* “Discrepancy between Medical Decisions for Individual Patients and for Groups” appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine in April 1990.
† “On the Belief That Arthritis Pain Is Related to the Weather” appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in April 1996.
9
BIRTH OF THE WARRIOR PSYCHOLOGIST
By the fall of 1973 it was fairly clear to Danny that other people would never fully understand his relationship with Amos. The previous academic year, they’d taught a seminar together at Hebrew University. From Danny’s point of view, it had been a disaster. The warmth he felt when he was alone with Amos vanished whenever Amos was in the presence of an audience. “When we were with other people we were one of two ways,” said Danny. “Either we finished each other’s sentences and told each other’s jokes. Or we were competing. No one ever saw us working together. No one knows what we were like.” What they were like, in every way but sexually, was lovers. They connected with each other more deeply than either had connected with anyone else. Their wives noticed it. “Their relationship was more intense than a marriage,” said Barbara. “I think they were both turned on intellectually more than either had ever been before. It was as if they were both waiting for it.” Danny sensed that his wife felt some jealousy; Amos actually praised Barbara, behind her back, for dealing so gracefully with the intrusion on their marriage. “Just to be with him,” said Danny. “I never felt that way with anyone else, really. You are in love and things. But I was rapt. And that’s what it was like. It was truly extraordinary.”
And yet it was Amos who worked hardest to find ways to keep them together. “I was the one who was holding back,” said Danny. “I kept my distance because I was afraid of what would happen to me without him.”
It was four in the morning California time when the armies of Egypt and Syria launched their attack upon Israel. They’d taken the Israelis by surprise on Yom Kippur. Along the Suez Canal, the 500-man Israeli garrison was overwhelmed by 100,000 Egyptian troops. From the Golan Heights, 177 Israeli tank crews gazed down upon an attacking force of 2,000 Syrian tanks. Amos and Danny, still in the United States trying to become decision analysts, raced to the airport and got the first flight possible to Paris, where Danny’s sister worked in the Israeli embassy. Getting into Israel during a war wasn’t easy. Every inbound El Al plane was crammed with fighter pilots and combat unit commanders who were coming in to replace the men killed in the first days of the invasion. That’s just what you did, if you were an Israeli capable of fighting in 1973: You ran toward the war. Knowing this, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat had promised to shoot down any commercial planes attempting to land in Israel. As they waited in Paris for Danny’s sister to talk someone into letting them onto a flight, Danny and Amos bought combat boots. They were made of canvas—lighter than the leather boots issued by the Israeli military.
When the war broke out, Barbara Tversky was on the way to an emergency room in Jerusalem with her eldest son. He had won a contest with his brother to see who could stick a cucumber farthest up his own nose. As they headed home, people surrounded their car and screamed at Barbara for being on the road. The country was in a state of panic: Fighter jets screamed low over Jerusalem to signal all reserves to return to their units. Hebrew University closed. Army trucks rumbled all night through the Tverskys’ usually tranquil neighborhood. The city was black. Street lamps remained off; anyone who owned a car taped over its brake lights. The stars could not have been more spectacular, or the news more troubling—because, for the first time, Barbara sensed that the Israeli government was withholding the truth. This war was different from the others: Israel was losing. Not knowing where Amos was, or what he planned to do, didn’t help. Phone calls were so expensive that when he was in the United States they communicated only by letter. Her situation wasn’t unusual: There were Israelis who would learn that loved ones living abroad had returned to Israel to fight only by being informed that they had been killed in action.
To make herself useful, Barbara went to the library and found the material to write a newspaper article about stress and how to cope with it. A few nights into the conflict, around ten o’clock, she heard footsteps. She was working alone in the study, with the blinds lowered, to avoid letting the light seep out. The kids were asleep. Whoever was coming up the stairs was running; then suddenly Amos bounded from the darkness. The El Al flight that he had taken with Danny had carried as passengers no one but Israeli men returning to fight. It had descended into Tel Aviv in total darkness: There hadn’t even been a light on the wing. Once again, Amos went into the closet and pulled down his army uniform, now with a captain’s insignia on it, and, once again, it fit. At five o’clock the following morning he left.
