Thomas Gilovich

Thomas Gilovich is an American psychologist who holds the Irene Blecker Rosenfeld Professorship of Psychology at Cornell University. He was born on January 16, 1954, studied at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and took his doctorate at Stanford University in 1981, where a lecture by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman turned his research toward judgment and decision making. His work sits at the meeting point of social psychology, decision research and behavioral economics, and he is best known for studying how people read the evidence of everyday experience and sometimes draw faulty conclusions from it. He has collaborated with Kahneman, Tversky, Richard Nisbett and Lee Ross, and his better known lines of research include the hot hand in basketball, the spotlight effect, the illusion of transparency, the clustering illusion, the bias blind spot, regret over action and inaction, and the finding that experiences tend to bring more lasting happiness than material purchases. He wrote the popular book How We Know What Isn't So and co-edited Heuristics and Biases. He is a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.