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The Two Friends Who Changed How We Think About How We Think

By Cass R. Sunstein and Richard Thaler

In 2003, we reviewed “Moneyball,” Michael Lewis’s book about Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s. The book, we noted, had become a sensation, despite focussing on what would seem to be the least exciting aspect of professional sports: upper management. Beane was a failed Major League Baseball player who went into the personnel side of the business and, by applying superior “metrics,” had remarkable success with a financial underdog. We loved the book—and pointed out that, unbeknownst to the author,  it was really about behavioral economics , the combination of economics and psychology in which we shared a common interest, and which we had explored together with respect to public policy and law.

Why isn’t the market for baseball players “efficient”? What is the source of the biases that Beane was able to exploit? Some of the answers to these questions, we suggested, might be found by applying the insights of the Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, on whose work  behavioral economics greatly relies . Lewis read the review, began to take an interest in the whole topic of human rationality, and, improbably, decided to write a book about Kahneman and Tversky. He kindly even gave us credit for setting him down this path.

Though we were pleased that Lewis was taking an interest in our field, we admit to being skeptical when we heard about his book plan. Granted, Lewis has shown many times before—not only with “Moneyball” but also with “The Big Short,” his book about the real-estate market, and “Flash Boys,” which is about high-speed trading—that he can write a riveting book about an arcane subject. And we did not doubt the appeal of the book’s main characters: one of us had written several papers with Kahneman, and the other had known Kahneman and Tversky since 1977 and had collaborated with both men. (Tversky died in 1996, at the age of fifty-nine. Kahneman, now eighty-two, is blessedly still very much with us.) Both of us had been deeply influenced by their joint work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making. Still, how was Lewis going to turn a story about their  lives  into the kind of page-turner that he’s known for? Kahneman and Tversky were brilliant, but they did most of their work together more than thirty years ago, and they worked primarily by talking to each other, switching between English and Hebrew. Where’s the book?

Our skepticism was misplaced. The book, titled “The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds,” captivated both of us, even though we thought we knew most of the story—and even though the book is just what Lewis had said it would be, a book about Amos and Danny, two men who changed how people think about how people think. Lewis accomplishes this in his usual way, by telling fascinating stories about intriguing people, and leaving readers to make their own judgments about what lessons should be learned. He provides a basic primer on the research of Kahneman and Tversky, but almost in passing; what is of interest here is the collaboration between two scientists. Having written several articles and one book together, we have firsthand experience in both the joys and struggles of getting two minds to speak with one voice, and the conflicts that can arise when one author is a fast writer and the other likes to linger over each word. And while one gleans a good deal about teamwork from the book, Lewis doesn’t spell the lessons out. Instead, the reader learns through observation, getting as close as anyone could to being in those closed rooms where the two men worked.

In 1968, Tversky and Kahneman were both rising stars in the psychology department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. They had little else in common. Tversky was born in Israel and had been a military hero. He had a bit of a quiet swagger (along with, incongruously, a slight lisp). He was an optimist, not only because it suited his personality but also because, as he put it, “when you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice. Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens.” A night owl, he would often schedule meetings with his graduate students at midnight, over tea, with no one around to bother them.

Tversky was a font of memorable one-liners, and he found much of life funny. He could also be sharp with critics. After a nasty academic battle with some evolutionary psychologists, he proclaimed, “Listen to evolutionary psychologists long enough, and you’ll stop believing in evolution.” When asked about artificial intelligence, Tversky replied, “We study natural stupidity.” (He did not really think that people were stupid, but the line was too good to pass up.) He also tossed off such wisdom as “The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.” Managers who spend most of their lives in meetings should post that thought on their office walls.

Early in his career, Tversky was a “mathematical psychologist,” which meant that he used formal models to characterize human behavior. He didn’t care for metaphors: “They replace genuine uncertainty about the world with semantic ambiguity. A metaphor is a cover-up.” He was organized and highly disciplined. His office was spotless; there was nothing on his desk except a pad, a mechanical pencil, and an eraser. (Even Tversky made mistakes.)

If there were a pad and pencil in Daniel Kahneman’s office, on the other hand, Kahneman would struggle to find them. Born in Tel Aviv when his mother was visiting family, he spent his childhood in Paris, speaking French as his first language. His father was a chemist in a cosmetics company. In 1940, the German occupation put the family at risk. Hiding in the South of France, they managed to survive (with the exception of his father, who died in 1944, from untreated diabetes). After the war, the rest of the family immigrated to Palestine.

A constant worrier, Kahneman is an early riser who often wakes up alarmed about something. He is prone to pessimism—claiming that, by expecting the worst, he is never disappointed. This pessimism extends to the expectations he has for his own research, which he likes to question: “I get a sense of movement and discovery whenever I find a flaw in my thinking.” In our own collaborations with Kahneman, we saw this close up, as he would proclaim, at what seemed to be the final stages of some joint work, that he had just discovered a fatal problem with our whole approach and that we would have to give up or start all over again. He was usually wrong about that—but sometimes he was right, and the constant worry made the work much better.

Tversky liked to say, “People are not so complicated.  Relationships  between people are complicated.” But then he would pause and add, “Except for Danny.” So, yes, they were different, but those who saw them together, spending endless hours just talking, knew that something special happened when they applied their two very different minds to a problem. Lewis both captures and sharpens the contrast between them, showing us why their collaboration was impossibly incongruous and yet perfectly complementary.

The names Kahneman and Tversky are now well known among social scientists, but even experts in the field will not know the story of how their collaboration began. At the beginning of their careers, they worked in different branches of psychology: Kahneman studied vision, while Tversky studied decision-making. Like much of psychology, these topics can be studied only indirectly; one can’t directly monitor what people see or think (yet). In those days, mathematical psychologists like Tversky conceived of thinking in much the same way as economists: choices were thought to be made more or less “correctly,” as people incorporate new information and make good choices for themselves. By contrast, those studying vision made much use of common mistakes such as visual illusions. (What does the fact that we see what seems to be water on a desert highway tell us about the vision system?) As Kahneman put it, “How do you understand memory? You don’t study memory. You study forgetting.”

In the spring of 1969, Kahneman invited Tversky to speak at his seminar. Tversky chose to outline some cutting-edge experiments about how people learn from new information. The experiments seemed to demonstrate that ordinary people were close to being rational; they thought like “intuitive statisticians.” Though the presentation was impressive, Kahneman thought that the experiments were, as Lewis writes, “just incredibly stupid,” and that they demonstrated no such thing. Insisting that judgments are more like sensory perceptions (and similarly prone to error), he went after Tversky hard, as people do in the best academic environments. Tversky almost never lost an argument, but he lost this one.

Very much in character, Tversky reacted to this loss by coming back for more. His friend Avishai Margalit, the distinguished Israeli philosopher, calls the session “Kahneman and Tversky’s Big Bang.” He recalls meeting an agitated Tversky, who “started by dragging me into a room. He said, ‘You won’t believe what happened to me.’ He tells me that he had given this talk and Danny had said, ‘Brilliant talk, but I don’t believe a word of it.’ ”

Before long, Kahneman and Tversky were in constant conversation. They worked intensely in a small seminar room or a coffee shop, or while taking a long walk. The sessions were private; no one else was invited to join. As they began to produce work together, each sentence would be written, rewritten, and rewritten again, with Kahneman manning the typewriter. (Tversky never did master the art of the keyboard.) On a good day, they would write a paragraph or two. Everything was produced jointly; they did not really know where one’s thought ended and the other’s began. Graduate students “now wondered how two so radically different personalities could find common ground, much less become soul mates,” Lewis writes. One reason was that “Danny was always sure he was wrong. Amos was always sure he was right.”

