublemakers: The Power of Dissent in Life and Business (Basic Books, 2018).
Why they are cited here: The site cites her for the benefits of minority dissent and the devil’s advocate against groupthink.
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Michael Norton#
- Dates
- date of birth not published
- Nationality
- American
- Role
- Psychologist and professor of business administration, Harvard Business School
Michael Norton is an American psychologist and professor at Harvard Business School, where he is the Harold M. Brierley Professor. A graduate of Williams College, he earned his doctorate at Princeton (2002) and did a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT. His research deals with the influence of social factors on behavior, money and happiness, notably the finding that spending on experiences makes people happier than buying things. He is best known for the IKEA effect, which he studied with Daniel Mochon and Dan Ariely.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him as co-author of the study on the IKEA effect: we value more what we have helped build ourselves.
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Matthew Rabin#
- Dates
- date of birth not published
- Nationality
- American
- Role
- Behavioral economist, Harvard University
Matthew Rabin, born in 1963, is an American economist who holds the Pershing Square Chair in Behavioral Economics at Harvard (Department of Economics and Harvard Business School). He uses formal economic theory to build psychological factors and systematic biases into models: fairness and social preferences, present bias, loss aversion, reference dependence, errors in statistical reasoning. His 2000 calibration theorem on risk aversion is a reference in the field.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him for his formal work on loss aversion and errors of statistical inference.
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Max Ringelmann#
- Dates
- 1861 – 1931
- Nationality
- French
- Role
- Agricultural engineer, professor at the Institut national agronomique
Maximilien Ringelmann (1861–1931) was a French agricultural engineer and professor at the Institut national agronomique in Paris. He headed the agricultural machinery testing station from 1888 and devised the Ringelmann scale for measuring smoke opacity. He also wrote a history of rural engineering. His measurements of the pulling effort of groups of men or animals, published in 1913, showed that individual output decreases as the group grows: the Ringelmann effect.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him for the Ringelmann effect, the first observation of social loafing, that is, the drop in individual effort in a group.
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Ilana Ritov#
- Dates
- date of birth not published
- Nationality
- Israeli
- Role
- Psychologist, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, judgment and decision-making
Ilana Ritov is a professor at the School of Education of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she is also scientific director of the I-Core center for the empirical study of decision-making and the law, and a member of the Center for the Study of Rationality. Her research in the psychology of judgment and decision-making deals with choice in a social context, altruism, social comparison and the difference between abstract choices and identified victims. In the 1990s she worked with Jonathan Baron on omission bias, and with Daniel Kahneman on the valuation of public goods.
Why they are cited here: The site cites her, with Baron, for the studies on omission bias and the status quo bias.
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Lauren A. Rivera#
- Dates
- date of birth not published
- Nationality
- American
- Role
- Sociologist, specialist in hiring
Lauren A. Rivera is an American sociologist and management researcher, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management (Northwestern University) and holder of the Peter G. Peterson Chair in Corporate Ethics, with an associated appointment in sociology. Her research deals with hiring and evaluation practices in elite organizations. She is the author of Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs (2015).
Why they are cited here: The site cites her for her studies of hiring, where affinity with the evaluator weighs on choices.
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Everett Rogers#
- Dates
- 1931 – 2004
- Nationality
- American
- Role
- Communication sociologist, author of Diffusion of Innovations (1962)
Everett Rogers (1931–2004), an American communication sociologist, was born in Carroll (Iowa) and studied at Iowa State University. He taught at Ohio State, Michigan State, Stanford, the University of Southern California and then the University of New Mexico. He is the author of Diffusion of Innovations (1962, five editions through 2003), in which he formalizes how an innovation spreads through a social system and popularizes the notion of early adopters.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him for his theory of the diffusion of innovations, which sheds light on how ideas and practices, good or bad, spread within a group.