He had been assigned, with Danny, to the psychology field unit. The unit had grown since the mid-1950s, when Danny had redesigned the selection system. In early 1973 an American psychologist named James Lester, sent by the Office of Naval Research to study Israeli military psychology, wrote a report in which he described the unit they were about to join. Lester marveled at the entire society—a country that had at once the world’s strictest driving tests and the world’s highest automobile accident rates—but seems to have been struck especially by the faith the Israeli military placed in their psychologists. “Failure rate in the officer course is running at 15–20%,” he wrote. “Such confidence does the military have in the mysteries of psychological research that they are asking the Selection Section to try to identify these 15% during the first week in training.”
The head of Israeli military psychology, Lester reported, was an oddly powerful character named Benny Shalit. Shalit had argued for, and received, a new, elevated status for military psychology. His unit had a renegade quality to it; Shalit had gone so far as to sew an insignia of his own design onto its uniform. It consisted of the Israeli olive branch and sword, Lester explained, “topped by an eye which symbolizes assessment, insight, or something along those lines.” In his attempts to turn his psychology unit into a fighting force, Shalit had dreamed up ideas that struck even the psychologists as wacko. Hypnotizing Arabs and sending them to assassinate Arab leaders, for instance. “He actually did hypnotize one Arab,” recalled Daniela Gordon, who served under Shalit in the psychology unit. “They took him to the Jordanian border, and he just ran off.”
A rumor among Shalit’s subordinates—and it refused to die—was that Shalit kept the personality assessments made of all the Israeli military big shots, back when they were young men entering the army, and let them know that he wouldn’t be shy about making them public. Whatever the reason, Benny Shalit had an unusual ability to get his way in the Israeli military. And one of the unusual things Shalit had asked for, and received, was the right to embed psychologists in army units, where they might directly advise commanders. “Field psychologists are in a position to make recommendations on a variety of unconventional issues,” Lester reported to his U.S. Navy superiors. “For example, one noticed that infantry troops in hot weather, stopping to open soft drinks with their ammunition magazines, often damaged the stock. It was possible to redesign the stock so that a tool for opening bottles was included.” Shalit’s psychologists had eliminated the unused sights on submachine guns, and changed the way machine-gun units worked together, to increase the rate at which they fired. Psychologists in the Israeli army were, in short, off the leash. “Military psychology is alive and well in Israel,” concluded the United States Navy’s reporter on the ground. “It is an interesting question whether or not the psychology of the Israelis is becoming a military one.”
What Benny Shalit’s field psychologists might do during an actual battle, however, was unclear. “The psychology unit did not have the faintest idea what to do,” said Eli Fishoff, who served as Benny Shalit’s second-in-command. “The war was totally unexpected. We were just thinking maybe it’s the end of us.” In a matter of days the Israeli army had lost more men, as a percentage o
f the population, than the United States military lost in the entire Vietnam War. The war was later described by the Israeli government as a “demographic disaster” because of the prominence and talent of the Israelis who were killed. In the psychology unit someone came up with the idea of designing a questionnaire, to determine what, if anything, might be done to improve the morale of the troops. Amos seized upon it, helped to design the questions, and then used the entire exercise more or less as an excuse to get himself closer to the action. “We just got a jeep and went bouncing around in the Sinai looking for something useful to do,” said Danny.
Their fellow psychologists who watched Danny and Amos toss rifles into the back of a jeep and set out for the battlefield thought they were out of their minds. “Amos was so excited—like a little child,” recalled Yaffa Singer. “But it was crazy for them to go to the Sinai. It was so dangerous. It was absolutely crazy to send them out with those questionnaires.” The risk of running directly into enemy tanks and planes was the least of it. There were land mines everywhere; it was easy to get lost. “They didn’t have guards,” said Daniela Gordon, their commanding officer. “They guarded themselves.” All of them felt less concern for Amos than for Danny. “We were very worried about sending Danny on his own,” said Eli Fishoff, head of the field psychologists. “I wasn’t so worried about Amos—because Amos was a fighter.”