That actually did help. While Tversky was “the most terrifying mind most people had ever encountered,” he was uncharacteristically receptive to Kahneman’s ideas. Kahneman, for his part, found Tversky’s arrogance surprisingly liberating: “It was extremely rewarding to feel like Amos, smarter than almost everyone.” And they laughed together—a lot. As Kahneman said, “Amos was always very funny, and in his presence I became funny as well, so we spent hours of solid work in continuous amusement.”

What followed was a period of extraordinary creativity—the best and most original work that either of them had done, or would do, at any stage in his career. In the period between 1971 and 1979, they published the work that would eventually win Kahneman the Nobel Prize in Economics. (The prize would certainly have been shared with Tversky had he still been alive. Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously.) There were two distinct themes: judgment and decision-making. Judgment is about estimating (or guessing) magnitudes and probabilities.  How likely is it that a billionaire businessman from New York with no experience in government gets elected President?  Decision-making is about how we choose, especially when there is uncertainty (meaning almost all the time).  What should we do now?

Kahneman and Tversky showed that, in both of these domains, human beings hardly behave as if they were trained or intuitive statisticians. Rather, their judgments and decisions deviate in identifiable ways from idealized economic models. Most of the importance of Kahneman and Tversky’s work lies in the claim that departures from perfect rationality can be anticipated and specified. In other words, errors are not only common but also predictable.

For instance: ask people what they think is the ratio of gun homicides to gun suicides in the United States. Most of them will guess that gun homicides are much more common, but the truth is that gun suicides happen about twice as often. The explanation that Kahneman and Tversky offered for this type of judgment error is based on the concept of “availability.” That is, the easier it is for us to recall instances in which something has happened, the more likely we will assume it is. This rule of thumb works pretty well most of the time, but it can lead to big mistakes when frequency and ease of recall diverge. Since gun homicides get more media coverage than gun suicides, people wrongly think they are more likely. The availability heuristic, as Kahneman and Tversky called it, leads people to both excessive fear and unjustified complacency—and it can lead governments astray as well.

The influence of their work has been immense—not only in psychology and economics, where it has become part of the normal conversation, but in every other field of social science,  as well as medicine , law, and, increasingly, business and public policy. And this legacy is based on what by current standards would be considered a very small number of papers—eight, to be precise. (They went on to write more papers together in the years that followed, but the foundation was laid with those few from the nineteen-seventies.)

The low rate of output was one of their strengths, and is a direct result of their joint personality traits. Kahneman’s constant worry about how they might be wrong combined perfectly with Tversky’s mantra: “Let’s get it right.” And it takes a long time to write a paper when both authors have to agree on every word, one by one.

The Kahneman and Tversky partnership was extraordinary in terms of its scientific impact—they are the Lennon and McCartney of social science—and even now, when joint work is increasingly common in academia, enduring teams like theirs are extremely rare. In Lewis’s account, the relationship between Kahneman and Tversky was as intense as a marriage. As anyone who has been married knows, marriages can be fraught, and they sometimes dissolve entirely, rarely amicably. Tversky and Kahneman never got divorced, but they did start dating other people, and their relationship became strained.

After the two decided to leave Israel, in 1978, Tversky quickly received offers from Harvard and Stanford (where he ended up). Kahneman, who was looking for jobs jointly with his equally distinguished wife, Anne Treisman, was hired at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver—a fine university, but lower in status than those that pursued his friend. At a relatively young age, Tversky received honorary degrees from Yale and the University of Chicago.

Although their work had been a true collaboration of equals, Tversky had unofficially been declared the star of the team, which didn’t sit well with Kahneman. Tensions were aggravated in 1984, when Tversky was given a MacArthur “genius” grant, and Kahneman wasn’t. Kahneman was not actually eligible for the award, which is given only to American citizens or residents, but not many people realized this—and, what’s more, when Kahneman moved to Berkeley, two years later, thus becoming eligible, the MacArthur Foundation still did not give him a fellowship. The incident illustrates another one of Kahneman and Tversky’s most famous concepts: loss aversion. When the MacArthur grants are awarded every year, only the most egomaniacal of us read the list and say, “Damn, I lost.” Unless, that is, your best friend wins the prize for work you did entirely together.

The two did not stop being friends, or stop talking nearly every day, or stop working on occasional projects. But once they were separated by distance, and began working with students and other co-authors, their relationship lost its ease. The way Kahneman saw it, “Amos changed. When I gave him an idea he would look for what was good in it. For what was right with it. . . . He stopped doing that.” He noted, “Something happens when you are with a woman you love. You know something happened. You know it’s not good. But you go on.” Tellingly, he added, “I wanted something from  him , not from the world.” After one particularly difficult interaction, Kahneman decided, and told Tversky, that they were no longer even friends. “I sort of divorced him.” This is the kind of outburst that Kahneman typically takes back within a few days, as he did at least a dozen times when he declared that he was abandoning for good his book project, which would eventually become the mega-best-seller “Thinking, Fast and Slow.”

In the case of his breakup with Tversky, fate intervened to hasten the inevitable reversal. Only three days later, Tversky called to say that he had just been diagnosed with a malignant melanoma and that he had, at most, six months to live. As Kahneman recalled, “He was saying, ‘We’re friends, whatever you think we are.’ ”

In the remaining six months, Kahneman and Tversky worked on the introduction to an edited collection of papers related to their work, an introduction Kahneman had to finish after Tversky died. Kahneman had (of course) worried about completing this introduction alone, and Tversky had (of course) assured him that he should just trust the mental model that, by now, he surely had of Tversky’s mind. But no one has that model, alas. That is why collaborations are so special: one partner cannot simply replace the mind of the other, even after twenty-five years.

Tversky once said, “It is sometimes easier to make the world a better place than to prove you have made the world a better place.” But it is not hard to prove that Amos and Danny did so—you only have to read those papers that they published in the seventies. Or, for that matter, Lewis’s book.

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THE UNDOING PROJECT

A friendship that changed our minds.

by Michael Lewis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 6, 2016

Kahneman and Tversky approached their personal lives and their research in extremely divergent manners. At times, Lewis’...

The bestselling author combines biography with recent intellectual history in a saga about the influential Israeli psychologist team of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.

Tversky died in 1996, before Lewis ( Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt , 2014, etc.) even recognized his name. But Kahneman is still living, and Lewis spent lots of time with him studying his theories of how the human mind works while making decisions ranging from product purchasing decisions to choosing a marriage partner. Lewis’ fascination with Tversky and Kahneman began with a reference in a review of his bestseller Moneyball , a book that explained how the Oakland Athletics organization overhauled its decision-making processes in order to sign the best athletes possible on a limited budget. The review praised Lewis for explaining how most baseball executives had been choosing players using irrational criteria. The review also emphasized that the author seemed unaware that the techniques were grounded in the decades-old research of Tversky and Kahneman. That research demonstrated the irrationalities of the human brain and recommended how such irrational thinking could be minimized. By the time Lewis approached Kahneman, the potential book subject had won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, despite identifying as a psychologist. However, he had not yet completed his bestselling book Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), so Lewis would be chronicling an individual nearly unknown outside academia. The result is largely successful. As always, Lewis’ writing style is engaging and mostly irresistible. The opening chapter is slightly disorienting because it never mentions the book’s subjects; instead, the author chronicles the journey of a professional basketball executive hoping to construct a systematic method of choosing players. However, after Lewis eases into the main subjects, he ably captures their outsized personalities, explaining how they came to collaborate and how that collaboration slowly frayed.

Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-393-25459-4

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | PSYCHOLOGY | BUSINESS | LEADERSHIP, MANAGEMENT & COMMUNICATION | GENERAL BUSINESS

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BOOK REVIEW

by Michael Lewis

GOOD ECONOMICS FOR HARD TIMES

by Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2019

Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.

“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.

It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty , 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.

Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0

Page Count: 432

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019

GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | GENERAL BUSINESS | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | BUSINESS | PUBLIC POLICY | ISSUES & CONTROVERSIES | ECONOMICS

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SEEN & HEARD

THE RIGHT STUFF

by Tom Wolfe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 24, 1979

Yes: it's high time for a de-romanticized, de-mythified, close-up retelling of the U.S. Space Program's launching—the inside story of those first seven astronauts. But no: jazzy, jivey, exclamation-pointed, italicized Tom Wolfe "Mr. Overkill" hasn't really got the fight stuff for the job. Admittedly, he covers all the ground. He begins with the competitive, macho world of test pilots from which the astronauts came (thus being grossly overqualified to just sit in a controlled capsule); he follows the choosing of the Seven, the preparations for space flight, the flights themselves, the feelings of the wives; and he presents the breathless press coverage, the sudden celebrity, the glorification. He even throws in some of the technology. But instead of replacing the heroic standard version with the ring of truth, Wolfe merely offers an alternative myth: a surreal, satiric, often cartoony Wolfe-arama that, especially since there isn't a bit of documentation along the way, has one constantly wondering if anything really happened the way Wolfe tells it. His astronauts (referred to as "the brethren" or "The True Brothers") are obsessed with having the "right stuff" that certain blend of guts and smarts that spells pilot success. The Press is a ravenous fool, always referred to as "the eternal Victorian Gent": when Walter Cronkite's voice breaks while reporting a possible astronaut death, "There was the Press the Genteel Gent, coming up with the appropriate emotion. . . live. . . with no prompting whatsoever!" And, most off-puttingly, Wolfe presumes to enter the minds of one and all: he's with near-drowing Gus Grissom ("Cox. . . That face up there!—it's Cox. . . Cox knew how to get people out of here! . . . Cox! . . ."); he's with Betty Grissom angry about not staying at Holiday Inn ("Now. . . they truly owed her"); and, in a crude hatchet-job, he's with John Glenn furious at Al Shepard's being chosen for the first flight, pontificating to the others about their licentious behavior, or holding onto his self-image during his flight ("Oh, yes! I've been here before! And I am immune! I don't get into corners I can't get out of! . . . The Presbyterian Pilot was not about to foul up. His pipeline to dear Lord could not be clearer"). Certainly there's much here that Wolfe is quite right about, much that people will be interested in hearing: the P-R whitewash of Grissom's foul-up, the Life magazine excesses, the inter-astronaut tensions. And, for those who want to give Wolfe the benefit of the doubt throughout, there are emotional reconstructions that are juicily shrill. But most readers outside the slick urban Wolfe orbit will find credibility fatally undermined by the self-indulgent digressions, the stylistic excesses, and the broadly satiric, anti-All-American stance; and, though The Right Stuff has enough energy, sass, and dirt to attract an audience, it mostly suggests that until Wolfe can put his subject first and his preening writing-persona second, he probably won't be a convincing chronicler of anything much weightier than radical chic.

Pub Date: Sept. 24, 1979

ISBN: 0312427565

Page Count: 370

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1979

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

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by Tom Wolfe

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The Undoing Project review – ‘psychology’s Lennon and McCartney’

A ll love stories involve the science of decision making – for better or worse, richer or poorer. No romance has been as alive to the fallibility of that process as the one described in this book. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman were both the grandsons of eastern European rabbis. Chance and fate brought them together in Tel Aviv in the 1960s. Their subsequent deep friendship and intellectual collaboration – a bromance that invented “behavioural economics” and established cognitive rules for human irrationality – has arguably done as much to define our world as, say, the intertwining between Francis Crick and James Watson.

One of the Israeli duo’s observations was that “no one ever made a decision because of a number – they needed a story”. Kahneman and Tversky argued and proved that in the main humans decided things emotionally, not rationally – the trick was to recognise those habits, and not confuse one for the other. Practising what they preached, their scientific papers were rigorous with fact and research but laced with memorable parable and anecdote. They never made the mistake of thinking that the behaviour they described – of subconscious biases and illogical choices that skewed markets and misunderstood risk – did not also apply to themselves.

Michael Lewis, with his great gift for humanising complex and abstract ideas, is exactly the storyteller Tversky and Kahneman deserve. He came to their story surprisingly late. Lewis’s landmark 2003 book Moneyball described the ways in which the Oakland Athletics baseball team had employed scientific data analysis rather than instinct and experience to mould a successful team. That strategy, unbeknown to Lewis, had its intellectual roots in papers written by Kahneman and Tversky 30 years earlier, but which were only then becoming mainstream thinking. Lewis’s omission was made clear in a review by Richard H Thaler, the Chicago professor and co-author of Nudge , who had done much to promote and extend the Israeli pair’s thinking.

It was only after that review that Lewis read Kahneman and Tversky’s work and realised the limitation of what he had written in Moneyball (which itself became a phenomenon): “I’d set out to tell a story about the way markets worked, or failed to work, especially when they were valuing people,” he says. “But buried somewhere inside it was another story, one that I’d left unexplored and untold, about the way the human mind worked, or failed to work, when it was forming judgments and making decisions.” This book puts that omission right.

It is rooted, brilliantly, in the biographies of the two men (Tversky died in 1996; Kahneman has clearly spent a lot of time talking to Lewis). Anyone who has read Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow will know a few elements of this biography – that he developed some of his theories while creating performance tests for the Israeli army, for example – but much of it is revelatory. Lewis presents the pair of academics partly, like all the greatest double acts, as star-crossed lovers – in their formative years, each of them seems, in retrospect, to have been waiting for the other to arrive in order to find out exactly what he was capable of.

Both had dramatically challenging rites of passage. Kahneman was the son of a chemist who worked for the L’Oréal factory in Paris. When war broke out his father was interned as a Jew, but saved from transportation to the gas chambers by the president of the perfume company (who was in other respects a Nazi collaborator). With his family fearing that the pardon wouldn’t hold, they escaped from Paris, holing up in the south of France where they lived through one winter in a chicken coop. Kahneman was seven. His father died of diabetes towards the end of the war and with his mother and sister Daniel ended up in Jerusalem on the front line of the conflict that attended the creation of Israel. Not surprisingly, having been “hunted through his childhood like a rabbit”, he developed a survivor’s instinct, and a constant fear of the worst – habits he carried into his academic training as a psychologist.

Tversky, three years Kahneman’s junior, was a fighter rather than a survivor. A slight, skinny kid, with genius-level intelligence, he volunteered as soon as he could for commando training in the Israeli army and became a fearless soldier, commended for bravery by Moshe Dayan. More than his patriotic heroism, though, it was his insouciant intellect that singled him out. By the time he met Kahneman, Tversky was long used to being the cleverest man in any room. Colleagues spoke of his ability to converse on equal terms with Nobel laureate physicists, with only passing acquaintance of their fields. He also enjoyed pricking pomposity. After a talk by Murray Gell-Mann, discoverer of the quark, he remarked: “You know, Murray, there is no one in the world who is as smart as you think you are…”

Tversky and Kahneman saw in the other something that they lacked. Kahneman had moved in his academic career from one idea to the next, never focusing. In a world of specialism, he distrusted narrowness. Tversky was a brilliant shaper of ideas, not an instigator of them, and he recognised in Kahneman’s scattershot mind exactly the raw material he needed. “Amos almost suspended disbelief when we were working together,” Kahneman said. “And that was the engine of collaboration.”

They were, in this sense, the Lennon and McCartney of behavioural psychology: they understood each other better than they understood themselves. Their first paper was about how people were routinely drawn to extrapolating conclusions from statistically insignificant samples: “Belief in the Law of Small Numbers” – a faith that if a coin came down heads twice in a row, the next toss was more likely to be tails. That kind of thing. “Even the fairest coin, given the limitations of its memory and moral sense, cannot be as fair as the gambler expects it to be,” they wrote.