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Robert Rosenthal#
- Dates
- born in 1933
- Nationality
- American (born in Germany)
- Role
- Psychologist, Harvard and then University of California, Riverside, author of Pygmalion in the Classroom (1968)
Robert Rosenthal (1933–2024), an American psychologist born in Germany, taught at Harvard and then was a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of California, Riverside. He studied experimenter effects and self-fulfilling prophecies, and helped popularize meta-analysis in psychology. He is best known for the study of the Pygmalion effect in the classroom, carried out with Lenore Jacobson (Pygmalion in the Classroom, 1968).
Why they are cited here: The site cites him for the Pygmalion effect: the expectations of a teacher or a boss influence the performance of those they supervise.
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Lee Ross#
- Dates
- 1942 – 2021
- Nationality
- American
- Role
- Social psychologist, Stanford University
Lee Ross (1942–2021), born in Toronto, was a Canadian-American psychologist. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Toronto (1965) and his doctorate at Columbia (1969) under Stanley Schachter, then taught at Stanford. He described the fundamental attribution error (1977), naive realism, the false consensus effect and reactive devaluation. A member of the US National Academy of Sciences, he also applied psychology to negotiation and conflict, notably in the Middle East.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him for the fundamental attribution error and naive realism, which makes us believe we see the world as it is.
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William Samuelson#
- Dates
- date of birth not published
- Nationality
- American
- Role
- Economist and decision specialist, Boston University
William Samuelson is an American economist and professor at Boston University (Questrom School of Business), specializing in decision economics and auction theory. He is co-author of a widely used managerial economics textbook. His most cited work is the 1988 article “Status Quo Bias in Decision Making,” written with Richard Zeckhauser and published in the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty. Few detailed biographical details are available in open sources.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him as co-author, with Zeckhauser, of the 1988 study that named and experimentally demonstrated the status quo bias.
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Muzafer Sherif#
- Dates
- 1906 – 1988
- Nationality
- American (born in Turkey)
- Role
- Social psychologist, Robbers Cave experiments (1954)
Muzafer Sherif (1906–1988), born in Ödemiş (Turkey), studied in Istanbul, at Harvard and at Columbia, where he earned his doctorate in 1935 with a thesis on the social factors of perception. He settled in the United States and taught at Princeton, the University of Oklahoma and Penn State, among others. He studied norm formation with the autokinetic effect. He designed the Robbers Cave experiment (1954) and realistic conflict theory. He died in Fairbanks (Alaska).
Why they are cited here: The site cites him for Robbers Cave: competition between groups creates hostility, and common goals reduce it.
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Barry Staw#
- Dates
- date of birth not published
- Nationality
- American
- Role
- Organizational psychologist, University of California, Berkeley (Haas School of Business)
Barry M. Staw is a professor of leadership and communication (Lorraine T. Mitchell Professor) at the Haas School of Business of the University of California, Berkeley. With a doctorate from Northwestern, he has taught at Illinois, Northwestern, Iowa and UCLA. His research deals with escalation of commitment, the links between affect and performance at work, and organizational innovation. He received the Scholarly Contributions Award of the Academy of Management.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him as the researcher who formalized escalation of commitment (“Knee-deep in the big muddy,” 1976), the tendency to persist in a losing decision.
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Marilyn Strathern#
- Dates
- born in 1941
- Nationality
- British
- Role
- Social anthropologist, University of Cambridge
Marilyn Strathern, born on March 6, 1941, is a British social anthropologist. With a doctorate from Cambridge (1968), she worked on Melanesia, gender, kinship and reproductive technologies, notably in The Gender of the Gift (1988). She taught at Manchester and then held the William Wyse Chair of Social Anthropology at Cambridge (1993–2008). She headed Girton College (1998–2009) and is a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (2001).
Why they are cited here: The site cites her for the common formulation of Goodhart’s law (“when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”), given in her 1997 article on audit.
