The Undoing Project

by Michael Lewis

  He spent the last week of his life at home, with his wife and children. He’d obtained the drugs he needed to end his own life, when he felt it was no longer worth living, and found ways to let his children know what he planned to do, without coming out and saying it. (“What do you think of euthanasia?” he asked his son Tal casually.) Toward the end, his mouth turned blue; his body was bloated. He never took painkillers. On May 29, Israel held an election for prime minister, and a militaristic Benjamin Netanyahu defeated Shimon Peres. “So I won’t see peace in my lifetime,” Amos said, upon hearing the news. “But I was never going to see peace in my lifetime.” Late on the night of June 1, his children heard from their father’s bedroom the sound of footsteps and his voice. Talking, perhaps to himself. Thinking. On the morning of June 2, 1996, Amos’s son Oren entered his father’s bedroom and found him dead.

  His funeral was a blur. It had an unreal feeling to it. The people in attendance could imagine many things, but they had trouble imagining Amos Tversky dead. “Death is unrepresentative of Amos,” said his friend Paul Slovic. Amos’s Stanford colleagues, who had come to think of Danny as a figure from the distant past, were shocked when he appeared and approached the front of the synagogue. (“It was like seeing a fucking ghost,” said one.) “He seemed disoriented, almost shell-shocked,” recalled Avishai Margalit. “There was a feeling of unfinished business.” In a room filled with people dressed in dark suits, Danny had arrived in shirtsleeves, as he would have done for an Israeli funeral. That struck people as odd: He didn’t seem to know where he was. But no one thought it was anything but correct that Danny delivered the main eulogy. “It was clear that he was the one to talk,” said Margalit.

  * * *

  Their final conversations had been mostly about their work. But not all of them. There were things Amos wanted to say to Danny. He wanted to tell him that no one had caused him more pain in his life. To stop himself from echoing the sentiment, Danny had to bite his tongue. He also said that Danny was, even now, the person he most wanted to talk to. “He said I’m the one he’s most comfortable talking to, because I’m not afraid of death,” recalled Danny. “He knew I’m ready to die anytime.”

  As Amos approached his death, Danny spoke to him nearly every day. He wondered aloud at Amos’s desire to keep on living exactly as he had, and his disinterest in fresh, new experiences. “What am I going to do, go to Bora-Bora?” Amos had replied. From that moment Danny lost any interest he might have had in ever visiting Bora-Bora. The mention of the name would forever trigger an uneasy ripple in his mind. After Amos had told him that he was dying, Danny had suggested that they write something together—an introduction to a collection of their old papers. Amos had died before they could finish. In their final conversation, Danny told Amos that he dreaded the thought of writing something under Amos’s name of which Amos might disapprove. “I said, ‘I don’t trust what I’m going to do,’” Danny said. “And he said, ‘You will just have to trust in the model of me that is in your mind.’”

  Danny remained at Princeton, where he had gone to escape Amos. After Amos’s death, Danny’s phone rang more often than ever. Amos might be gone, but their work lived on, and it was getting more and more attention. And when people spoke of it they no longer said “Tversky and Kahneman.” People began to refer to “Kahneman and Tversky.” Then, in the fall of 2001, Danny received an invitation to visit Stockholm and speak at a conference. Members of the Nobel Committee would attend, along with leading economists. All the speakers but Danny were economists. Like Danny, they were all pretty obviously under consideration for the prize. “It was an audition,” said Danny. He worked hard to prepare his talk, which he knew had to be about something other than the work he had done with Amos. Some of his friends found that odd, as it was the joint work with Amos that had caught the interest of the Nobel Committee. “I was invited for the joint work,” said Danny, “but I needed to show that I on my own am good enough. The question wasn’t, was the work worthy? The question was, am I worthy?”

  Danny didn’t usually prepare his talks. He’d once given a college commencement speech entirely off-the-cuff, and no one seemed to realize that he hadn’t thought about what he was going to say until he sat on the dais waiting to be announced. That talk in Stockholm he’d really worked on. “I sweated it out to such an extent that I spent a lot of time choosing the exact color of the background for the slides,” he said. His subject was happiness. He spoke of the ideas that he most regretted not exploring together with Amos. How people’s anticipation of happiness differed from the happiness they experienced, and how both differed from the happiness they remembered. How you could measure these things—by, say, questioning people before, during, and after painful colonoscopies. If happiness was so malleable, it made a mockery of economic models that were premised on the idea that people maximized their “utility.” What, exactly, was to be maximized?