For a decade or so after this they compulsively counted the ways in which we habitually build pattern into random experience, seeing trends in the past, prophesying the future, detailing our general inability to live with uncertainty and doubt, and the consequences for our politics and our economics. “We study natural stupidity not artificial intelligence,” Tversky said.

As with all highly creative partnerships, cracks and jealousies began to show. Having established this one’s seductive chemistry Lewis’s story details its explosive break-up in all its painful inevitability. “People don’t choose between things, they choose between descriptions of things,” Kahneman observed. And though we all make mistakes, some prove more forgivable than others.

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The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

Whether it's baseball, the housing crash or high-speed stock trading, Michael Lewis has a knack for tackling subjects that will enable his readers to see the world through a new lens. Given that talent, he must have felt an inevitable kinship to Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, whose collaboration on a series of groundbreaking behavioral studies changed forever the way we understand how human beings make decisions.

Lewis' latest work, THE UNDOING PROJECT, is the absorbing story of that collaboration. It's both a highly readable introduction to Kahneman and Tversky's work and a deeply human account of their unlikely and intense relationship, a story of "how two so radically different personalities could find common ground, much less become soul mates."

Lewis' interest in this body of research dates all the way back to a review of his 2003 book, MONEYBALL, by Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein and University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler, who helped popularize Kahneman and Tversky's ideas about how the human mind "functioned when it faced uncertain situations." As Lewis notes, "These ideas had taken some time to seep into the culture, but now they were in the air we breathed. There was a new awareness of the sorts of systematic errors people might make --- and so entire markets might make --- if their judgments were left unchecked."

"Anyone confronting the ideas of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman for the first time through this engaging work is unlikely ever again to think the same way about the complicated phenomenon of how we make up our minds."

Beginning in the late 1960s and extending until approximately 1983, Tversky and Kahneman devised a series of highly original experiments designed to expose the mental shortcuts --- what they called heuristics --- that bias our decision making. Without previous exposure to the Israelis' work, Lewis gave currency to some of these ideas in his account of how Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane helped transform the evaluation of baseball talent through the use of analytics. THE UNDOING PROJECT explores how Kahneman and Tversky's insights helped transform fields as disparate as the Israeli military, the health care industry and (thanks to Cass Sunstein) the U.S. school lunch program, and ultimately upended our view of "the pitfalls in the human mind when it was required to render judgments in conditions of uncertainty."

With a generous helping of examples from their research, Lewis patiently traces the evolution of Kahneman and Tversky's theories and the path they took into the culture at large. Among the decision-making deficiencies ruthlessly exposed by this psychological research are our tendency to generalize from small samples (representativeness) or by examples close at hand (availability) and anchoring, illustrated by an experiment that asked its subjects to estimate the percentage of African countries in the United Nations after spinning a wheel of fortune. Subjects who spun a higher number tended to guess a higher percentage, while those who guessed a lower number guessed smaller. Lewis demonstrates, through his concise and yet informative description of the Israeli psychologists' work, how "the rules of thumb people used to evaluate probability led to misjudgments."

THE UNDOING PROJECT is also an intensely human story. Though they both received their undergraduate degrees from Hebrew University of Jerusalem, it would be hard to find two such dissimilar scholars. Kahneman, the elder by three years, was a French Holocaust survivor whose father died before his son and wife immigrated in 1946 to what would become the State of Israel two years later. Plagued by self-doubt, his interest in psychology was fueled by his service in the Israel Defense Forces, where he devised personality tests to assess the qualifications of recruits. In contrast, Tversky, a native of Israel and paratrooper in the IDF who received one of the army's highest medals for bravery, was an assertive and charismatic personality. A mathematical psychologist, he had an abiding interest in how people made decisions.

Lewis zestfully describes how these two superficially mismatched men would retreat to a conference room for hours on end, with the only sound coming from the room the echo of their laughter. "They'd become a single mind," Lewis argues, "creating ideas about why people did what they did, and cooking up odd experiments to test them." Beginning with their first paper, "Belief in the Law of Small Numbers," in 1971, they worked a revolution in the field of decision making, culminating in the articulation of what they called "prospect theory" in 1979, the foundation for the field of behavioral economics.

There's a poignancy to Lewis' description of how Tversky and Kahneman's relationship eroded after the mid-1980s, the victim of professional jealousy on the latter's part and their divergent career paths. Both permanently left Israel: Tversky to take a prestigious position at Stanford and Kahneman to join the faculty at the University of British Columbia. Tversky died of cancer in 1996, while Kahneman, alive today at age 82, won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 for their joint work, recounted in detail in his New York Times bestseller, THINKING, FAST AND SLOW.

In THE UNDOING PROJECT, Michael Lewis again reveals his facility for taking an arcane subject and making it accessible to a wide readership. Anyone confronting the ideas of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman for the first time through this engaging work is unlikely ever again to think the same way about the complicated phenomenon of how we make up our minds.

Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg on December 15, 2016

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis

• Publication Date: December 6, 2016
• Genres: Economics , Nonfiction , Psychology
• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• ISBN-10: 0393254593
• ISBN-13: 9780393254594

BOOK REVIEW article

Book review: the undoing project: a friendship that changed our minds.

• Psychology, General Studies, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia

A Book Review on The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds

Michael Lewis, (New York, NY: Norton), 2017, 368 pages, ISBN: 978-0-393-25459-4.

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds is best-selling author Lewis' (2017) account of the lives and deep collaboration between Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. It tells the story of two brilliant psychologists, and distinctive personalities, who, through their research on cognitive biases, upended traditional notions of rationality in human thought that had previously served as the foundation for much economic and decision making theory. The importance of their research for fields as diverse as medicine and public health (e.g., Redelmeier and Tversky, 1990 ); decision making and economic policy (e.g., Thaler and Sunstein, 2008 ); as well as management and investment strategy earned Kahneman the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002 (Tversky passed away in 1996).

Lewis (Moneyball, The Big Short, The Blind Side) is a story-teller with a unique ability to make complex ideas accessible and entertaining, and the extensive research he has done in preparing this book shows throughout. A years-long personal friendship with Dr. Kahneman, considerable cooperation from Tversky's remaining family members, and extensive interactions with the pair's many collaborators and colleagues allow him to provide color and insights into their personalities, personal histories, and relationships that no one else could. The reader, thus, is able to learn about Kahneman and Tversky's research and its many real-world implications through numerous illuminating and often surprising anecdotes. Lewis begins his chronicle, for example, with 30 pages examining how professional basketball teams evaluate prospective players, and the many ways in which this process is prone to error. We are not actually introduced to Kahneman until around page 50 of the text, where we get to know him through a recollection of his childhood experiences as a Jew in Nazi-occupied France, and his early forays into psychology as an officer in the Israeli army. Similarly, Tversky is introduced, some 40 pages later, as he is standing in line to apply to Hebrew University's newly formed psychology department; looking smart in his paratrooper's uniform and astounding compatriots with his wit. Using this kind of story-driven approach, Lewis provides a consistently compelling portrait of these two unique personalities and their formative influences, while chronicling their discovery of many, now well-known, biases in human reasoning. Often difficult to grasp concepts such as the availability heuristic, anchoring and adjustment, the base-rate fallacy, prospect theory, and loss aversion (e.g., Kahneman and Tversky, 1979 ; Kahneman et al., 1982 ; Kahnemann, 2011 ) are all set forth in narratives that even the most non-technical readers should find easy to digest.