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Cass Sunstein#
- Dates
- born September 21, 1954
- Nationality
- American
- Role
- Legal scholar, Harvard University, co-author of “Nudge”
Cass Sunstein, born on September 21, 1954, is an American legal scholar and professor at Harvard University (Robert Walmsley University Professor). A specialist in constitutional and administrative law, he headed the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs from 2009 to 2012. He introduced the notion of choice architecture into public decision-making. He is co-author with Richard Thaler of “Nudge” (2008) and, later, of “Noise” with Daniel Kahneman and Olivier Sibony.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him as co-author of “Nudge,” a book that popularized the use of cognitive biases to steer choices in a benevolent way.
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Henri Tajfel#
- Dates
- June 22, 1919 – May 3, 1982
- Nationality
- British (born in Poland)
- Role
- Social psychologist, University of Bristol, social identity theory
Henri Tajfel (1919–1982), born in Włocławek (Poland), studied in France and served in the French army during the Second World War. A prisoner of war, he survived while his family disappeared in the Holocaust. After becoming British, he taught at Oxford and then, from 1967, at the University of Bristol. With John Turner, he developed social identity theory, based on his minimal group experiments.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him for minimal groups and social identity: an arbitrary categorization is enough to produce favoritism toward one’s own group.
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Philip Tetlock#
- Dates
- born in 1954
- Nationality
- American-Canadian
- Role
- Psychologist, University of Pennsylvania, specialist in expert judgment and forecasting
Philip Tetlock, born in Toronto in 1954, is a Canadian-American psychologist educated at the University of British Columbia and then at Yale (PhD 1979). He taught at Berkeley and Ohio State before joining the University of Pennsylvania in 2011. Author of Expert Political Judgment and Superforecasting, he showed that experts often forecast barely better than chance. In 2011 he co-founded the Good Judgment Project with Barbara Mellers.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him for his work on the reliability of expert judgment and the improvement of probabilistic forecasts.
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Richard Thaler#
- Dates
- born September 12, 1945
- Nationality
- American
- Role
- Economist, 2017 Nobel laureate in economics
Richard Thaler, born on September 12, 1945, is an American economist and professor at the Booth School of Business of the University of Chicago. He is one of the founders of behavioral economics, with work on the endowment effect, mental accounting and lack of self-control. He is co-author of “Nudge” (2008) with Cass Sunstein and author of “Misbehaving” (2015). He received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2017.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him for the endowment effect, mental accounting and the “nudge,” which brought cognitive biases into economics.
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Edward L. Thorndike#
- Dates
- August 31, 1874 – August 9, 1949
- Career path
- Williamsburg (Massachusetts) → Montrose (New York)
- Nationality
- American
- Role
- Psychologist, pioneer of the psychology of learning
Edward L. Thorndike (1874–1949) was an American psychologist, a pioneer of the psychology of learning. With a doctorate from Columbia University (1898), he taught at Teachers College for most of his career. His experiments with cats in “puzzle boxes” led him to formulate the law of effect, a forerunner of operant conditioning. He was president of the American Psychological Association in 1912 and was also interested in mental testing and education.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him for his 1920 article on the “constant error” in ratings, the first description of what is known as the halo effect.
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Amos Tversky#
- Dates
- March 16, 1937 – June 2, 1996
- Career path
- Haifa → Stanford (United States)
- Nationality
- Israeli
- Role
- Cognitive and mathematical psychologist
Amos Tversky (1937–1996) was an Israeli psychologist, born in Haifa, with a doctorate from the University of Michigan (1965). He taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and then, from 1978, at Stanford. A specialist in cognitive and mathematical psychology, he published with Daniel Kahneman the founding papers on judgment heuristics and on prospect theory. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1984 and died of cancer in 1996; the 2002 Nobel Prize awarded to Kahneman was explicitly linked to their collaboration.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him as co-author of the founding work on heuristics and biases (representativeness, availability, anchoring) and on decision framing.