  After his talk, Danny returned to Princeton. He had the idea that, if he was ever to be given a Nobel Prize, it would be the following year. They’d seen and heard him in the flesh. They’d judge him worthy or not.

  All potential winners were aware of the day the call from Stockholm would come, in the early morning, were it to come at all. On October 9, 2002, Danny and Anne sat in their home in Princeton, both waiting and not waiting. Danny was actually writing a reference for one of his star graduate students, Terry Odean. He honestly hadn’t thought much about what he would do if he won a Nobel Prize. Or, rather, he had specifically not allowed himself to think much about what he would do if he won a Nobel Prize. As a child during the war, he’d cultivated an active fantasy life. He would play out elaborate scenes with himself at the center of them. He imagined himself single-handedly winning the war and ending it, for example. But because he was Danny, he made a rule about his fantasy life: He never fantasized about something that might happen. He established this private rule for his imagination once he realized that, after he had fantasized about something that might actually happen, he lost his drive to make it happen. His fantasies were so vivid that “it was as if you actually had it,” and if you actually had it, why would you bother to work hard to get it? He’d never end the war that killed his father, so what did it matter if he created an elaborate scenario in which he won it single-handedly?

  Danny had not allowed himself to imagine what he would do if he were ever given a Nobel Prize. Which was just as well, as the phone didn’t ring. At some point Anne got up and said, a bit sadly, “Oh well.” Every year there were disappointed people. Every year there were old people waiting by phones. Anne went off to exercise and left Danny alone. He’d always been good at preparing himself for not getting what he wanted, and in the grand scheme of things this was not a hard blow. He was fine with who he was and what he had done. He could now safely imagine what he would have done had he won the Nobel Prize. He would have brought Amos’s wife and children with him. He would have appended to his Nobel lecture his eulogy of Amos. He would have carried Amos to Stockholm with him. He would have done for Amos what Amos could never do for him. There were many things Danny would have done, but now he had things to do. He went back to writing his enthusiastic reference for Terry Odean.

  Then the phone rang.

  A NOTE ON SOURCES

  Papers written for social science journals are not intended for public consumption. For a start, they’re instinctively defensive. The readers of academic papers, in the mind’s eye of their authors, are at best skeptical, and more commonly hostile. The writers of these papers aren’t trying to engage their readers, much less give them pleasure. They’re trying to survive them. As a result, I found that I was able to get a clearer, more direct, and more enjoyable understanding of the ideas in academic papers by speaking with their authors than by reading the papers themselves—though of course I read the papers, too.

  The academic papers of Tversky and Kahneman are an important exception. Even as they wrote for a narrow acad
emic audience, Danny and Amos seemed to sense a general reader waiting for them, in the future. Danny’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow was openly directed at the general reader, and that helped this general reader in many ways. Actually, I watched Danny agonize over his book for several years, and even read early drafts of some of it. Everything Danny wrote, like everything he said, was full of interest. Still, every few months he’d be consumed with despair, and announce that he was giving up writing altogether—before he destroyed his own reputation. To forestall his book’s publication he paid a friend to find people who might convince him not to publish it. After its publication, when it landed on the New York Times bestseller list, he bumped into another friend, who later described what must be the oddest response any author has ever had to his own success. “You’ll never believe what happened,” said Danny incredulously. “Those people at the New York Times made a mistake and put my book on the bestseller list!” A few weeks later, he bumped into the same friend. “It’s unbelievable what is going on,” said Danny. “Because those people at the New York Times made that mistake and put my book on their bestseller list, they’ve had to keep it there!”

  I would encourage anyone interested in my book to read Danny’s book, too. For those whose thirst for psychology remains unquenched, I’d recommend two other books, which helped me come to grips with the field. The eight-volume Encyclopedia of Psychology will answer just about any question you might have about psychology, clearly and directly. The nine-volume (and counting) A History of Psychology in Autobiography will answer just about any question you might have about psychologists, though less directly. The first volume of this remarkable series was published in 1930, and it continues to motor along, fueled by an endlessly renewable source of energy: the need felt by psychologists to explain why they are the way they are.