True to Lewis' relaxed narrative approach, his protagonists don't actually meet until some 140 pages deep into the manuscript. There we witness the cocky mathematical genius Tversky being challenged by Kahneman over his presentation of a simple theory related to Bayesian decision making. Up to that point Tversky had more or less taken for granted, like most decision theorists of the era, that human thinking adhered to mathematical principles in some form. Kahneman; whom Lewis describes as a perpetual doubter, forever questioning everything, instinctively pounced on Tversky's overly theoretical description of human thought. From Kahneman's perspective, humans make decisions based on impressions; math need not be involved. Rather than starting from real behavior, decision theorists were, in Kahneman's view, simply creating mathematical models and attempting to interpret reality through those models. Apparently, for Tversky this was something of a revelation. From that time on, the two began to spend more and more time together, bouncing ideas around and gradually developing what would become a decades-long friendship and collaboration.

Lewis' work is, at heart, the story of Kahneman and Tversky's relationship. For many years the two were practically inseparable, spending hours together most days, simply exploring all manner of ideas, and laughing. The two complemented each other in important ways: Tversky freed the naturally insecure Kahneman to experience a level of confidence and joy; while Kahneman pushed the hyper-confident Tversky to question ideas and see different perspectives in a manner that others could not. As described by Lewis, they worked so closely together that neither had any real conception of where their ideas came from. In this sense, theirs was a true collaboration; their work together became much more than either could lay claim to individually. Their story takes its tragic turns however: The two take up positions at different universities and, although they continue to collaborate, over time, jealousy and resentment creep into their exchanges. By the time of Tversky's early death from cancer, their friendship was just a faint reflection of its previous form.

In sum, aside from being just generally entertaining, The Undoing Project will be a worthwhile and enjoyable read for anyone with an interest in decision making, the research process and the nature of collaboration. The interested reader is rewarded on many levels by Lewis' work: It has engaging portrayals of history, war, and survival. It tells the story of a unique friendship between two exceptional individuals. And, it details important psychological findings as well as their broader implications in lively anecdotal form. Prospective graduate students and others who are considering a career in academia can learn much about university life and the nature of collaboration from this work. Others, with even a passing interest in psychology and human nature, should find the many stories and insights presented here to be compelling reading as well.

Author Contributions

The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and approved it for publication.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Kahneman, D., and Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: an analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica 47, 263–291. doi: 10.2307/1914185

CrossRef Full Text

Kahneman, D., Slovic, P., and Tversky, A. (1982). Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases . New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

PubMed Abstract | Google Scholar

Kahnemann, D. (2011). Thinking Fast and Slow . New York, NY: Farrar Strauss, & Giroux.

Lewis, M. (2017). The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds. New York, NY: Norton.

Google Scholar

Redelmeier, D. A., and Tversky, A. (1990). Discrepancy between medical decisions for individual patients and for groups. N. Engl. J. Med. 322, 1162–1164.

Thaler, R., and Sunstein, C. (2008). Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New York, NY: Penguin Books.

Keywords: decision making, collaborations, history of psychology, behavioral economics, cognitive biases

Citation: Bonn G (2017) Book Review: The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds. Front. Psychol . 8:2211. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02211

Received: 22 October 2017; Accepted: 05 December 2017; Published: 13 December 2017.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2017 Bonn. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Gregory Bonn, [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Book Review: The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds

Michael Lewis, editor. The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds. 2017. New York, NY: Norton. 368 p. ISBN: 978-0-393-25459-4.

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds is best-selling author Lewis' ( 2017 ) account of the lives and deep collaboration between Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. It tells the story of two brilliant psychologists, and distinctive personalities, who, through their research on cognitive biases, upended traditional notions of rationality in human thought that had previously served as the foundation for much economic and decision making theory. The importance of their research for fields as diverse as medicine and public health (e.g., Redelmeier and Tversky, 1990 ); decision making and economic policy (e.g., Thaler and Sunstein, 2008 ); as well as management and investment strategy earned Kahneman the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002 (Tversky passed away in 1996).

Lewis (Moneyball, The Big Short, The Blind Side) is a story-teller with a unique ability to make complex ideas accessible and entertaining, and the extensive research he has done in preparing this book shows throughout. A years-long personal friendship with Dr. Kahneman, considerable cooperation from Tversky's remaining family members, and extensive interactions with the pair's many collaborators and colleagues allow him to provide color and insights into their personalities, personal histories, and relationships that no one else could. The reader, thus, is able to learn about Kahneman and Tversky's research and its many real-world implications through numerous illuminating and often surprising anecdotes. Lewis begins his chronicle, for example, with 30 pages examining how professional basketball teams evaluate prospective players, and the many ways in which this process is prone to error. We are not actually introduced to Kahneman until around page 50 of the text, where we get to know him through a recollection of his childhood experiences as a Jew in Nazi-occupied France, and his early forays into psychology as an officer in the Israeli army. Similarly, Tversky is introduced, some 40 pages later, as he is standing in line to apply to Hebrew University's newly formed psychology department; looking smart in his paratrooper's uniform and astounding compatriots with his wit. Using this kind of story-driven approach, Lewis provides a consistently compelling portrait of these two unique personalities and their formative influences, while chronicling their discovery of many, now well-known, biases in human reasoning. Often difficult to grasp concepts such as the availability heuristic, anchoring and adjustment, the base-rate fallacy, prospect theory, and loss aversion (e.g., Kahneman and Tversky, 1979 ; Kahneman et al., 1982 ; Kahnemann, 2011 ) are all set forth in narratives that even the most non-technical readers should find easy to digest.

True to Lewis' relaxed narrative approach, his protagonists don't actually meet until some 140 pages deep into the manuscript. There we witness the cocky mathematical genius Tversky being challenged by Kahneman over his presentation of a simple theory related to Bayesian decision making. Up to that point Tversky had more or less taken for granted, like most decision theorists of the era, that human thinking adhered to mathematical principles in some form. Kahneman; whom Lewis describes as a perpetual doubter, forever questioning everything, instinctively pounced on Tversky's overly theoretical description of human thought. From Kahneman's perspective, humans make decisions based on impressions; math need not be involved. Rather than starting from real behavior, decision theorists were, in Kahneman's view, simply creating mathematical models and attempting to interpret reality through those models. Apparently, for Tversky this was something of a revelation. From that time on, the two began to spend more and more time together, bouncing ideas around and gradually developing what would become a decades-long friendship and collaboration.

Lewis' work is, at heart, the story of Kahneman and Tversky's relationship. For many years the two were practically inseparable, spending hours together most days, simply exploring all manner of ideas, and laughing. The two complemented each other in important ways: Tversky freed the naturally insecure Kahneman to experience a level of confidence and joy; while Kahneman pushed the hyper-confident Tversky to question ideas and see different perspectives in a manner that others could not. As described by Lewis, they worked so closely together that neither had any real conception of where their ideas came from. In this sense, theirs was a true collaboration; their work together became much more than either could lay claim to individually. Their story takes its tragic turns however: The two take up positions at different universities and, although they continue to collaborate, over time, jealousy and resentment creep into their exchanges. By the time of Tversky's early death from cancer, their friendship was just a faint reflection of its previous form.

In sum, aside from being just generally entertaining, The Undoing Project will be a worthwhile and enjoyable read for anyone with an interest in decision making, the research process and the nature of collaboration. The interested reader is rewarded on many levels by Lewis' work: It has engaging portrayals of history, war, and survival. It tells the story of a unique friendship between two exceptional individuals. And, it details important psychological findings as well as their broader implications in lively anecdotal form. Prospective graduate students and others who are considering a career in academia can learn much about university life and the nature of collaboration from this work. Others, with even a passing interest in psychology and human nature, should find the many stories and insights presented here to be compelling reading as well.

Author contributions

The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and approved it for publication.

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The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds Paperback – October 31, 2017

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“Brilliant. . . . Lewis has given us a spectacular account of two great men who faced up to uncertainty and the limits of human reason.” ―William Easterly, Wall Street Journal

• Print length 368 pages
• Language English
• Publisher W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date October 31, 2017
• Dimensions 5.5 x 0.9 x 8.2 inches
• ISBN-10 0393354776
• ISBN-13 978-0393354775
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (October 31, 2017)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 368 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0393354776
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0393354775
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 7.2 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.9 x 8.2 inches
• #33 in Medical Cognitive Psychology
• #39 in Business Decision Making
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About the author

Michael lewis.