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- The contrast effect
- Negativity bias
- Reference class forecasting
- Ambiguity aversion
- Loss aversion
- The Planning Fallacy
- Anchoring
- Availability heuristic
- The framing effect
- The representativeness heuristic
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Abraham Wald#
- Dates
- October 31, 1902 – December 13, 1950
- Nationality
- American (born in Cluj, Hungary)
- Role
- Mathematician and statistician, Statistical Research Group, Columbia University
Abraham Wald (1902–1950) was a mathematician and statistician born in Cluj (Kolozsvár), then in Hungary, with a doctorate from the University of Vienna (1931) under Karl Menger. Driven out of Austria by the Anschluss of 1938, he emigrated to the United States and joined Columbia University. There he founded sequential analysis and contributed to statistical decision theory. During the Second World War he worked at the Statistical Research Group; he died in a plane crash in India in 1950.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him for his reasoning about aircraft returning from missions: armor the areas with no hits, because planes hit there did not come back, a classic example of survivorship bias.
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Peter Wason#
- Dates
- April 22, 1924 – April 17, 2003
- Nationality
- British
- Role
- Cognitive psychologist, University College London, author of the “2-4-6” task and the selection task
Peter Wason (1924–2003), born in Bath, was a British cognitive psychologist who worked at University College London until the early 1980s. He was one of the pioneers of the psychology of reasoning. He devised the 2-4-6 task, the four-card selection task and the THOG problem. He is credited with the expression “confirmation bias.” Among others, he supervised Philip Johnson-Laird and Jonathan Evans.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him for confirmation bias, which he named and brought to light with the 2-4-6 and selection tasks.
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Neil D. Weinstein#
- Dates
- date of birth not published
- Nationality
- American
- Role
- Health psychologist
Neil D. Weinstein is an American health psychologist, for a long time a professor at Rutgers University. His 1980 article is one of the founding studies of “unrealistic optimism”: asked about their chances of experiencing various events, students judge themselves luckier than average for desirable events and less exposed for undesirable ones. He later studied the perception of health risks and the adoption of preventive behaviors.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him for unrealistic optimism (optimism bias) in the face of risks.
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Roberta Wohlstetter#
- Dates
- 1912 – 2007
- Nationality
- American
- Role
- Historian and intelligence analyst, author of “Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision”
Roberta Wohlstetter (1912–2007) was an American historian of military intelligence, educated at Vassar College and then at Columbia and Radcliffe. She worked at the RAND Corporation from 1948 to 1965. Her book “Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision” (1962), awarded the Bancroft Prize in 1963, analyzes why the warning signs of the Japanese attack were not interpreted. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1985.
Why they are cited here: The site cites her for her distinction between “signal” and “noise” in the analysis of Pearl Harbor, an illustration of interpretation errors and hindsight bias in intelligence.
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Robert Zajonc#
- Dates
- November 23, 1923 – December 3, 2008
- Nationality
- American (born in Poland)
- Role
- Social psychologist, University of Michigan and then Stanford
Robert Zajonc (1923–2008), born in Łódź (Poland), escaped a German labor camp during the war and joined the Resistance in France before emigrating to the United States. With a doctorate from the University of Michigan (1955), he taught there for nearly forty years, then at Stanford. He studied the mere exposure effect, social facilitation and the confluence model of family size. In a 1980 article, he argues for the relative independence of affect and cognition. He died at Stanford of pancreatic cancer.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him for the mere exposure effect: we like what we have already encountered more, without reinforcement.
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Richard Zeckhauser#
- Dates
- date of birth not published
- Nationality
- American
- Role
- Economist, Harvard Kennedy School
Richard Zeckhauser is an American economist, professor of political economy (Frank P. Ramsey Professor) at the Harvard Kennedy School. His work deals with decision analysis, the economics of risk and uncertainty, health and public policy. He has carried out many studies on how individuals and institutions decide under uncertainty. With William Samuelson, he published the 1988 reference article on the status quo bias.
Why they are cited here: The site cites him as co-author, with Samuelson, of the 1988 study on the status quo bias.
