In this curious state of mind, he found his thoughts settling on a nephew, Ilan. Ilan had been a twenty-one-year-old navigator in the back of an Israeli fighter during the Yom Kippur war. After the war, he had sought out Danny and asked him to listen to an audiotape he had kept from it. He’d been in the backseat of the fighter when an Egyptian MiG got behind them, locking in for a kill. On the tape, you could hear Ilan scream at his pilot, “Break! Break! Break! He’s on our tail!” As Ilan played the tape, Danny noticed that the young man was shaking; for some reason, he wanted his uncle to hear what had happened to him. Ilan had survived the war, but a year and a half later, in March 1975, five days before he was to be released from service, he was killed. Blinded by a flare, his pilot had flown upside down straight into the ground.
They’d thought they were rising when in fact they were falling. It wasn’t an original mistake. Pilots in flight often became disoriented. The inner ear wasn’t designed for a gravity-defying chamber pitching and rolling at 650 miles an hour a mile above the earth’s surface any more than the mind was designed to calculate the probabilities of complex situations. It had evolved to stabilize people on their own two feet. People who flew airplanes were susceptible to sensory illusions—which was why a pilot without an instrument rating who flew into clouds had an average life expectancy of 178 seconds.*
After Ilan’s death, Danny couldn’t help but notice the urge in those who loved him to mentally undo his plane crash. Many of the sentences that came from their lips might just as well have started with the words “if only.” If only Ilan had been released from the Air Force a week earlier. If only he’d taken charge after his pilot was blinded by that flare. People’s minds coped with loss by drifting onto fantasy paths, where loss never occurred. But this drifting, Danny noticed, wasn’t random. There appeared to be constraints on the mind when it created alternatives to reality. If Ilan had still had a year of service remaining when his plane crashed, no one would have said, “If only he had been released a year ago.” No one said, “If only the pilot had the flu that day” or “If only Ilan’s plane had been grounded for mechanical problems.” For that matter, no one said, “If only Israel had not had an Air Force.” Any of those counterfactuals would have saved his life, but none of them came to the minds of those who loved him.
There were of course a million ways that any plane crash might have been avoided, but people seemed to consider only a few of them. There were patterns in the fantasies that people created to undo his nephew’s tragedy, and they resembled patterns in the alternative versions of his own life that played out in Danny’s mind.
Soon after his arrival in Vancouver, Danny asked Amos to send him any notes that he’d kept from their discussions about regret. In Jerusalem they’d spent more than a year talking about the rules of regret. They’d been interested chiefly in people’s anticipation of the unpleasant emotion, and how this anticipation might alter the choices they made. Now Danny wanted to explore regret, and other emotions, from the opposite direction. He wanted to study how people undid events that had already happened. Both he and Amos could see how such a study might feed into their work on both judgment and decision making. “There is nothing in the framework of decision theory that would prohibit the assignment of utilities to states of frustrated hope, relief or regret, if these are identified as important aspects of the experience of consequences,” they wrote, in what amounted to a memo to themselves. “However, there is a reason to suspect a major bias against the acknowledgment of the true impact of such states on experience. . . . It is expected of mature individuals that they should feel the pain or pleasure that is appropriate to the circumstances without undue contamination by unrealized possibilities.”
Danny now had an idea that there might be a fourth heuristic—to add to availability, representativeness, and anchoring. “The simulation heuristic,” he’d eventually call it, and it was all about the power of unrealized possibilities to contaminate people’s minds. As they moved through the world, people ran simulations of the future. What if I say what I think instead of pretending to agree? What if they hit it to me and the grounder goes through my legs? What happens if I say no to his proposal instead of yes? They based their judgments and decisions in part on these imagined scenarios. And yet not all scenarios were equally easy to imagine; they were constrained, much in the way that people’s minds seemed constrained when they “undid” some tragedy. Discover the mental rules that the mind obeyed when it undid events after they had occurred and you might find, in the bargain, how it simulated reality before it occurred.