Michael Lewis, the best-selling author of The Undoing Project, Liar's Poker, Flash Boys, Moneyball, The Blind Side, Home Game and The Big Short, among other works, lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, Tabitha Soren, and their three children.

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The Undoing Project – Book Review

23rd december, 2016.

Michael Lewis could spin gold out of any topic he chose but his best work has shone a spotlight into corners of the world that weren’t getting enough attention until Lewis came along. Liar’s Poker described bond trader Lewis Ranieri and the way securitisation revolutionised Wall Street in the 1980s. Moneyball covered baseball manager Billy Beane and anticipated the “quants” taking over the world. And The Big Short depicted Steve Eisman and Michael Burry, the men who spotted the financial crisis coming and bet vast sums on it.

When Tversky died young, in 1996, he was on the secret shortlist for a Nobel memorial prize in economics, and received a detailed obituary in The New York Times. Kahneman won the Nobel economics prize in 2002 and published his own bestselling book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, in 2011. Their ideas are everywhere; it’s almost impossible to find a book in the “smart thinking” section of a bookshop that doesn’t cite Kahneman and Tversky: an irony, since their work highlights many of the ways in which our thinking isn’t smart at all.

For example, they identified the “representativeness heuristic” — our tendency to make judgments by comparing an example to some mental model. When we meet a nervous, geeky-looking gentleman we note that he matches our stereotype of a programmer and, therefore, probably is a programmer. We forget that most of the people we meet are not, in fact, programmers, no matter how much they might resemble them.

This matters, because when judging probabilities we often skip over the real question, “Is this likely?”, in favour of a representativeness question: “Does this match my preconceptions?”. “Is the lump likely to be a malignant tumour?” becomes “Does the lump match my idea of what a malignant tumour looks like?”. It’s a reasonable rule of thumb that can lead us seriously astray.

All this is well known to anyone who has read Kahneman himself or popularisations of his work, so what does Lewis add? He’s a far better writer than most, meaning that even the familiar is fresh. And there is a great deal here that feels new. Lewis has done his homework; he has evidently talked to the right people — with the inevitable omission of the much-missed Tversky — and he knows how to tell a story simply, powerfully and with an eye for the telling detail.

Yet The Undoing Project gets off to a shaky start with a chapter discussing the selection of basketball players and the way in which basketball scouts commit various cognitive errors. Perhaps the success of Moneyball encouraged Lewis and his editor to think this was wise but it adds very little to our appreciation of the main characters, and much of the chapter is baffling unless one happens to be a fan of American sports.

All is forgiven in chapter two, when we meet the young Danny Kahneman, a Paris-raised Jew whose family spend the war dodging the Nazis and their sympathisers. No matter how many accounts one reads of such horrors, the reader is filled with sadness and a kind of awe at the survivors. At the age of seven, Danny was caught on the streets after curfew by an SS soldier. The man didn’t notice the yellow star under his sweater; instead, he hugged little Danny and, full of emotion, showed him a photograph of another young boy. Then he gave Danny some money and sent him on his way. “People were endlessly complicated and interesting,” Kahneman recalled.

Tversky is no less deftly portrayed: as a child, he was so bullish that he was willing to leap from a high diving board despite being unable to swim — he simply arranged for a bigger boy to be on hand to drag him to safety. As a soldier, Tversky saw a comrade pull the pin on a grenade-like explosive, then faint. As his commanding officer yelled orders to stay put, Tversky dashed forward, dragged the stricken man a few yards away, then dived to cover him, taking the shrapnel into his own body. Yet he berated his own men for carelessly taking risks. “If a bullet is going to kill me, it has my name on it anyway,” they would say. Tversky, a quick wit, reminded them that many bullets were addressed “To Whom It May Concern”.

Today, Kahneman and Tversky’s view of human psychology is widely accepted, and thanks to his longevity and his Nobel Prize, Kahneman is a more famous figure than Tversky. But Lewis takes us back in time, conjuring up the 1970s, when their ideas were new and controversial, they were operating in the backwater of Israeli academia, and when it was the mesmerising Amos rather than the quiet Danny who won all the attention.

Behavioural economics itself is not a major part of the book. Richard Thaler, the most important intellectual conduit between Kahneman and Tversky and economics, does not appear in the story until the closing chapters. While Tversky loved to have an intellectual foe to slay, it would diminish his work with Kahneman to define it merely as a takedown of textbook economics. By writing less about behavioural economics Lewis gives Kahneman and Tversky’s ideas room to breathe.

Lewis admires his subjects and believes they are right about everything important. He has no time for rational economic man, and brutally dismisses one noted critic of Kahneman, the psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer. But this isn’t a hagiography. Tversky is depicted as intellectually aggressive, contemptuous of many academics and perversely compelled to needle the vulnerable Kahneman. Meanwhile, a new side to Kahneman emerges. In my limited personal experience, Kahneman seems wise, kindly and stoic in the face of his advancing years. But Lewis describes the younger Kahneman as depressed, envious of his celebrated partner and desperately needy.

Nevertheless, it is clear that Lewis is cheering our heroes on, and the reader cannot help but join him. The story he tells of their intellectual love affair, and its painful disintegration, is vivid, original and hard to forget. Written for and first published in the Financial Times .

My new book “ Messy ” is now out and available online in the US and UK or in good bookshops everywhere.

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Book review -- the undoing project: a friendship that changed our minds.

Psychology permeates nearly every area of human endeavor. In the world of investing, for instance, psychology can help us understand the systematically poor decision-making that drives the academic anomalies explored on this blog. One cannot be a student of investing without also being a student of psychology.

The emergent field of behavioral economics puts our irrational tendencies under the microscope, and is largely based on discoveries that arose from a unique collaboration between two Israeli psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (K&T). Although Kahneman went on to win a Nobel Prize in 2002 in connection with this body of work, Tversky, sadly could not share it since he passed away in 1996 (the Nobel is only awarded to living scholars).

In “The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds,” Michael Lewis tells the story of K&T’s remarkable collaboration and one of the most productive academic partnerships in history.

Michael Lewis

The book can be found here .

Want to see all our book reviews ?

Michael Lewis has a way of shedding light on overlooked areas that can have profound influences. If you read his book, “Moneyball,” you know that the Oakland A’s overcame the lowest payroll in baseball by focusing on statistics-driven algorithms, instead of flawed human scouting assessments. “The Undoing Project” explores the how and why of this type of human irrationality, and the history of K&T’s research effort to explore human decision-making under uncertainty.

What I like about the book?

The book offers an engrossing biographical perspective on this brilliant academic duo. The individual stories of these men and their work makes for a fascinating read.

Lewis describes Kahneman’s childhood, which he spent as a Jewish refugee trying to avoid the Nazis during the German occupation of France in the early 1940s. Although Kahneman’s father died during the war, Kahneman and his mother eventually made their way to Jerusalem, where Kahneman attended high school, and later Hebrew University, to pursue studies in psychology. Later, having distinguished himself intellectually by earning a PhD from Berkeley, Kahneman was called on by the Israeli military to apply his knowledge of psychology to the problem of evaluating new conscripts, and training soldiers.

During this time, Amos Tversky, who was several years younger than Kahneman, was jumping out of airplanes as a paratrooper and leading Israeli army platoons in combat. Like Kahneman, he was a formidable intellect, and also studied psychology at Hebrew University. After getting his PhD at the University of Michigan, he returned in 1966 to Israel.