  At any rate, in grappling with my subject, I obviously leaned on the work of others. Here are those I leaned on:

  INTRODUCTION: THE PROBLEM THAT NEVER GOES AWAY

  Thaler, Richard H., and Cass R. Sunstein. “Who’s on First.” New Republic, August 31, 2003. https://newrepublic.com/article/61123/whos-first.

  CHAPTER 1: MAN BOOBS

  Rutenberg, Jim. “The Republican Horse Race Is Over, and Journalism Lost.” New York Times, May 9, 2016.

  CHAPTER 2: THE OUTSIDER

  Meehl, Paul E. Clinical versus Statistical Prediction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1954.

  ——— . “Psychology: Does Our Heterogeneous Subject Matter Have Any Unity?” Minnesota Psychologist 35 (1986): 3–9.

  CHAPTER 3: THE INSIDER

  Edwards, Ward. “The Theory of Decision Making.” Psychological Bulletin 51, no. 4 (1954): 380–417. http://worthylab.tamu.edu/courses_files/01_edwards_1954.pdf.

  Guttman, Louis. “What Is Not What in Statistics.” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 26, no. 2 (1977): 81–107. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2987957.

  May, Kenneth. “A Set of Independent Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Simple Majority Decision.” Econometrica 20, no. 4 (1952): 680–84.

  Rosch, Eleanor, Carolyn B. Mervis, Wayne D. Gray, David M. Johnson, and Penny Boyes-Braem. “Basic Objects in Natural Categories.” Cognitive Psychology 8 (1976): 382–439. http://www.cns.nyu.edu/~msl/courses/2223/Readings/Rosch-CogPsych1976.pdf.

  Tversky, Amos. “The Intransitivity of Preferences.” Psychological Review 76 (1969): 31–48.

  ——— . “Features of Similarity.” Psychological Review 84, no. 4 (1977): 327–52. http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/dm/Tversky-features.pdf.

  CHAPTER 4: ERRORS

  Hess, Eckhard H. “Attitude and Pupil Size.” Scientific American, April 1965, 46–54.

  Miller, George A. “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information.” Psychological Review 63 (1956): 81–97.

  CHAPTER 5: THE COLLISION

  Friedman, Milton. “The Methodology of Positive Economics.” In Essays in Positive Economics, edited by Milton Friedman, 3–46. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953.

  Krantz, David H., R. Duncan Luce, Patrick Suppes, and Amos Tversky. Foundations of Measurement—Vol. I: Additive and Polynomial Representations; Vol. II: Geometrical, Threshold, and Probabilistic Representations; Vol III: Representation, Axiomatization, and Invariance. San Diego and London: Academic Press, 1971–90; repr., Mineola, NY: Dover, 2007.

  Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman. “Belief in the Law of Small Numbers.” Psychological Bulletin 76, no. 2 (1971): 105–10.

  CHAPTER 6: THE MIND’S RULES

  Glanz, James, and Eric Lipton. “The Height of Ambition,” New York Times Magazine, September 8, 2002.

  Goldberg, Lewis R. “Simple Models or Simple Processes? Some Research on Clinical Judgments,” American Psychologist 23, no. 7 (1968): 483–96.

  ——— . “Man versus Model of Man: A Rationale, Plus Some Evidence, for a Method of Improving on Clinical Inferences.” Psychological Bulletin 73, no. 6 (1970): 422–32.

  Hoffman, Paul J. “The Paramorphic Representation of Clinical Judgment.” Psychological Bulletin 57, no. 2 (1960): 116–31.

  Kahneman, Daniel, and Amos Tversky. “Subjective Probability: A Judgment of Representativeness.” Cognitive Psychology 3 (1972): 430–54.

  Meehl, Paul E. “Causes and Effects of My Disturbing Little Book.” Journal of Personality Assessment 50, no. 3 (1986): 370–75.

  Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman. “Availability: A Heuristic for Judging Frequency and Probability.” Cognitive Psychology 5, no. 2 (1973): 207–32.

  CHAPTER 7: THE RULES OF PREDICTION

  Fischhoff, Baruch. “An Early History of Hindsight Research.” Social Cognition 25, no. 1 (2007): 10–13.

