- Person
- Amos Tversky
- Lived
- 1937–1996
- Field
- Cognitive psychology
- From
- Israeli
The story
Amos Tversky, an Israeli psychologist who had fought as a paratrooper before becoming one of the founders of the science of judgment and decision-making, spent much of his career with Daniel Kahneman showing that people’s choices depend on how options are described. In a 1981 article in Science they called this the framing of decisions: the same problem, worded differently, can produce predictable reversals of preference. That paper demonstrated reversals in choices about money, both hypothetical and real, and in questions about the loss of human lives. The next step was to test the idea on a real medical decision.
Tversky wanted to know whether framing affected real medical decisions. Working with the physicians Barbara McNeil, Stephen Pauker and Harold Sox, he presented data summarising the results of surgery and radiation therapy for lung cancer to three groups: 238 outpatients with various chronic illnesses, 491 graduate students and 424 physicians. Each person was asked to imagine having lung cancer and to choose a treatment.
The groups received exactly the same statistics, except that some saw the outcomes framed as the probability of living and others as the probability of dying, and some saw the treatments named while others did not. In all three groups, surgery became substantially more attractive when the outcomes were framed in terms of survival rather than death, when information was given as life expectancy rather than cumulative probabilities, and when the treatments were identified. Doctors were no more immune to the effect than patients.
The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in May 1982, concluded that awareness of these effects among physicians and patients could help reduce bias and improve the quality of medical decision-making. It became one of the classic demonstrations that the way risks are presented can shape life-and-death choices, for doctors as much as for patients.
Why it matters
The study helped doctors recognise that how they word risks changes patients’ choices, supporting more balanced, genuinely informed decisions about treatment.
About Amos Tversky
Israeli psychologist who, with Daniel Kahneman, mapped the predictable errors people make in judging risk, work now used in medicine, economics, public policy and safety design.
Sources
- On the elicitation of preferences for alternative therapies (N Engl J Med 1982;306:1259–62) PubMed
- The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice (Science 1981) PubMed
- Amos Tversky MacArthur Foundation
- Amos Tversky Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.