Both men were teaching in the psychology department at Hebrew University in 1969, when Kahneman invited Tversky to speak at a seminar. Tversky presented work by Ward Edwards that described humans as “conservative Bayesians,” an idea that struck Kahneman as attributing far too much statistical sophistication to humans who, as Kahneman knew from his experience with the military, often made messy real-world decisions based on imperfect intuition and misperceptions that didn’t fit easily into elegant math-based academic theories. Kahneman laid into the presentation, and the usually confident Tversky began to question himself, recognizing there were new dimensions to his field that he had not considered.

Soon after, K&T began working closely together, observing the cognitive errors they themselves tended to make, and then testing these on others. They noted that different classes of biases led to predictable logical inconsistencies in how humans reason. They would spend hours together in a room, dissecting their own misjudgments, and could be heard laughing behind closed doors. They devised clever experiments that pinpointed and probed the mechanisms of these errors. Who contributed what to their research efforts? They couldn’t say. It was a team effort and the two worked so well together they would finish each other’s sentences.

They were also polar opposites in temperament. Tversky was gregarious, outgoing and confident. Meanwhile, Kahneman shunned the spotlight and was consumed by uncertainty. It was a combination that worked well together. Kahneman’s self-doubt enabled him to relentlessly explore his own cognitive errors, and Tversky’s brashness drove the forceful tone of a series of pioneering papers they co-authored.

They proposed that people relied on mental shortcuts (heuristics) when forming judgments, and these led to errors: the Halo effect; Representativeness; Availability; Anchoring; Framing; the Endowment effect, and many more. Whole books could be written about each of these areas ( we’ve written extensively on these subjects as well). The granddaddy of them all, and the basis for the Nobel prize, may be Prospect Theory, which is the idea that losses hurt more than gains of similar magnitude feel good.

These ideas started as simple observations they empirically measured in others, but revealed profound truths about how humans perceive the world. In the end, we should be skeptical of our own judgment, since it is deeply clouded by bias.

One sense in which their work together was an “undoing project” was in that while their distinct personalities allowed for their combined brilliance, it also created the conditions for their “undoing,” and the dissolution of the partnership.

Tversky had a reputation as a first-rate intellect, and was outspoken and charismatic. Khaneman was left off some papers, and when people called they wanted to talk to Tversky. It was Tversky who was hired for the prestigious positions, while Kahneman was the afterthought. In the end, Kahneman grew resentful of the attention that people paid to Tversky. This became so difficult for Kahneman that they eventually went their separate ways, driven by Kahneman’s desire for recognition of his own talents.

Thus, “The Undoing Project” is a tragedy with an ironic twist — ironic because today, with Tversky gone, it is Kahneman who receives all the accolades, which is the reverse of the dynamic that triggered their separation. It must be bittersweet for Kahneman today, and I’m sure the irony is not lost on him.

Constructive Criticism

One criticism I have of the book is that some of the writing felt like a re-hash of Kahneman’s 2011 magnum opus, “Thinking Fast and Slow,” which is carefully organized around K&D’s work. The “Undoing Project” by contrast, is more of a biography, with the academic ideas presented in hodgepodge fashion, or referred to only in passing, as Lewis races through the literature. Perhaps this is unavoidable. Lewis had to make the book short and accessible, but cover a lot of complex material and condense it into a compelling read.

Meanwhile K&T labored over the language they used. Lewis reports that Tversky might wrestle with the wording of a single sentence for an entire day. Also, even “Thinking Fast and Slow” is itself a summary. If you really want to understand these ideas you have to read the source papers, and study and reflect on the ideas over time. If your goal is to come away with a deep understanding of this academic work, you will be disappointed. There is simply too much ground to cover in a mass-market paperback format.

However, if you are looking for a brief but readable overview of the field and don’t have the patience or time for a cognitively demanding slog through “Thinking Fast and Slow,” the book is excellent. Or, if you are already familiar with K&T’s work and are curious to know more about the personalities and history behind this unique academic collaboration, it’s outstanding. As usual, Lewis spins a good yarn. It’s engaging, entertaining and laugh-out-loud funny in parts. Take this exchange between a Houston Rockets basketball scout and a prospective player:

Rockets Interviewer: What do you know about the Houston Rockets?

Player: I know you are in Houston.

That’s vintage Lewis. He extracts the absurdity of a situation and serves it up for our enjoyment, and instruction: While funny (and not a bad answer?), it has nothing to do with whether the player can help the Rockets! And that’s the point. It’s snippets like this that makes the book fun to read. There’s a lot of this kind of thing. Another great moment: When asked if their work related to artificial intelligence, Tversky responded, “You know, not really…We study natural stupidity instead of artificial intelligence.”

This made me laugh, but also gave me pause. Is it really “stupidity” K&T were studying? I would say it was not so much stupidity, as the failure of human rationality. Maybe those are the same thing?

More generally, the book serves as a reminder of what flawed decision-makers humans are. The more people can appreciate this fact about themselves, the more skeptical they will be about judgments they make every day. If you are aware of the conditions that create bias, you are better able to defend against your own bias.

Since this is a finance blog, perhaps we should circle back to investing, where it’s especially important to understand the biases that work against us because they cost us money . If there are flaws in the Efficient Market Hypothesis, it is because humans are not perfectly rational automatons who always make rational choices. K&T demonstrated this is empirically true.

In investing, prospect theory is likely what drives the “disposition effect,” when we sell winners too early, but hang onto losers to avoid the pain of realizing a loss. Availability bias may play a role in the value effect, since negative news and earnings are salient, and cause us to overreact, sending prices below fundamental value.

K&T can provide the tools that help understand biases that apply across all domains, including investing. They taught us that we should be skeptical of ourselves since we consistently make irrational errors. It’s just how we are wired. In our own lives, it’s up to us, armed with K&T’s insights, to interpret how we can best minimize these biases so we don’t succumb to self-inflicted irrationality.

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Book Review – The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds originally appeared on http://blog.alphaarchitect.com/?p=27376

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The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds Hardcover – Illustrated, Dec 6 2016

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How a Nobel Prize–winning theory of the mind altered our perception of reality.

Forty years ago, Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky wrote a series of breathtakingly original studies undoing our assumptions about the decision-making process. Their papers showed the ways in which the human mind erred, systematically, when forced to make judgments in uncertain situations. Their work created the field of behavioral economics, revolutionized Big Data studies, advanced evidence-based medicine, led to a new approach to government regulation, and made much of Michael Lewis’s own work possible. Kahneman and Tversky are more responsible than anybody for the powerful trend to mistrust human intuition and defer to algorithms.

The Undoing Project is about a compelling collaboration between two men who have the dimensions of great literary figures. They became heroes in the university and on the battlefield―both had important careers in the Israeli military―and their research was deeply linked to their extraordinary life experiences. Amos Tversky was a brilliant, self-confident warrior and extrovert, the center of rapt attention in any room; Kahneman, a fugitive from the Nazis in his childhood, was an introvert whose questing self-doubt was the seedbed of his ideas. They became one of the greatest partnerships in the history of science, working together so closely that they couldn’t remember whose brain originated which ideas, or who should claim credit. They flipped a coin to decide the lead authorship on the first paper they wrote, and simply alternated thereafter.

This story about the workings of the human mind is explored through the personalities of two fascinating individuals so fundamentally different from each other that they seem unlikely friends or colleagues. In the process they may well have changed, for good, mankind’s view of its own mind.

• Print length 368 pages
• Language English
• Publisher WW Norton
• Publication date Dec 6 2016
• Dimensions 23.62 x 15.24 x 3.3 cm
• ISBN-10 0393254593
• ISBN-13 978-0393254594
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ WW Norton; Illustrated edition (Dec 6 2016)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 368 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0393254593
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0393254594
• Item weight ‏ : ‎ 658 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 23.62 x 15.24 x 3.3 cm
• #67 in Social Scientist & Psychologist Biographies (Books)
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About the author

Michael lewis.

