Eldar Shafir (Hebrew: אלדר שפיר) is an American behavioral scientist, and the co-author of Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much[1] (with Sendhil Mullainathan).

[4] He is Past President of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making, member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, Senior Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Research Affiliate of Innovations for Poverty Action, member of the Behavioral Economics Roundtable of the Russell Sage Foundation, and Vice-Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Behaviour.

[5] Along with Peter Diamond and Amos Tversky, Shafir is a proponent of the Money illusion, compiling empirical evidence for the existence of this effect, both in experiments and in real world situations.

For instance, in a study with Amos Tversky involving Princeton students, it was found that people tend to find ways not to decide when faced with complicated and consequential decision.

In a series of empirical studies, Shafir, together with researchers Peter Diamond and Tversky have provided evidence from experimental and real world situations that a number of factors such as cognitive biases affect decision making.

studies have shown that the psychology of the poor is similar to that of people who are stressed for other reasons such as from working too hard, those who are lonely and without connections or those who lack calories because they are on a diet, according to Shafir.

Indeed, a series of 18 studies co-authored by Shafir showed that people display a "thick skin bias," whereby they erroneously believe that the poor have been "toughened" by poverty, such that they are less harmed by negative events.

Although this bias is false, a wide range of people show it, including professionals in customer service, education, and mental healthcare contexts, and it has potentially important implications for interpersonal relationships and for policy.