The Undoing Project

by Michael Lewis

  Danny was a refugee in the way that, say, Vladimir Nabokov was a refugee. A refugee who kept his distance. A refugee with airs. And a sharp eye for the locals. At the age of fifteen he took a vocational test that identified him as a psychologist. It didn’t surprise him.* He’d always sensed that he would be some sort of professor, and the questions he had about human beings were more interesting to him than any others. “My interest in psychology was as a way to do philosophy,” he said. “To understand the world by understanding why people, especially me, see it as they do. By then the question of whether God exists left me cold. But the question of why people believe God exists I found really fascinating. I was not really interested in right and wrong. But I was very interested in indignation. Now that’s a psychologist!”

  * * *

  Most Israelis, upon finishing high school, were conscripted into the military. Identified as intellectually gifted, Danny was allowed to proceed directly to university to pursue a degree in psychology. How to do this was not obvious, as the country’s only college campus lay behind Arab lines, and its plans for a psychology department had been killed in an Arab ambush. And so, on a morning in the fall of 1951, the seventeen-year-old Danny Kahneman sat in math class, held in a Jerusalem monastery that served as one of several temporary homes for Hebrew University. Even here, Danny seemed out of place. Most of the students had just come from serving three years in the army, and a lot of them had seen combat. Danny was younger, and dressed in a jacket and tie, which struck the other students as preposterous.

  For the next three years Danny essentially taught himself great swaths of his chosen field, as his teachers could not. “My statistics teacher I loved,” Danny recalled, “but she didn’t know statistics from beans. I taught myself statistics, from a book.” His professors were less an assemblage of specialists than a collection of characters, most of them European refugees, who happened to be willing to live in Israel. “Basically it was organized around charismatic teachers, people who had biographies, not just curriculum vitaes,” recalled Avishai Margalit, who would go from Hebrew University to become a philosophy professor at Stanford, among other places. “They had lived big lives.”

  The most vivid was Yeshayahu Leibowitz—whom Danny adored. Leibowitz had come to Palestine from Germany via Switzerland in the 1930s, with advanced degrees in medicine, chemistry, the philosophy of science and—it was rumored—a few other fields as well. Yet he’d tried and failed to get his driver’s license seven times. “You’d see him walking the streets,” recalled one former Leibowitz student, Maya Bar-Hillel. “His pants pulled up to his neck, he had these hunched shoulders and a Jay Leno chin. He’d be talking to himself and making these rhetorical gestures. But his mind attracted youth from all over the country.” Whatever Leibowitz happened to be teaching—and there seemed no subject he could not teach—he never failed to put on a show. “The course I took from him was called biochemistry, but it was basically about life,” recalled another student. “A large part of the class was devoted to explaining how stupid Ben-Gurion was.” He was referring to David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister. One of Leibowitz’s favorite stories was about a donkey placed equidistant from two bundles of hay. In the story the donkey can’t decide which bundle of hay is closer to him, and so dies of hunger. “Leibowitz would then say that no donkey would do this; a donkey would just go at random to one or the other and eat. It’s only when decisions are made by people that they get more complicated. And then he said, ‘What happens to a country when a donkey makes the decisions that people are supposed to make you can read every day in the paper.’ His class was always full.”

  What Danny recalled of Leibowitz was typically peculiar: not so much what the man had said but the sound made by the chalk hitting the board when he wanted to make a point. It was like a gunshot.

  Even at that young age, and in those circumstances, it was possible to detect a drift in Danny’s mind, by the currents it resisted. Freud was in the air but Danny didn’t want anyone lying on his couch, and he really didn’t want to lie upon anyone else’s. He’d decided to attach no particular importance to his own childhood experience, or even his memories: Why should he care about other people’s? By the early 1950s, some large number of the psychologists who insisted that the discipline be subject to the standards of science had given up the ambition to study the inner workings of the human mind. If you can’t observe what is happening in the mind, how can you even pretend to make a study of it? What was deemed worthy of scientific attention—and what could be studied scientifically—was how living creatures behaved.

  The dominant school of thought was called behaviorism. Its king, B. F. Skinner, had gotten his start during the Second World War, after the U.S. Air Force hired him to train pigeons to guide bombs. Skinner taught his pigeons to peck in the right spot on an aerial map of the target, by rewarding them with food each time they did it. (They did this with less enthusiasm when antiaircraft fire was exploding around them, and so were never used in combat.) Skinner’s success with the pigeons was the start of a spectacularly influential career underpinned by the idea that all animal behavior was driven not by thoughts and feelings but by external rewards and punishments. He locked rats inside what he called “operant conditioning chambers” (they soon became known as “Skinner boxes”) and taught them to pull levers and push buttons. He taught pigeons to dance and play Ping-Pong and bang out “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” on a piano.