Alone in Vancouver, Danny was gripped by his new interest in the distance between worlds—the world that existed and worlds that might have come to pass but never did. Much of the work he and Amos had done was about finding structure where no one had ever thought to look for it. Here was another chance to do that. He wanted to investigate how people created alternatives to reality by undoing reality. He wanted, in short, to discover the rules of the imagination.
With one eye on a prickly colleague in his new department named Richard Tees, Danny sat down and created a vignette for a new experiment:
Mr. Crane and Mr. Tees are scheduled to leave the airport on different flights, at the same time. They traveled from town in the same limousine, were caught in the same traffic jam, and arrived at the airport thirty minutes after the scheduled departure time of their flights.
Mr. Crane is told that his flight left on time.
Mr. Tees is told that his flight was delayed, and just left five minutes ago.
Who is more upset?
The situation of the two men was identical. Both expected to miss their planes and both had. And yet 96 percent of the subjects to whom Danny put the question said that Mr. Tees was more upset. Everyone seemed to understand that reality wasn’t the only source of frustration. The emotion was also fed by its proximity to another reality—how “close” Mr. Tees came to making his flight. “The only reason for Mr. Tees to be more upset is that it was more ‘possible’ for him to reach his flight,” Danny wrote, in notes for a talk on the subject. “There is an Alice-in-Wonderland quality to such examples, with their odd mixture of fantasy and reality. If Mr. Crane is capable of imagining unicorns—and we expect he is—why does he find it relatively difficult to imagine himself avoiding a thirty-minute delay, as we suggest he does? Evidently there are constraints on the freedom of fantasy.”
It was those constraints that Danny set out to investigate. He wanted to understand better what he was now calling “counterfactual emotions,” or the feelings that spurred people’s minds to spin alternative realities in order to avoid the pain of the emotion. Regret was the most obvious counterfactual emotion, but frustration and envy shared regret’s essential trait. “The emotions of unrealized possibility,” Danny called them, in a letter to Amos. These emotions could be described using simple math. Their intensity, Danny wrote, was a product of two variables: “the desirability of the alternative” and “the possibility of the alternative.” Experiences that led to regret and frustration were not always easy to undo. Frustrated people needed to undo some feature of their environment, while regretful people needed to undo their own actions. “The basic rules of undoing, however, apply alike to frustration and regret,” he wrote. “They require a more or less plausible path leading to the alternative state.”
Envy was different. Envy did not require a person to exert the slightest effort to imagine a path to the alternative state. “The availability of the alternative appears to be controlled by a relation of similarity between oneself and the target of envy. To experience envy, it is sufficient to have a vivid image of oneself in another person’s shoes; it is not necessary to have a plausible scenario of how one came to occupy those shoes.” Envy, in some strange way, required no imagination.
Danny spent the first several months of his separation from Amos with these strange and beguiling thoughts. In early January 19
79, he wrote Amos a memo titled “The state of the ‘undoing’ project.” “I have spent some time making up disasters and undoing them in various ways,” he wrote, “in an attempt to order the alternative modes of undoing.”
A shopkeeper was robbed at night. He resisted. Was beaten in the head. Was left alone. Eventually died before robbery was noticed.
A head-on collision between two cars, each attempting to overtake under conditions of restricted visibility.
A man had a heart attack, tried in vain to reach the phone.
Someone is killed by a stray shot in a hunting accident.
“How do you undo those?” he wrote. “And Kennedy’s assassination. World War II?” He went on for eight neatly written pages. Imagination wasn’t a flight with limitless destinations. It was a tool for making sense of a world of infinite possibilities by reducing them. The imagination obeyed rules: the rules of undoing. One rule was that the more items there were to undo in order to create some alternative reality, the less likely the mind was to undo them. People seemed less likely to undo someone being killed by a massive earthquake than they were to undo a person’s being killed by a bolt of lightning, because undoing the earthquake required them to undo all the earthquake had done. “The more consequences an event has, the larger the change that is involved in eliminating that event,” Danny wrote to Amos. Another, related, rule was that “an event becomes gradually less changeable as it recedes into the past.” With the passage of time, the consequences of any event accumulated, and left more to undo. And the more there is to undo, the less likely the mind is to even try. This was perhaps one way time heals wounds, by making them feel less avoidable.
