The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

We understand a lot more about how we make decisions, the kinds of mistakes we seem to make and how we experience our world thanks to Danny and Amos, two grandsons of rabbis who lost their religion. These two men taught us that we are not natural statisticians and that our rules of thumb and gut feelings often lead us astray. They explained that we tell ourselves stories about people and things that are representative, that we make judgments based on insufficient data. For example, we often think that a handsome person is smarter. Or—take another example--have you ever decided that a three-year old is going to be a movie star or a doctor? How did you decide that this three-year old will find that profession appealing? Certainly not by using statistics. One of the first things Danny and Amos discovered is that even trained statisticians are not natural statisticians. We all make decisions based not on probability but on stories.And there is more. It turns out we are very, very risk averse. We will do a lot to avoid feeling (or remembering the feel of) pain. Indeed, we are “happy” to experience (on the whole) more pain in order to remember less pain. And we will risk a lot to avoid losing things that we own or think we own. And by think we own, I mean we have an ingrained sense of what we are entitled to. There is a famous case study of monkeys who are all perfectly happy eating cucumbers so long as they all get cucumbers. But the minute some of them got bananas and some got cucumbers the monkeys who got cucumbers threw their cucumbers away in fury. They had no interest in being treated unequally. Humans are the same way. If you treat people equally, we’re OK with that; if you obviously advantage some people over some others, we get mad. Really mad. We know all this thanks to two Israeli psychologists.When we make decisions when very little is or can be known, things are even worse. Then we use shortcuts called framing (the stories we tell to explain an event that often have little or nothing with the decision we have to make) and rules of thumb or gut feelings to make our choices. Not only that but we make decisions by referring to a story or something we recall that we think may be similar. On top of that, because we are really risk averse, we may well end up gambling in a manner that, if were able to look at our own actions from a statistical point of view, we would describe as reckless. But, as I mentioned before, we are not natural statisticians. All of this means that our decisions when little is known (say our decisions in the middle of the 2008 Crash) are uncertain at best.All this probably sounds trite to you. At any rate, you probably heard all or most of these ideas already. They’re everywhere these days. In the New York Times op-eds and in school textbooks on everything from politics to economics to biology. But when Amos and Danny started, this idea of an irrational man was hardly trite at all. The prevailing idea of man at that time was that of a rational being. Smart people believed that we were able to know and order our preferences and if we made irrational decisions it was because strong emotions got in the way of our otherwise unbounded rationality. Amos and Danny turned that view of human nature upside down.Amos Tversky and Danny Kahneman were as unlike as two people could be. Danny survived the Holocaust, hiding in various French safe houses, and that experience left him constantly doubting himself. A student’s mean review could throw him into a panic and if his ideas were not working out he would abandon them. Amos, on the other hand, was bold, brash, confident. He filled up the room. To this day, people remember his voice. The psychology they practiced was different too. Amos used formal, mathematical models to characterize and explain human behavior. Danny, Lewis tells us, was a poet who became a psychologist. So Amos and Danny were very different – but different in a way that complimented each other.When these two unlikely people formed a kind of couple—became one mind—as they Danny it, they completely changed our understanding of ourselves. And yet it was the all-too human emotion of jealousy that drove them apart. They reconciled when Amos had only six months left to live.This is a wonderful, human story about a friendship, about human nature, and about us and it is told by a wonderful story teller. I highly recommend it.