The moment Danny and Amos were in the jeep roaring through the Sinai, however, it was Danny who became useful. “He was jumping off the car and grilling people,” recalled Fishoff. Amos seemed like the practical one, but Danny, more than Amos, had a gift for finding solutions to problems where others failed even to notice that there was a problem to solve. As they sped toward the front lines, Danny noticed the huge piles of garbage on the roadsides: the leftovers from the canned meals supplied by the U.S. Army. He examined what the soldiers had eaten and what they had thrown out. (They liked the canned grapefruit.) His subsequent recommendation that the Israeli army analyze the garbage and supply the soldiers with what they actually wanted made newspaper headlines.
Israeli tank drivers were just then being killed in action at an unprecedented rate. Danny visited the site where new tank drivers were being trained, as quickly as possible, to replace the ones who had died. Groups of four men took turns in two-hour shifts on a tank. Danny pointed out that people learn more efficiently in short bursts, and that new tank drivers might be educated faster if the trainees rotated behind the wheel every thirty minutes. He also somehow found his way to the Israeli Air Force. Fighter pilots were also dying in unprecedented numbers, because of Egypt’s use of new and improved surface-to-air missiles provided by the Soviet Union. One squadron had suffered especially horrific losses. The general in charge wanted to investigate, and possibly punish, the unit. “I remember him saying accusingly that one of the pilots had been hit ‘not only by one missile but by four!’ As if that was conclusive evidence of his ineptitude,” recalled Danny.
Danny explained to the general that he had a sample size problem: The losses experienced by the supposedly inept fighter squadron could have occurred by random chance alone. If he investigated the unit, he would no doubt find patterns in behavior that might serve as an explanation. Perhaps the pilots in that squadron had paid more visits to their families; or maybe they wore funny-colored underpants. Whatever he found would be a meaningless illusion, however. There weren’t enough pilots in the squadron to achieve statistical significance. On top of it, an investigation, implying blame, would be horrible for morale. The only point of an inquiry would be to preserve the general’s feelings of omnipotence. The general listened to Danny and stopped the inquiry. “I have considered that my only contribution to the war effort,” said Danny.
The actual business at hand—putting questions to soldiers fresh from combat—Danny found pointless. Many of the soldiers were traumatized. “We were wondering what to do with people who were in shock—how even to evaluate them,” said Danny. “Every soldier was frightened, but there were some people who couldn’t function.” Shell-shocked Israeli soldiers resembled people with depression. There were some problems Danny didn’t feel equipped to deal with, and this was one of them.
He didn’t really want to be in the Sinai anyway, not in the way Amos seemed to want to be there. “I remember a sense of futility—that we were wasting our time there,” he said. When their jeep bounced once too often and caused Danny’s back to go out, he quit the journey—and left Amos alone to administer the questionnaires. From their jeep rides he retained a single vivid memory. “We went to sleep near a tank,” he recalled. “On the ground. And Amos didn’t like where I was sleeping, because he thought the tank might move and crush me. And I remember being very, very touched by this. It was not sensible advice. A tank makes a lot of noise. But that he was worried about me.”
Later, the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research undertook a study of the war. “Battle Shock Casualties During the 1973 Arab-Israeli War,” it was called. The psychiatrists who prepared the report noted that the war was unusual in its intensity—it was fought twenty-four hours a day, at least at the start—and in the losses suffered. The report also noted that, for the first time, Israeli soldiers were diagnosed with psychological trauma. The questionnaires Amos had helped to design asked the soldiers many simple questions: Where were you? What did you do? What did you see? Was the battle a success? If not, why not? “People started to talk about fear,” recalls Yaffa Singer. “About their emotions. From the war of independence until 1973 it hadn’t been allowed. We are supermen. No one has the guts to talk about fear. If we talk about it maybe we won’t survive.”
