Eldar Shafir

• Princeton University

In the present study, we delved into the personal and societal impacts of poverty in the low-income Ultraorthodox Jewish communities of Williamsburg, Borough Park, Lakewood, and Passaic along the East Coast of the United States. Based on 44 interviews with individuals who live in poverty, three main themes were found. The first revolved around issu...

Importance A goal of health care is to reduce symptoms and improve health status, whereas continuing dubious treatments can contribute to complacency, discourage the search for alternatives, and lead to shortfalls in care. Objective To test a potential bias in intuitive reasoning following a marginal improvement in symptoms after a dubious treatme...

Poverty is a powerful context that affects billions of consumers around the world. An appreciation of this context and the ways it shapes thoughts, feelings, and behaviors is essential to understanding the vulnerabilities of low-SES consumers. We synthesize research on consumption in poverty by reviewing some of the social vulnerabilities and frequ...

In a ‘very close replication’ study using the same attributes as the original, Chandrashekar et al. (2021) report a failure to replicate some choose–reject problems documented in Shafir (1993). We find that several of the original attributes have changed their valence three decades later, and we compose new versions with updated attributes that ful...

Background Diagnostic reasoning requires clinicians to think through complex uncertainties. We tested the possibility of a bias toward an available single diagnosis in uncertain cases. Design We developed 5 different surveys providing a succinct description of a hypothetical individual patient scenaric. Each scenario was formulated in 2 versions r...

O’Donnell et al. (“ODAL”) (1) claim to audit the “scarcity literature” through a series of replications. Although we applaud the audit’s goals, we found serious issues that invalidate its conclusions. Notably, the paper fails as an audit of the scarcity literature. (1) It includes studies that are not about resource scarcity and even studies that a...

During Ramadan, people of Muslim faith fast by not eating or drinking between sunrise and sunset. This is likely to have physiological and psychological consequences for fasters, and societal and economic impacts on the wider population. We investigate whether, during this voluntary and temporally limited fast, reminders of food can impair the fast...

Across six studies (total N = 3,549), we find that participants who were randomly assigned to choose from larger assortments thought their choices were more self-expressive, an effect that emerged regardless of whether larger sets actually enabled participants to better satisfy their preferences. Studies examining the moderating role of choice doma...

Objectives Economic constraints are a common explanation of why patients with low socioeconomic status tend to experience less access to medical care. We tested whether the decreased care extends to medical assistance in dying in a healthcare system with no direct economic constraints. Design Population-based case–control study of adults who died....

Cash transfer programs aim to lessen the harmful effects of economic deprivation by giving cash or its equivalent directly to people in need. In this article, we combine insights from three areas of behavioral science-economics, child development, and cognitive psychology (including behavioral economics and the psychology of poverty)—to shed light...

We present a series of studies documenting what we call a ‘thick skin bias’ in people's perceptions of those living in poverty. Across a wide range of life events, from major to minor, people of lower socioeconomic status (SES) are systematically perceived as being less harmed by negative experiences than higher-SES people, even when this is patent...

Impressions of competence from faces predict important real-world outcomes, including electoral success and CEO selection. Presumed competence is associated with social status. Here, we show that subtle economic status cues in clothes affect perceived competence from faces. In nine studies, people rated the competence of faces presented in frontal...

Shah et al. (2012) examined how different forms of scarcity affect attention and borrowing behavior. Results from a series of lab experiments suggested that (1) various forms of scarcity have similar effects on cognition and behavior, (2) scarcity leads to attentional shifts and greater focus (3) scarcity can lead people to over-borrow, and (4) sca...

The most effective behavioral policies are often also the most contentious. Psychologically informed interventions that promote non-deliberative behaviors (‘nudges’) are often more effective than ‘traditional’ policies (like informational and educational campaigns) that target more deliberative processes. Yet, precisely because of their deliberativ...

Recent research has studied how resource scarcity draws attention and creates cognitive load. As a result, scarcity improves some dimensions of cognitive function, while worsening others. Still, there remains a fundamental question: how does scarcity influence the content of cognition? In this article, we find that poor individuals (i.e., those fac...

Objective To test whether a full moon contributes to motorcycle related deaths. Design Population based, individual level, double control, cross sectional analysis. Setting Nighttime (4 pm to 8 am), United States. Participants 13 029 motorcycle fatalities throughout the United States, 1975 to 2014 (40 years). Main outcome measure Motorcycle fat...

The circumstances surrounding poverty-tight financial challenges, instability of income and expenses, low savings, no insurance, and several other stressors-translate into persistent and cognitively taxing hardship for people in poverty contexts. Thoughts about money and expenses loom large, shape mental associations, interfere with other experienc...

The broadcast of media reports about moral crises such as famine can subtly depress rather than activate moral concern. Whereas much research has examined the effects of media reports that people attend to, social psychological analysis suggests that what goes unattended can also have an impact. We test the idea that when vivid news accounts of hum...