A more general rule Danny labeled “The Focus Rule.” “We tend to have a hero or an actor operating in a situation,” he wrote. “Wherever possible we’ll keep the situation fixed and have the actor move. . . . We don’t invent a gust of wind to deflect Oswald’s bullet.” An exception to this rule was when the person engaged in the undoing was the main actor of his own fantasy. He was less likely to undo his own actions than he was to undo the situation in which he found himself. “Changing or replacing oneself is much less available than changing or replacing another actor,” wrote Danny. “A world in which I have a new set of traits must be very far from the world in which I live. I may have some freedom, but I am not free to be someone else.”
The most important general rule of undoing had to do with what was surprising or unexpected. A middle-aged banker takes the same route to work every day. One day he takes a different route and is killed when a drugged-out kid in a pickup truck runs a red light and sideswipes his car. Ask people to undo the tragedy, and their minds drift to the route the banker took that day. If only he had gone the usual way! But put that same man back on his normal route, and let him be killed by the same drugged-out boy in the same truck, running a different stoplight, and no one thought: If only he had taken a different route that day! The distance the mind needed to travel from the usual way of doing things to some less ordinary way of doing things felt further than the trip made from the other direction.
In undoing some event, the mind tended to remove whatever felt surprising or unexpected—which was different from saying that it was obeying the rules of probability. A far more likely way to spare the man was to alter his timing. If he or the boy had been just a few seconds faster or slower at any moment on their tragic journeys, they’d never have collided. When undoing the accident, people didn’t think of that. It was easier to undo the unusual part of the story. “You may amuse yourself by mentally undoing Hitler,” Danny wrote, then mentioned to Amos a recent history that imagined Hitler having succeeded in his original ambition, to be a painter in Vienna. “Now imagine another [counterfactual],” wrote Danny. “Simply remember that just prior to the instant of conception there was a better than even chance that Adolf Hitler would be a lady. The probability of his being a successful artist was perhaps never so high [as the better than 50-50 chance that he would be born a girl]. Why then do we find one of these approaches to undoing Hitler quite acceptable and the other shocking, almost ungrammatical?”
The workings of the imagination reminded Danny of cross-country skiing, which he’d tried and failed to take up in Vancouver. He’d taken the beginner’s course twice, and discovered mainly how much more effort it took to climb some hill than to ski down it. The mind also preferred to go downhill when it was engaged in undoing. “The Downhill Rule,” Danny called this.
As he worked out this new idea, he had a new feeling—of having gone fast and far without Amos. At the end of his letter, he wrote, “It would help a lot if you could spend a couple of hours writing me a letter about this, before we meet next Sunday.” Danny wouldn’t recall if Amos ever wrote that letter—most likely he didn’t. Amos seemed interested in Danny’s new ideas, but for some reason he didn’t contribute to them. “He had little to say, which was rare for Amos,” said Danny. He suspected that Amos was wrestling with unhappiness, which was also unlike Amos. After he left Israel, Amos would later confide in a close friend, he was surprised by how little guilt he felt, and also by how much homesickness. Maybe that was the problem; maybe Amos, having formally immigrated to the United States, wasn’t feeling himself. Or maybe the problem was how different these new ideas felt from their other work. Their work until then had always started as a challenge to some existing, widely accepted theory. They exposed the flaws in theories of human behavior and created other, more persuasive theories. There was no general theory of the human imagination to disprove. There was nothing to destroy, or really even to push up against.