  The behaviorists presumed that whatever they discovered about rats and pigeons applied to people—on whom, for various reasons, it was simply less practical to conduct experiments. “To the reader who is anxious to advance to the human subject a word of caution is in order,” Skinner wrote, in an essay called “How to Teach Animals.” “We must embark upon a program in which we sometimes apply relevant reinforcement and sometimes withhold it. In doing this, we are quite likely [in humans] to generate emotional effects. Unfortunately the science of behavior is not yet as successful in controlling emotion as it is in shaping behavior.” The allure of behaviorism was that the science appeared clean: the stimuli could be observed, the responses could be recorded. It seemed “objective.” It didn’t rely on anyone telling anyone else what he thought or felt. All the important stuff was observable and measurable. There was a joke that captured the antiseptic spirit of behaviorism that Skinner himself liked to tell: A couple makes love. Afterward, one of them turns to the other and says, “It was good for you. How was it for me?”

  All the leading behaviorists were WASPs—a fact that didn’t go unnoticed by young people entering psychology in the 1950s. Looking back, a casual observer of the field at that time couldn’t help but wonder if there shouldn’t be two entirely unrelated disciplines: “WASP Psychology” and “Jewish Psychology.” The WASPs marched around in white lab coats carrying clipboards and thinking up new ways to torture rats and all the while avoided the great wet mess of human experience. The Jews embraced the mess—even the Jews who disdained Freud’s methods and longed for “objectivity” and wished to search for the kinds of truth that might be tested according to the rules of science.

  Danny, for his part, longed for objectivity. The school of psychological thought that most charmed him was Gestalt† psychology. Led by German Jews—its origins were in early twentieth-century Berlin—it sought to explore, scientifically, the mysteries of the human mind. The Gestalt psychologists had made careers uncovering interesting phenomena and demonstrating them with great flair: a light appeared brighter when it emerged from total darkness; the color gray looked green when it was surrounded by violet and yellow if surrounded by blue; if you said to a person, “Don’t step on that banana eel!,” he’d be sure that you had said not “eel” but “peel.” The Gestalists showed that there was no obvious relationship between any external stimulus and the sensation it created in people, as the mind intervened in many curious ways. Danny was especially struck by the way that the Gestalt psycho
logists, in their writings, put their readers through an experience, so that they might feel for themselves the mysterious inner workings of their own minds:

  If on a clear night we look up at the sky, some stars are immediately seen as belonging together, and as detached from their environment. The constellation Cassiopeia is an example, the Dipper is another. For ages people have seen the same groups as units, and at the present time children need no instruction in order to perceive the same units. Similarly, in figure 1 the reader has before him two groups of patches.

  Figure 1. Adapted from Wolfgang Köhler, Gestalt Psychology

  (1947; repr., New York: Liveright, 1992), 142.

  Why not merely six patches? Or two other groups? Or three groups of two members each? When looking casually at this pattern everyone beholds the two groups of three patches each.

  The central question posed by Gestalt psychologists was the question the behaviorists had elected to ignore: How does the brain create meaning? How does it turn the fragments collected by the senses into a coherent picture of reality? Why does that picture so often seem to be imposed by the mind upon the world around it, rather than by the world upon the mind? How does a person turn the shards of memory into a coherent life story? Why does a person’s understanding of what he sees change with the context in which he sees it? Why—to speak a bit loosely—when a regime bent on the destruction of the Jews rises to power in Europe, do some Jews see it for what it is, and flee, and others stay to be slaughtered? These questions, or ones like them, had led Danny into psychology. They weren’t the sort to be answered by even the most gifted rat. Their answers, if they existed, could be found only in the human mind.

  Later in his life Danny would say that he thought of science as a conversation. If so, psychology was a noisy dinner party during which the guests talked past one another and changed the subject with bewildering frequency. The Gestalt psychologists and the behaviorists and the psychoanalysts might all be jammed into the same building with a plaque on the front that said Department of Psychology, but they didn’t waste a lot of time listening to one another. Psychology wasn’t like physics, or even economics. It lacked a single persuasive theory to organize itself around, or even an agreed-upon set of rules for discussion. Its leading figures could, and did, say of the work of other psychologists, Basically, what you are doing and saying is total bullshit, without any discernible effect on the behavior of those psychologists.

  Part of the problem was the wild diversity of the people who wanted to be psychologists—a rattle-bag of characters with motives that ranged from the urge to rationalize their own unhappiness, to a conviction that they had deep insights into human nature but lacked the literary power to write a decent novel, to a need for a market for their math skills after they’d been found inadequate by the physics department, to a simple desire to help people in pain. The other issue was the grandma’s attic quality of the field: Psychology was a place all sorts of unrelated and seemingly unsolvable problems simply got tossed. “It is possible to find two competent and highly productive academic psychologists who, if they had lunch together, would be forced to discuss the Twins’ chances for the pennant or Ronald the Red Killer’s showmanship talents, because they would have negligible overlap in their knowledge and interests in psychology,” the University of Minnesota psychologist Paul Meehl wrote in a famous 1986 essay, “Psychology: Does Our Heterogeneous Subject Matter Have Any Unity?” “One can inquire as to why this is, whether anything can be done about it, or—a question that should be asked first—does it really matter anyway? Why should a behavior geneticist studying the transmission of schizophrenia be able to converse with an expert on the electrochemical processes in the retina of the walleyed pike?”