In this chapter, we argue that good experimental design and analysis accounts for the notion of construal, a person's subjective interpretation of a stimulus, a situation, or an experimental intervention. Researchers have long been aware of motivations, such as self-presentation, profit seeking, or distrust, that can influence experimental particip...

To the editor, Cohen1 provides a thoughtful and heartfelt clinical anecdote that complements our review of the shortfalls around hand washing among physicians.2 We agree that hand washing shows care and diligence in patient treatment. It also conveys an image of being calm rather than rushed, humble rather than self-important and wanting contact r...

### Summary Hospital-acquired infections contribute to an estimated 1.4 million deaths worldwide, including about 100 000 annually at a cost of $30B in North America alone.1 Inadequate hand hygiene remains a frequent and modifiable contributing factor, as established from hospital outbreaks of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus , vancomyc...

We review recent findings regarding the psychology of decisionmaking in contexts of poverty, and consider their application to public policy. Of particular interest are the oft-neglected psychological and behavioral consequences of economic scarcity coupled with financial instability. The novel framework highlights the psychological costs of low an...

Economic models of decision making assume that people have a stable way of thinking about value. In contrast, psychology has shown that people's preferences are often malleable and influenced by normatively irrelevant contextual features. Whereas economics derives its predictions from the assumption that people navigate a world of scarce resources,...

The International Bill of Human Rights recognizes a universal entitlement to "the continuous improvement of living conditions." A dignified existence is a common concern of modern civilization and of the social sciences. But the mindset that emerges when we have too little creates challenges that often impede the improvement of living conditions. P...

The poor are universally stigmatized. The stigma of poverty includes being perceived as incompetent and feeling shunned and disrespected. It can lead to cognitive distancing, diminish cognitive performance, and cause the poor to forego beneficial programs. In the present research, we examined how self-affirmation can mitigate the stigma of poverty...

A preoccupation with scarcity diminishes IQ and self-control. Simple measures can help us counteract this cognitive tax

Wicherts and Scholten criticized our study on statistical and psychometric grounds. We show that (i) using a continuous income variable, the interaction between income, and experimental manipulation remains reliable across our experiments; (ii) our results in the cognitive control task do not appear driven by ceiling effects; and (iii) our observed...

The poor often behave in less capable ways, which can further perpetuate poverty. We hypothesize that poverty directly impedes cognitive function and present two studies that test this hypothesis. First, we experimentally induced thoughts about finances and found that this reduces cognitive performance among poor but not in well-off participants. S...

Most theories of motivation and behavior (and lay intuitions alike) consider pain and effort to be deterrents. In contrast to this widely held view, we provide evidence that the prospect of enduring pain and exerting effort for a prosocial cause can promote contributions to the cause. Specifically, we show that willingness to contribute to a charit...

Poor Choices Two categories of reasons for why poor people make economically unsound choices, such as obtaining a payday loan at an extraordinarily high rate of interest, reflect, first, the environment: Poor people are more likely to be living in poor neighborhoods with higher rates of crime and lower rates of social services. Second, they reflect...

Human error due to risky behaviour is a common and important contributor to acute injury related to poverty. We studied whether social benefit payments mitigate or exacerbate risky behaviours that lead to emergency visits for acute injury among low-income mothers with dependent children. We analyzed total emergency department visits throughout Onta...

Consumers need information to compare alternatives for markets to function efficiently. Recognizing this, public policies often pair competition with easy access to comparative information. The implicit assumption is that comparison friction—the wedge between the availability of comparative information and consumers' use of it—is inconsequential be...

We studied the perception of wealth as a function of varying levels of assets and debt. We found that with total wealth held constant, people with positive net worth feel and are seen as wealthier when they have lower debt (despite having fewer assets). In contrast, people with equal but negative net worth feel and are considered wealthier when the...

To further our understanding of the economics of charity, we conducted a natural field experiment. Making use of two direct mail solicitations sent to nearly 20,000 prior donors to a charity, we tested the effectiveness of $1:$1 and $1:$3 matching grants on charitable giving. We find only weak evidence that either of the matches work; in fact, for...

This paper addresses the role of non-binding goals to attenuate time inconsistency. Agents have linear reference-dependent preferences and endogenously set a goal that is the reference point. They face an infinite horizon, optimal stopping problem in continuous time, where there exists an option value of waiting due to uncertainty. Goal-setting att...

The study of risky decision making has long used monetary gambles to study choice, but many everyday decisions do not involve the prospect of winning or losing money. Monetary gambles, as it turns out, may be processed and evaluated differently than gambles with nonmonetary outcomes. Whereas monetary gambles involve numeric amounts that can be stra...

