Alan Schwartz

Who they are

Alan Schwartz holds a PhD and a JD, and is Professor and the Michael Reese Endowed Professor of Medical Education in the Department of Medical Education at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, part of UIC. He is also a Research Professor in the Department of Pediatrics and a Department Affiliate in the UIC School of Law. His PhD is in cognitive psychology, with a master's in organizational behavior and industrial relations, both from the University of California, Berkeley, and his JD is from the UIC School of Law (2024).

His research concerns the psychology of decision making in both patients and physicians. For patients, that means risk perception, patient-physician fit, and how non-medical goals affect the evaluation of health states. For physicians, it means contextual errors in decision making and how they update beliefs when given new evidence.

Key papers

Thaler, R. H., Tversky, A., Kahneman, D., & Schwartz, A. (1997). The effect of myopia and loss aversion on risk taking: An experimental test. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 112(2), 647 to 661. doi:10.1162/003355397555226.

Key ideas

The 1997 paper tests two predictions about myopic loss aversion, the combination of a greater sensitivity to losses than to gains and a tendency to evaluate outcomes frequently. In the authors' abstract, investors who evaluate their investments less often should accept more risk, and removing losses by raising all payoffs should also increase risk taking. Both predictions were supported in an experiment on learning from experience. The investors who received the most frequent feedback took the least risk and earned the least money.

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