For days after the war, Amos sat with Singer and two other colleagues in the psychology field unit and read through the soldiers’ answers to his questions. They spoke of their motives for fighting. “It’s such horrible information that people tend to bury it,” said Singer. But caught fresh, the soldiers revealed to the psychologists sentiments that, in retrospect, seemed blindingly obvious. “We asked, why is anyone fighting for Israel?” said Singer. “Until that moment we were just patriots. When we started reading the questionnaires it was so obvious: They were fighting for their friends. Or for their families. Not for the nation. Not for Zionism. At the time it was a huge realization.” Perhaps for the first time, Israeli soldiers spoke openly of their feelings, as they watched five of their beloved platoon mates blown to bits or as they saw their best friend on earth killed because he turned left when he was supposed to turn right. “It was heartbreaking to read them,” said Singer.
Right up until the fighting stopped, Amos sought risks that he didn’t need to take—that in fact others thought were foolish to take. “He decided to witness the end of the war along the Suez,” recalled Barbara, “even though he knew full well that shelling continued after the time of the cease-fire.” Amos’s attitude toward physical risk occasionally shocked even his wife. Once, he announced that he wanted to start jumping out of airplanes again, just for fun. “I said you are the father of children,” said Barbara, “That ended the discussion.” Amos wasn’t a thrill seeker, exactly, but he had strong, almost childlike passions that, every so often, he allowed to grab hold of him and take him places most people would never wish to go.
In the end, he crossed the Sinai to the Suez Canal. Rumors circulated that the Israeli army might march all the way to Cairo, and that Soviets were sending nuclear weapons to Egypt to prevent them from doing so. Arriving at the Suez, Amos found that the shelling hadn’t merely continued; it had intensified. There was now a long-standing tradition, on both sides of any Arab-Israeli war, of seizing the moment immediately before a formal cease-fire to fire any remaining ammunition at each other. The spirit of the thing was: Kill as many of them as you can, while you can. Wandering around near the Suez Canal and sensing an incoming missile, Amos leapt into a trench and landed on top of an Israeli soldier.
Are you a bomb? asked the terrified soldier.
>
No, I’m Amos, said Amos.
So I’m not dead? asked the soldier.
You’re not dead, said Amos.
That was the one story Amos told. Apart from that, he seldom mentioned the war again.
* * *
In late 1973 or early 1974, Danny gave a talk, which he would deliver more than once, and which he called “Cognitive Limitations and Public Decision Making.” It was troubling to consider, he began, “an organism equipped with an affective and hormonal system not much different from that of the jungle rat being given the ability to destroy every living thing by pushing a few buttons.” Given the work on human judgment that he and Amos had just finished, he found it further troubling to think that “crucial decisions are made, today as thousands of years ago, in terms of the intuitive guesses and preferences of a few men in positions of authority.” The failure of decision makers to grapple with the inner workings of their own minds, and their desire to indulge their gut feelings, made it “quite likely that the fate of entire societies may be sealed by a series of avoidable mistakes committed by their leaders.”
Before the war, Danny and Amos had shared the hope that their work on human judgment would find its way into high-stakes real-world decision making. In this new field called decision analysis, they could transform high-stakes decision making into a sort of engineering problem. They would design decision-making systems. Experts on decision making would sit with leaders in business, the military, and government and help them to frame every decision explicitly as a gamble; to calculate the odds of this or that happening; and to assign values to every possible outcome. If we seed the hurricane, there is a 50 percent chance we lower its wind speed but a 5 percent chance that we lull people who really should evacuate into a false sense of security: What do we do? In the bargain, the decision analysts would remind important decision makers that their gut feelings had mysterious powers to steer them wrong. “The general change in our culture toward numerical formulations will give room for explicit reference to uncertainty,” Amos wrote, in notes to himself for a talk of his own. Both Amos and Danny thought that voters and shareholders and all the other people who lived with the consequences of high-level decisions might come to develop a better understanding of the nature of decision making. They would learn to evaluate a decision not by its outcomes—whether it turned out to be right or wrong—but by the process that led to it. The job of the decision maker wasn’t to be right but to figure out the odds in any decision and play them well. As Danny told audiences in Israel, what was needed was a “transformation of cultural attitudes to uncertainty and to risk.”
The Undoing Project Page 23