The authors investigated whether obstetricians make different decisions about a medical test case depending on the characteristics of background cases that preceded the test case. Five hypothetical cases were sent to 1247 obstetricians. The outcome of interest was the proportion of physicians who elect to perform a cesarean on a borderline test cas...

Firms spend billions of dollars developing advertising content, yet there is little field evidence on how much or how it affects demand. We analyze a direct mail field experiment in South Africa implemented by a consumer lender that randomized advertising content, loan price, and loan offer deadlines simultaneously. We find that advertising content...

Firms spend billions of dollars developing advertising content, yet there is little field evidence on how much or how it affects demand. We analyze a direct mail field experiment in South Africa implemented by a consumer lender that randomized advertising content, loan price, and loan offer deadlines simultaneously. We find that advertising content...

Participants made choices after the salience of their social identities was manipulated. Choices assimilated to the salient identity, whether that identity stemmed from a person’s role (e.g., student, family member) or culture (e.g., Chinese, American). Thus, the preferences that participants expressed depended on the identity that happened to be s...

Policymakers approach human behavior largely through the perspective of the "rational agent" model, which relies on normative, a priori analyses of the making of rational decisions. This perspective is promoted in the social sciences and in professional schools, and has come to dominate much of the formulation and conduct of policy. An alternative...

Firms spend billions of dollars each year advertising consumer products in order to influence demand. Much of these outlays are on the creative design of advertising content. Creative content often uses nuances of presentation and framing that have large effects on consumer decision making in laboratory studies. But there is little field evidence o...

Time and distance estimates were elicited with either unit-based (e.g., "How many days until...") or end-based (e.g., "On what date...") questions. For intervals of uncertain extent, unit-based estimates were consistently lower than were the corresponding end-based estimates. The observed patterns are consistent with an anchoring and adjustment pro...

Theories about poverty, held both by social scientists and by regular folks, typically fall into one of two camps: those who regard the behaviors of the economically disadvantaged as calculated adaptations to prevailing circumstances, and those who view these behaviors as emanating from a unique "culture of poverty" that is rife with deviant values...

This interdisciplinary work is a collection of major essays on reasoning: deductive, inductive, abductive, belief revision, defeasible (non-monotonic), cross cultural, conversational, and argumentative. They are each oriented toward contemporary empirical studies. The book focuses on foundational issues, including paradoxes, fallacies, and debates...

Choosing a mortgage is one of the biggest financial decisions an American consumer will make. Yet it can be a complicated one, especially in today's environment where mortgages vary in dimensions and unique features. This complexity has raised regulatory issues. Should some features be regulated? Should product disclosure be regulated? And most bas...

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Government-supported services—from charter schools to health plans—increasingly allow consumers to choose among alternatives. While standard economic models emphasize the benefits of choice, laboratory evidence raises the possibility that people may struggle with complex choices. We study this tension in the context of Medicare Part D, where during...

A biography of Amos Tversky

Amos Tversky (1937–1996), a cognitive psychologist, is regarded as a giant in the study of human judgment and decision making, and one of the founders of behavioural economics. His early work in mathematical psychology focused on choice, similarity and measurement. With Daniel Kahneman, he collaborated on a highly influential study of judgmental he...

Attempts to reconstruct the magnitude of recently encountered physical stimuli were influenced by the provision of physical anchors. Whether estimating length, weight, or loudness, those increasing the magnitude of a relatively small (short, light, or quiet) physical anchor produced estimates that were reliably lower than did those decreasing the m...

One of the main themes that has emerged from behavioral decision research during the past three decades is the view that people's preferences are often constructed in the process of elicitation. This idea is derived from studies demonstrating that normatively equivalent methods of elicitation (e.g., choice and pricing) give rise to systematically d...

Monetary transactions in which consumption is temporally separated from purchase naturally lend themselves to multiple frames and to alternative accounting schemes, which nonetheless maintain a modicum of discipline and authenticity. We investigate some of the relevant accounting rules, and find that advanced purchases (e.g., a case of wine) are ty...

Four studies examined the impact that thinking about mood can have on people's choices. In Study 1, participants who were asked to suppose they were in good, bad, or neutral moods were more likely to choose a silly comedic movie over an otherwise more attractive drama, compared to others who had not thought about mood. Similar patterns were observe...

This article considers several aspects of the economic decision making of the poor from the perspective of behavioral economics, and it focuses on potential contributions from marketing. Among other things, the authors consider some relevant facets of the social and institutional environments in which the poor interact, and they review some behavio...

This article considers some basic insights from behavioural research and their implications for consumer protection. It outlines some fundamental features of the social and institutional environments in which consumers interact, and discusses the behavioural tendencies, and potential failures, likely to arise in such contexts. Of particular interes...

