Eldar Shafir

Biography

Eldar Shafir is the Class of 1987 Professor of Behavioral Science and Public Policy, the Inaugural Director of Princeton’s Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science and Public Policy, and co-founder and scientific director at ideas42, a social science R&D lab. He studies decision-making, cognitive science, and behavioral economics. His recent research has focused on decision-making in contexts of poverty and on the application of behavioral research to policy. He is Past President of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making, Senior Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Council on the Future of Behavioural Sciences. He was a member of President Barack Obama’s Advisory Council on Financial Capability.  He has received several awards, most recently a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the William James Book Award. He was named one of Foreign Policy Magazine’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers of 2013, and elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He edited a book called “The Behavioral Foundations of Public Policy,” (2012), and co-authored, with economist Sendhil Mullainathan, “Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much,” (2013). He received his B.A. from Brown University and his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

For more information, visit https://psych.princeton.edu/person/eldar-shafir.