  Howard, R. A., J. E. Matheson, and D. W. North. “The Decision to Seed Hurricanes.” Science 176 (1972): 1191–1202. http://www.warnernorth.net/hurricanes.pdf.

  Kahneman, Daniel, and Amos Tversky. “On the Psychology of Prediction.” Psychological Review 80, no. 4 (1973): 237–51.

  Meehl, Paul E. “Why I Do Not Attend Case Conferences.” In Psychodiagnosis: Selected Papers, edited by Paul E. Meehl, 225–302. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1973.

  CHAPTER 8: GOING VIRAL

  Redelmeier, Donald A., Joel Katz, and Daniel Kahneman. “Memories of Colonoscopy: A Randomized Trial,” Pain 104, nos. 1–2 (2003): 187–94.

  Redelmeier, Donald A., and Amos Tversky. “Discrepancy between Medical Decisions for Individual Patients and for Groups.” New England Journal of Medicine 322 (1990): 1162–64.

  ——— . Letter to the editor. New England Journal of Medicine 323 (1990): 923. http://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJM199009273231320.

  ——— . “On the Belief That Arthritis Pain Is Related to the Weather.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 93, no. 7 (1996): 2895–96. http://www.pnas.org/content/93/7/2895.full.pdf.

  Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman. “Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.” Science 185 (1974): 1124–31.

  CHAPTER 9: BIRTH OF THE WARRIOR PSYCHOLOGIST

  Allais, Maurice. “Le Comportement de l’homme rationnel devant le risque: critique des postulats et axiomes de l’école américaine.” Econometrica 21, no. 4 (1953): 503–46. English summary: https://goo.gl/cUvOVb.

  Bernoulli, Daniel. “Specimen Theoriae Novae de Mensura Sortis,” Commentarii Academiae Scientiarum Imperialis Petropolitanae, Tomus V [Papers of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Petersburg, Vol. V], 1738, 175–92. Dr. Louise Sommer of American University did apparently the first translation into English: for Econometrica 22, no. 1 (1954): 23–36. See also Savage (1954) and Coombs, Dawes, and Tversky (1970).

  Coombs, Clyde H., Robyn M. Dawes, and Amos Tversky. Mathematical Psychology: An Elementary Introduction. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970.

  Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Fa
rrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. The Jack and Jill scenario in chapter 9 of the present book is from p. 275 of the hardcover edition.

  von Neumann, John, and Oskar Morgenstern. Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1944; 2nd ed., 1947.

  Savage, Leonard J. The Foundations of Statistics. New York: Wiley, 1954.

  CHAPTER 10: THE ISOLATION EFFECT

  Kahneman, Daniel, and Amos Tversky. “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk.” Econometrica 47, no. 2 (1979): 263–91.

  CHAPTER 11: THE RULES OF UNDOING

  Hobson, J. Allan, and Robert W. McCarley. “The Brain as a Dream State Generator: An Activation-Synthesis Hypothesis of the Dream Process.” American Journal of Psychiatry 134, no. 12 (1977): 1335–48.

  ——— . “The Neurobiological Origins of Psychoanalytic Dream Theory.” American Journal of Psychiatry 134, no. 11 (1978): 1211–21.

  Kahneman, Daniel. “The Psychology of Possible Worlds.” Katz-Newcomb Lecture, April 1979.

  Kahneman, Daniel, and Amos Tversky. “The Simulation Heuristic.” In Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, edited by Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky, 3–22. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

  LeCompte, Tom. “The Disorient Express.” Air & Space, September 2008, 38–43. http://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/the-disorient-express-474780/.

  Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman. “The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice.” Science 211, no. 4481 (1981): 453–58.

  CHAPTER 12: THIS CLOUD OF POSSIBILITY

  Cohen, L. Jonathan. “On the Psychology of Prediction: Whose Is the Fallacy?” Cognition 7, no. 4 (1979): 385–407.

  ——— . “Can Human Irrationality Be Experimentally Demonstrated?” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 4, no. 3 (1981): 317–31. Followed by thirty-nine pages of letters, including Persi Diaconis and David Freedman, “The Persistence of Cognitive Illusions: A Rejoinder to L. J. Cohen,” 333–34, and a response by Cohen, 331–70.