Monetary transactions in which consumption is temporally separated from purchase naturally lend themselves to multiple frames and to alternative accounting schemes, which nonetheless maintain a modicum of discipline and authenticity. We investigate some of the relevant accounting rules, and find that advanced purchases (e.g., a case of wine) are ty...

This paper estimates the risk preferences of cotton farmers in Southern Peru, using the results from a multiple-price-list lottery game. Assuming that preferences conform to two of the leading models of decision under risk--Expected Utility Theory (EUT) and Cumulative Prospect Theory (CPT)--we find strong evidence of moderate risk aversion. Once we...

Numerous laboratory studies report on behaviors inconsistent with rational economic models. How much do these inconsistencies matter in natural settings, when consumers make large, real decisions and have the opportunity to learn from experiences? We report on a field experiment designed to address this question. Incumbent clients of a lender in So...

The cheater-detection (CD) hypothesis suggests that people who otherwise perform poorly on the Wason selection task perform well when the task is couched in cheater-detection contexts. We report three studies with new selection problems that are similar to the originals but that question the CD hypothesis. The first two studies document a pattern h...

Economics has typically been the social science of choice to inform public policy and policymakers. In the current paper we contemplate the role behavioral science can play in enlightening policymakers. In particular, we provide some examples of research that has and can be used to inform policy, reflect on the kind of behavioral science that is im...

Recent studies have shown systematic choice-supportive memory for past choices, wherein people tend to overattribute positive features to options they chose and negative features to unchosen options (Mather & Johnson, 2000, Mather, Shafir, & Johnson, 2000). In contrast, the present experiments showed no choice-supportive memory bias for assigned op...

This paper examines the occurrence of framing effects when more thought is given to problems. In Study 1, participants were presented with one of two frames of several decision problems. Participants' Need for Cognition (NC) scores were obtained, and half the participants were asked to justify their choices. Substantial framing effects were observe...

Experimental psychology provides a drastically different picture of human abilities, motives, and behavior from that which predominates economic analyses. Individual preferences are normatively assumed to be well-ordered and consistent, but descriptively shown to be inconsistent and malleable. Not having at their disposal clear and reliable procedu...

This chapter reviews selected findings in research on reasoning, judgment, and choice and considers the systematic ways in which people violate basic requirements of the corresponding normative analyses. Recent objections to the empirical findings are then considered; these objections question the findings' relevance to assumptions about rationalit...

The authors tested whether clinicians make different decisions if they pursue information than if they receive the same information from the start. Three groups of clinicians participated (N=1206): dialysis nurses (n=171), practicing urologists (n=461), and academic physicians (n=574). Surveys were sent to each group containing medical scenarios fo...

According to consequentialism, which underlies the rational theory of choice, decisions should be determined by an assessment of the potential consequences. People, however, do not always consider the relevance of missing information in a consequentialist manner. As a result, they sometimes pursue noninstrumental information—information that may ap...

This study reveals that when remembering past decisions, people engage in choice-supportive memory distortion. When asked to make memory attributions of options' features, participants made source-monitoring errors that supported their decisions. They tended to attribute, both correctly and incorrectly, more positive features to the option they had...

In line with the principle of compatibility, when making social judgments, people tend to focus on personality attributes compatible with the trait under consideration. Better known, or enriched, personages are more likely to present attributes that are compatible with a particular trait than are personages about whom little is known. As a result,...

In negotiations where disputes are resolved via adjudication (as in the courts or arbitration), beliefs about a potential adjudicated outcome are central in determining the bargaining environment. The present research investigates how negotiators (trial attorneys and students) involved in a hypothetical product liability case use information about...

Decision makers often pursue noninstrumental information--information that appears relevant but, if simply available, would have no impact on choice. Once they pursue such information, people then use it to make their decision. Consequently, the pursuit of information that would have had no impact on choice leads people to make choices they would n...

Reports the death of Amos Tversky. Tversky received his bachelor of arts from Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1961, majoring in philosophy and psychology. He received his doctor of philosophy degree from the University of Michigan in 1965. Tversky taught at Hebrew University (1966–1978) and at Stanford University. (1978–1996), where he was the in...

Reports the death of Amos Tversky. Tversky received his bachelor of arts from Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1961, majoring in philosophy and psychology. He received his doctor of philosophy degree from the University of Michigan in 1965. Tversky taught at Hebrew University (1966–1978) and at Stanford University. (1978–1996), where he was the in...

The term 'money illusion' refers to a tendency to think in terms of nominal rather than real monetary values. Money illusion has significant implications for economic theory, yet it implies a lack of rationality that is alien to economists. This paper reviews survey questions regarding people's reactions to variations in inflation and prices, desig...

We propose a simple method for choosing a probability distribution as an approximation to a set of incoherent probability judgments. In two different domains we demonstrate that the resulting (coherent) probability estimates come closer to the observed relative frequencies than do the original incoherent judgments.