Thomas D. Gilovich

Cornell University, Ithaca, New York Professor of Psychology. Research illuminates how and why people often misinterpret evidence from their firsthand experience, leading to faulty conclusions, erroneous beliefs, and disastrous courses of action. In How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life (1993)-named one of the five all-time best books on irrationality by The Washington Post-reveals how even the smartest, best educated among us often fail to think straight. Research on regret explains why people quickly recover from some consequential mistakes but succumb to lifelong regret over others. Work on memory elucidates why people feel nostalgic about the good old days; why they blame themselves for traumatic experiences not of their doing; and why Olympic bronze medalists are paradoxically happier than the silver medalists who outperformed them. Research on the spotlight effect and the illusion of transparency showed how individuals have difficulty moving beyond their own experience to understand another's perspective, and how that difficulty affects social life. Research on the hot hand in basketball has exposed faulty intuitions about randomness and sparked long-running debates in psychology, sports, and statistics. Other books include Why smart people make big money mistakes and how to correct them - Lessons from the new science of behavioral economics (1999 with Belsky, G.) and The psychology of intuitive judgment: Heuristic and biases (2002 with Griffin, D.W. and Kahneman, D.)