Barbara Tversky : An Oral History
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- In this oral history, Barbara Tversky, professor emerita in psychology at Stanford University and a highly regarded expert in visual-spatial reasoning and collaborative psychology, shares recollections of her life in both Israel and the United States, her wide-ranging research in cognitive psychology, and her marriage to the late Amos Tversky.
- Summary
- In this oral history, Barbara Tversky, professor emerita in psychology at Stanford University and a highly regarded expert in visual-spatial reasoning and collaborative psychology, shares recollections of her life in both Israel and the United States, her wide-ranging research in cognitive psychology, and her marriage to the late Amos Tversky. After a caveat about the nature of memory drawn from her own research, Tversky recounts her rich family history, her father’s relatives fleeing pogroms in Russia and her mother’s family rooted in an upper-class Jewish community in Sweden. Her parents’ household, she says, was socialist or communist and Yiddish was among the several languages spoken in an intellectual atmosphere that embraced art, politics, and literature. Tversky explains how she came to attend the University of Michigan and was drawn to cognitive psychology and research. She recalls her ambivalent participation in the university’s turbulent political scene in the 1960s, including collecting signatures to support the development of the Peace Corps and presenting the petitions to then-presidential candidate John F. Kennedy. As she moved from undergraduate to graduate studies, she met Amos Tversky, a native Israeli, and she tells how their relationship grew when she worked as a cook in the co-op where Amos lived. Barbara discusses the evolution of her dissertation experiments on the role of visual memories. That work was interrupted when Amos took a job in Israel, she says, and they decided to marry and go together. She offers a kaleidoscopic description of her life in Israel: learning Hebrew, getting her footing in an argumentative and egalitarian culture, finding safety during the Six-Day War--and later the Yom Kippur War--while Amos was away fighting. It was a disorienting time, as Barbara describes it, divided between the United States and Israel and between her teaching and research and her growing family. During those years, the Tverskys also spent more than one sabbatical at Stanford University, she says, and Amos began to work with Daniel Kahnemann on their groundbreaking work about how people think--a relationship so close even their toddler son noticed the connection. As she tells the story, their work determined much about her family’s life in the next decades. In 1977, she and Amos took fulltime positions at Stanford, and she describes the foreign culture the university represented as she restarted her career yet again. She discusses at length her relationships with graduate students and her strategy of allowing them to define their own research questions--opening her own work to many aspects of cognitive psychology: spatial thinking, time and gesture, the theory of maps, symbolic systems, and storytelling. Following Amos’s death in 1996, she moved to New York and Teachers College, Columbia University. Barbara devotes the last part of her interview to Amos and their life together, as well as a critique of the book The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis that engages the Tversky-Kahnemann relationship and work. Now president-elect of the Association for Psychological Science, she briefly outlines her plans.
Description
| Type of resource | sound recording-nonmusical, text, still image |
|---|---|
| Extent | 5 audio files; 1 text file; 1 photograph |
| Place | Stanford (Calif.) |
| Publisher | Stanford Historical Society |
| Date created | August 22, 2017 - 2018-08-23 |
| Language | English |
| Digital origin | born digital |
Creators/Contributors
| Interviewee | Tversky, Barbara Gans | |
|---|---|---|
| Creator | Tversky, Barbara Gans | |
| Interviewer | Marine-Street, Natalie J. | |
| Publisher | Stanford Historical Society |
Subjects
| Subject | Tversky, Barbara Gans |
|---|---|
| Subject | Tversky, Amos |
| Subject | Stanford University. Department of Psychology |
| Subject | Psychology |
| Genre | Interview |
Bibliographic information
| Biographical Profile |
Barbara Tversky studied cognitive psychology at the University of Michigan. She held positions first at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and then at Stanford, from 1978-2005 when she took early retirement. She is an active Emerita Professor of Psychology at Stanford and Professor of Psychology at Columbia Teachers College. She is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, the Cognitive Science Society, the Society for Experimental Psychology, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Science. She has been on the Governing Boards of the Psychonomic Society, the Cognitive Science Society, the International Union of Psychological Science, and the Association for Psychological Science. She has served on the editorial boards of many journals and the organizing committees of dozens of international interdisciplinary meetings.
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| Transcript |
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| Finding Aid | |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/bj822xn3564 |
| Location | SC0932 |
| Repository | Stanford University. Libraries. Department of Special Collections and University Archives |
Access conditions
- Use and reproduction
- Digital recordings from this collection may be accessed freely. These files may not be reproduced or used for any purpose without permission. For permission requests, please contact Stanford University Department of Special Collections & University Archives (speccoll@stanford.edu).
- Copyright
- Copyright © 2013 The Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.
Collection
Stanford Historical Society Oral History Program interviews, 1999-2022
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