Thomas Gilovich, Ph.D., and Lee Ross, Ph.D.

Thomas Gilovich, Ph.D., is the Irene Blecker Rosenfeld Professor of Psychology at Cornell University and co-director of the Cornell Center for Behavioral Economics and Decision Research. He received his B.A. in Psychology in 1976 from the University of California and his PhD in Psychology in 1981 from Stanford University. Dr. Gilovich is a social psychologist who specializes in the study of everyday judgment and reasoning. This research interest has led him to study how gamblers selectively remember their past performance, how decision makers are influenced by irrelevant analogies, how people come to have the types of regrets that they do, why people are reluctant to “tempt fate,” and why people receive more enduring satisfaction from purchasing experiences rather than possessions. Dr. Gilovich is most widely known for his research that debunks the “hot hand” in basketball and for his books, How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life, Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes (with Gary Belsky), Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment (with Dale Griffin and Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman), and Social Psychology (with Dacher Keltner and Richard Nisbett). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

Lee Ross, Ph.D., is the Stanford Credit Union Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and co-founder of the Stanford Center on Conflict and Negotiation. The author of two influential books, Human Inference and the Person and the Situation (both with Richard Nisbett) and a coeditor of two other volumes (his research on attributional biases and shortcomings in human inference has exerted a major impact in social psychology and the field of human inference, judgment and decision-making. More recently he has ventured into more applied domains, exploring relational and psychological barriers to dispute resolution and participating in conflict resolution activities in the Middle East and Northern Ireland. He has also worked on other applied topics including telemarketer fraud directed against the elderly, education of disadvantaged students and the psychological barriers impeding US and international efforts to global warming. Ross was elected in 1994 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2010 to the National Academy of Sciences. He has also received distinguished career awards from the American Psychological Society and the Society of Experimental Social Psychology.