There was another problem—the dramatic new difference in their relative status was coming between them. When Amos visited the University of British Columbia, he seemed to be lowering himself. Danny went up to Palo Alto and Amos came down to Vancouver. “Amos was a contemptuous person, and I could sense how provincial he thought the place was,” said Danny. One night as they talked, Amos blurted out that the difference he felt being at Stanford was the difference of being in a place where everyone was first-rate. “That was a first,” recalled Danny. “I knew he really did not mean a thing by it and that he probably regretted saying it—but I remember the thought that it was simply inevitable that Amos would feel some condescending pity and that I would be hurt by it.”
But Danny’s overwhelming feeling was of frustration. He’d gone the better part of a decade having all his ideas more or less in Amos’s presence. There was no time at all between the moment either of them had some idea and the moment he shared it with the other. The magic was what happened next: the uncritical acceptance, the joining together of their minds. “I have a feeling that I initiate a lot, but the product is always out of my reach,” Danny would one day tell Miles Shore. Now he was back to working alone, sensing an absence of thoughts that would improve his own. “I was having an enormous number of ideas, but he wasn’t there,” said Danny. “And so those ideas were wasted, because they didn’t have the benefit of the kind of thinking that Amos was capable of putting into things.”
A few months after Danny wrote his memo to Amos, in April 1979, he and Amos delivered a pair of talks at the University of Michigan. The occasion was the prestigious annual Katz-Newcomb Lecture Series, and the striking thing about it, to Danny, was that both of them had been invited, not just Amos. Danny’s impression that Amos might be feeling low on new ideas was confirmed when Amos took for the subject of his talk their joint work on framing. Danny’s was his first public unveiling of ideas he had cooked up in their nine months apart. “The Psychology of Possible Worlds,” he called it. “Because we feel ourselves to be among friends,” he began, “Amos and I have decided on what otherwise would be a risky choice for this lecture. A topic that we have only recently begun to study, and about which we still have much more enthusiasm than we have knowledge. . . . We shall explore the role of unrealized possibilities in our emotional response to reality and in our understanding
of it.”
He then explained the rules of undoing. He had created more vignettes to test on subjects—in addition to a banker who was killed in a car crash by a drugged-out boy, there was another unlucky man, who had died of both a heart attack and from failing to hit the brakes on his car. Most of them he’d dreamed up late at night in Vancouver. He’d been awakened so often by his thoughts on the subject that he’d kept a notepad by his bed. Amos might be the superior mind, but Danny was the better talker. Amos might be getting the lion’s share of the rewards of their relocation to North America, but that couldn’t last forever: People would see his contribution. The audience was enthralled—he could see that. And when he was done, no one was in a hurry to leave. They were standing around together, and Amos’s old mentor Clyde Coombs approached them with genuine wonder in his eyes. “The ideas, so many ideas, where do they come from?” he asked. And Amos said, “Danny and I don’t talk about these things.”
Danny and I don’t talk about these things.
That was the moment when the story unspooling in Danny’s mind began to change. Later he would point to it and say: That is the beginning of the end of us. He would later seek to undo the moment, but when he did, he did not say, “If only Clyde Coombs had not asked that question.” Or: “If only I felt as invulnerable as Amos.” Or: “If only I had never left Israel.” He said, “If only Amos was capable of self-effacement.” Amos was the actor in Danny’s imagination. Amos was the object in focus. Amos had been handed on a platter a chance to give Danny credit for what he had done, and Amos had declined to take it. They’d move on, but the moment had lodged itself in Danny’s mind and would refuse to leave it. “Something happens when you are with a woman you love,” said Danny. “You know something happened. You know it’s not good. But you go on.” You are in love, and yet you sense a new force pulling you out of it. Your mind has lit upon the possibility of another narrative. You half hope something comes along to stabilize or reenergize the old one. In this case, nothing came along. “I wanted Amos to lean back against what was happening and he was not doing it, nor did he accept that he had to do it,” said Danny.
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