  Aptitude tests revealed Danny to be equally suited for the humanities and science, but he only wanted to do science. He also wanted to study people. Beyond that, it soon became clear, he didn’t know what he wanted to do. In his second year at Hebrew University, he listened to a talk by a visiting German neurosurgeon who claimed that damage to the brain caused people to lose the capacity for abstract thought. The claim turned out to be false, but Danny was so taken by it in that moment that he decided to chuck psychology to pursue a medical degree—so that he’d be allowed to poke around the human brain and see what other effects he might generate. A professor eventually persuaded him that it was insane to go through the misery of acquiring a medical degree unless he actually wanted to be a doctor. But it was the start of a pattern: seizing on some idea or ambition with great enthusiasm only to abandon it in disappointment. “I’ve always felt ideas were a dime a dozen,” he said. “If you had one that didn’t work out, you should not fight too hard to save it, just go find another.”

  In an ordinary society it is unlikely that anyone would ever have discovered the fantastic practical usefulness of Danny Kahneman. Israel wasn’t a normal society. Graduating from Hebrew University—which somehow bestowed upon him a degree in psychology—Danny was required to serve in the Israeli army. Gentle, detached, disorganized, conflict-avoiding, and physically inept: Danny wasn’t anyone’s idea of a soldier. Only twice did he come close to having to fight, and both instances remained, to him, vividly memorable. The first time came when the platoon that he and several others commanded was ordered to attack an Arab village. Danny’s platoon was meant to circle around the village and ambush any Arab forces. The year before, after an Israeli army unit had massacred Arab women and children, Danny and his friend Shimon Shamir had discussed what they would do if they were ordered to kill Arab civilians. They’d decided that they would refuse the order. Here was the closest Danny would come to being given that order. “We were not supposed to go into the village,” he said. “The other officers were given their orders. And I listened—and they were never told to kill civilians. But they were never told how not to kill civilians. And I couldn’t ask the question—because it wasn’t my mission.” In the event, his own mission was aborted and his unit withdrawn before it came anywhere near to shooting at anyone—and only later did he learn why. The other platoons had walked into an ambush. The Jordanian army had been waiting for them. Had he not withdrawn, “We would have been butchered.”

  The other time, he was sent one night to lay ambushes for the Jordanian army. He had three squads in his platoon. He led each of the first two squads to their ambush sites and left subordinates in charge of them. The third, on the Jordanian border, he led himself. To find the border, his commanding officer (a poet named Haim Gouri) told him, he should walk until he reached a sign: Frontier. Stop. In the dark, Danny missed the sign. As the sun rose, what he saw instead was an enemy soldier, on a hill, with his back to him: He’d invaded Jordan. (“I nearly started a war.”) The stretch of land beneath the hill in front of them, he saw, was ideally suited for Jordanian snipers looking to pick off Israeli soldiers. Danny turned to sneak his patrol back into Israel, but then he noticed that one of his men was missing his pack. Imagining the dressing-down he’d receive for leaving a pack in Jordan, he and his men crept around the fringes of the kill zone. “It was incredibly dangerous. I knew how stupid it was. But we would stay until we found it. Because I could hear the first question, ‘How could you leave that pack?’ That has stayed with me: the idiocy of it.” They found the pack, then left. Upon his return, his superiors admonished him, but not about the backpack. “They said, ‘Why didn’t you shoot?’”

  The army jolted him out of his usual self-assigned role of detached observer. His year as a platoon commander, Danny said later, “removed the remaining traces of the pervasive sense of vulnerability and physical weakness and incompetence which I had had in France.” But he wasn’t born to shoot at people. He wasn’t really suited to army life, either, but the army forced him to be suitable. They assigned him to the psychology unit. The chief feature of the Israeli army’s psychology unit in 1954 was that it had no psychologists. Upon joining it, Danny found that his new boss—the Israeli army’s ch
ief of psychological research—was a chemist. So Danny, a twenty-year-old refugee from Europe who had spent a meaningful amount of his life in hiding, found himself the Israel Defense Forces’ expert on psychological matters. “He was thin, ugly, and very clever,” recalls Tammy Viz, who served with Danny in the psychology unit. “I was nineteen and he was twenty-one, and I think he flirted with me and I was so dumb I didn’t know it. He was not a normal guy. But people liked him.” They also needed him—though how much they surely did not immediately appreciate.

  The new nation faced a serious problem: how to organize a madly diverse population into a fighting force. In 1948, David Ben-Gurion had declared Israel open to any Jew who wished to immigrate. Over the next five years, the state accepted more than 730,000 immigrants from different cultures, speaking different languages. Many of the young men entering the new Israel Defense Forces already had endured unspeakable horrors—everywhere you turned, you found people with numbers tattooed on their arms. Mothers stumbled unexpectedly upon their own children, who they thought had been murdered by the Germans, on the streets of Israeli cities. No one was encouraged to speak about what he’d experienced in war. “People who had post-traumatic stress disorder were considered weaklings,” as one Israeli psychologist put it. Part of the job of being an Israeli Jew was to at least pretend to forget the unforgettable.