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds, by Michael Lewis, is a well-written story about two people who developed some important ideas. This book is a well-told story, but that’s both its strength and its weakness.The story is about the ideas and relationship of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. They are two Israeli psychologists who wrote a paper that was published in the journal Science in 1974 about the systematic ways that we often make mistakes in our thinking and decision-making. Knowing that, here are some ideas about who will like this book.Who Should Read This BookIf you’ve heard something about heuristics and biases in decision-making, or if someone has recommended that you read Kahneman’s book, Thinking Fast and Slow, but you don’t know if you’re quite ready for that, this book will be a great read. By telling the story about the development of the ideas that Kahneman and Tversky produced, you get a brief introduction to most of them and to why they’re important.If you like good stories about how creative people work together to produce great things, you should like this book, too. Kahneman/Tversky’s relationship was what some psychologists call a “fertile pair.” It is as much an intellectual marriage as it is a partnership, and the story of the relationship is intertwined with the development of both the ideas and the participants.If what you want is a simple introduction to heuristics and biases in decision-making, this probably won’t do the trick. It’s the story of how two psychologists developed their thinking, so you’ll pick up some things, but it’s the story of the relationship of Tversky and Kahneman and not a treatise on heuristics and biases.What’s in the BookLewis opens the book with a story about Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets, and how he set out to use data to improve the decisions involved in running that team by basing those decisions on evidence, data. He quickly discovered that while data was important, there seemed to be problems in the way that people used data, the way they think. No matter how good the data is, human beings make predictable and systematic errors in the way we think and make decisions. The work of Tversky and Kahneman is all about those predictable and systematic errors.From the Rockets, Lewis takes us to World War II and occupied Paris to introduce us to the young Daniel Kahneman. He migrates to Israel where he and Amos Tversky meet. Kahneman is quiet and self-effacing and French. Lewis describes Tversky as “a swaggering sabra. They form one of the most productive partnerships in modern science, even though they are very different people.That difference is a source of tension and problems, but it’s also the source of the rich ideas they developed together. Because it’s a story about their relationship and not a book about decision-making, Lewis leaves out a lot. For example, if you only read this book, you will think that Kahneman and Tversky coined the phrase “heuristics.” (Location 2407) That’s not the case.One of my majors in college was Management Science. I learned there were basically three kinds of problems. Some problems could be reliably solved with a recipe. If you got the right ingredients and put them through the right process, you would get a reliably good solution. Other problems required creative solutions because they were unique.Between those two, there was a class of decisions which I learned could be solved with heuristics, which were defined as guidelines or rules of thumb. Don Sull’s recent book, Simple Rules, is a good introduction to that way of thinking.Lewis is writing a book about Kahneman and Tversky and their relationship and their work. He includes things which help tell that story. He leaves out thing which don’t help move the story along. And he does everything he can to help us see the world through the lens of the Kahneman/Tversky relationship.Take the case of Gerd Gigerenzer. He’s a German psychologist. If the only thing you read about him is Lewis’s book, you’ll see him as an irrational and jealous opponent of Kahneman and Tversky. But that’s not the whole story, by a long shot.Gigerenzer comes from the point of view of Herman Simon, the American psychologist who gave us the terms “suboptimize” and “satisfice.” Gigerenzer starts from the idea that humans have bounded rationality and he sees heuristics (decision rules) as a way to make decision-making in certain situations better and faster. You might want to know more about his background, and thoughts, but Michael Lewis only gives you the part of his work that’s relevant for his story about Kahneman and Tversky.Bottom LineIf you want to read a great story of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and the ideas they developed, pick up this book and read it. You’ll love it.If all you want is an introduction to those ideas without the story of their development, read Kahneman and Tversky’s 1974 paper from the journal Science. The title is “Judgement Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.” The basics that they outline there still rule a lot of the discussion.If you want a brief but helpful discussion of heuristics as guidelines or rules of thumb, pick up a copy of Don Sull’s book, Simple Rules.If you want to go deep into Kahneman and Tversky’s ideas, you’re going to have to pick up Kahneman’s great book, Thinking Fast and Slow. It’s a book that will take some effort to read because the ideas are dense, and even though they are well-presented, they’re not cloaked in the clothes of story. If you’re willing to do the work, though, Thinking Fast and Slow may be one of the most important books you ever read. It’s that importance that spurred Michael Lewis on to writing The Undoing Project.