Michael Lewis, the best-selling author of The Undoing Project, Liar's Poker, Flash Boys, Moneyball, The Blind Side, Home Game and The Big Short, among other works, lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, Tabitha Soren, and their three children.

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In The New York Times Book Review, David Leonhardt reviews “The Undoing Project,” by Michael Lewis. Leonhardt writes:

The changes in sports are known as the Moneyball revolution, after the title of a 2003 book by Michael Lewis, about the low-budget success of the Oakland Athletics. One review of “Moneyball” particularly caught Lewis’s eye, because it offered a criticism that had not occurred to him. Writing in The New Republic, two academics — Richard Thaler, an economist who had helped overthrow his field’s hyperrationality, and Cass Sunstein, a law professor — argued that Lewis had missed a larger story: The success of the A’s could trace its intellectual roots not only through the world of baseball’s analytical geeks but also back to the work of Kahneman and Tversky. “Until that moment I don’t believe I’d ever heard of either Kahneman or Tversky,” Lewis now writes. “My book wasn’t original. It was simply an illustration of ideas that had been floating around for decades and had yet to be fully appreciated by, among others, me.” Lewis set about learning more about the psychologists, and the result is his latest book, “The Undoing Project,” a joint biography of Kahneman and Tversky, and a discussion of their ideas and complex relationship.

On this week’s podcast, Lewis discusses “The Undoing Project”; Arianna Huffington talks about “Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less,” by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang; and Gregory Cowles and John Williams on what people are reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

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“So Long, See You Tomorrow” by William Maxwell

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“Eileen” by Ottessa Moshfegh

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• Quarterly Review

The Undoing Project (Book Review)

Lewis, Michael. “The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed our Minds.” (2016). WW Norton & Co.

Dr. Scott Downey , Associate Director and Professor

Michael Lewis (who wrote “Moneyball” and “The Big Short”) presents this terrific story of the friendship and academic rivalry between Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. It is an easy read but provides a substantive context for the foundations of behavioral economics. Lewis presents these two great minds in contrast. Tversky was optimistic and confident and Kahneman self-doubting and pessimistic. While Tversky was receiving attention, Kahneman was challenged to find his own voice. Both go on to receive Nobel-level accolades. While we learn about these two men and their impacts, we also learn about behaviorism (my field) and how it relates to economics. From their work in understanding why the Israeli military would repeatedly promote the wrong soldiers to the many examples of how humans often draw the wrong conclusions, the book is a fascinating look into how we make decisions and the biases or tricks that lead us there.

What this means for food and agribusiness

We do not always make decisions rationally—not managers, not salespeople, not customers. Human beings are terrible judges of attribution, or causality. We—academics included—are often overconfident and take mental shortcuts, overlooking facts in favor of opinion. Understanding these pitfalls can be a useful reminder that things are not always as they appear. One example of this is called the “availability” heuristic. When we have seen information repeatedly, we tend to assume that observations are caused by that fact. This concept has shaped much of my approach to discovery that we teach to salespeople. The idea is that sellers who constantly run into customers with similar problems tend to then look for those same problems. The analogy would be that a doctor who sees sneezing patients with colds all day long tends to assume that the next sneezing patient probably has a cold. This works really well. It is efficient and may be correct most of the time, except when the patient actually has allergies. There are all kinds of repercussions of this. Sales managers who are promoted into management because they were good salespeople tend to assume they know how to sell. As a result, many sales managers try to get salespeople to sell the way they did. Salespeople who are successful with their customers assume they know how to sell and approach each customer using the approach that they believe works. Both may be true. The manager and salesperson do know how to sell, but only to their customers. There is an entire set of customers who didn’t buy from them. The approach that works for one salesperson may not be the best approach for another.

Another example of their work is the theory of loss aversion. This says that people will make irrational choices in order to avoid the possibility of loss. Buyer behavior often is influenced by this factor. It is why marketers can explain rational reasoning that one product is superior to another all day long without persuading customers to make a change. A new product has inherent risk as compared to a comfortable tried and true product. This goes further into our own behavior change. We are likely to continue to pursue a “safe” way of doing things than to change what we do and receive a “potential” reward.

Kahneman and Tversky took the approach that the best way to look at human behavior was to measure actual behavior rather than just to ask questions. Measuring actual behavior helps find inconsistencies between what someone says is important to them and the way they actually act. I may, for example, say I want to lose weight, but I eat pie whenever I get the chance. The parallel in the sales area is that a customer may want to improve their yield, rate of gain, or production; but every time they have an opportunity to spend less for a product they do. Both can be true. Humans do not have to be rational. We have the ability to both want to improve and to save and we can want to lose weight and want to eat pie. Which one of these contrasting goals wins may depend on the moment. My ability to judge whether pie or weight loss wins most frequently is very poor. Liking pie more than wanting to lose weight is irrational. To admit to myself or others that I like pie more than losing weight might make me look bad, or face that I’m not who I want to be. Rather than do that, I will always say that my goal is to lose weight. Customers may say they want to improve performance, but their actions always take them a different direction. The lesson for sellers is that often today our job is helping the customer measure. Work with them to identify the inputs that lead to the outcomes they want. It’s like helping them measure the 10,000 steps they must take each day in order to get fit, except that our focus is on helping them measure the smaller steps that will help them achieve their business goals.

There are numerous other examples in “The Undoing Project” that describe how humans make errors in judgment. Many of them are predictable. I highly encourage reading this book.

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Forty years ago, Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky wrote a series of breathtakingly original studies undoing our assumptions about the decision-making process. Their papers showed the ways in which the human mind erred, systematically, when forced to make judgments in uncertain situations. Their work created the field of behavioral economics, revolutionized Big Data studies, advanced evidence-based medicine, led to a new approach to government regulation, and made much of Michael Lewis’s own work possible. Kahneman and Tversky are more responsible than anybody for the powerful trend to mistrust human intuition and defer to algorithms.

The Undoing Project is about a compelling collaboration between two men who have the dimensions of great literary figures. They became heroes in the university and on the battlefield—both had important careers in the Israeli military—and their research was deeply linked to their extraordinary life experiences. Amos Tversky was a brilliant, self-confident warrior and extrovert, the center of rapt attention in any room; Kahneman, a fugitive from the Nazis in his childhood, was an introvert whose questing self-doubt was the seedbed of his ideas. They became one of the greatest partnerships in the history of science, working together so closely that they couldn’t remember whose brain originated which ideas, or who should claim credit. They flipped a coin to decide the lead authorship on the first paper they wrote, and simply alternated thereafter.

This story about the workings of the human mind is explored through the personalities of two fascinating individuals so fundamentally different from each other that they seem unlikely friends or colleagues. In the process they may well have changed, for good, mankind’s view of its own mind.

• Print length 368 pages
• Language English
• Publisher W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date 6 December 2016
• Dimensions 23.62 x 15.24 x 3.3 cm
• ISBN-10 0393254593
• ISBN-13 978-0393254594
• See all details

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition (6 December 2016)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 368 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0393254593
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0393254594
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 658 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 23.62 x 15.24 x 3.3 cm
• #20,154 in Biographies & Autobiographies (Books)
• #23,112 in Analysis & Strategy
• #31,525 in Sciences, Technology & Medicine (Books)

About the author

Michael lewis.

Michael Lewis, the best-selling author of The Undoing Project, Liar's Poker, Flash Boys, Moneyball, The Blind Side, Home Game and The Big Short, among other works, lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, Tabitha Soren, and their three children.

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Book Review: The Undoing Project

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 Book

If 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 Book

Lewis 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 Line

If 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 .

What’s the fastest way to learn the big ideas from a great business book? Book summaries. Check out summaries from The Business Source , where you can watch, read, or listen to the big ideas from a great book in under 20 minutes.

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Book Review: The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds

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