"The Undoing Project"

[fiefoe]

At the heart of this book is a wonderous partnership that sadly couldn't last forever. I should remember to read more Michael Lewis.

• Daryl Morey... was also a distinctly unmotivated student at Northwestern University. He nevertheless set out to make enough money to buy a professional sports team, so that he might make the decisions about who would be on it.
• He had a diffidence about him—an understanding of how hard it is to know anything for sure. The closest he came to certainty was in his approach to making decisions. He never simply went with his first thought. He suggested a new definition of the nerd: a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it.
• Morey could see that no one else was using a model to judge basketball players—no one had bothered to acquire the information needed by any model. To get any stats at all, he’d had to send people to the offices of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), in Indianapolis, to photocopy box scores of every college game over the past twenty years, then enter all that data by hand into his system.
• “Almost everything we looked at was nonpredictive,” says Morey. But not everything. Rebounds per minute were useful in predicting the future success of big guys. Steals per minute told you something about the small ones. It didn’t matter so much how tall a player was as how high he could reach with his hands—his length rather than his height.
• The 48th pick of the draft basically never even yielded a useful NBA bench player, but already Marc Gasol was proving to be a giant exception. The label they’d stuck on him clearly had affected how they valued him: names mattered. “I made a new rule right then,” said Morey. “I banned nicknames.”
• Morey’s solution was to forbid all intraracial comparison... Jeremy Lin had the quickest first move of any player measured. He was explosive and was able to change direction far more quickly than most NBA players. “He’s incredibly athletic,” said Morey. “But the reality is that every fucking person, including me, thought he was unathletic. And I can’t think of any reason for it other than he was Asian.”
• I’m about to anchor you. Here. See if you aren’t screwed up.” Everyone had been warned; everyone’s minds remained screwed up. Simply knowing about a bias wasn’t sufficient to overcome it: The thought of that made Daryl Morey uneasy.
• Morey thus became aware of what behavioral economists had labeled “the endowment effect.” To combat the endowment effect, he forced his scouts and his model to establish, going into the draft, the draft pick value of each of their own players.
• all the biases he feared might distort their judgment: the endowment effect, confirmation bias, and others. There was what people called “present bias”—the tendency, when making a decision, to undervalue the future in relation to the present. There was “hindsight bias”—which he thought of as the tendency for people to look at some outcome and assume it was predictable all along.
• That neck—like his hands, his feet, his head, and even his ears—was so cartoonishly immense that you found your eyes jumping from feature to feature and wondering if that specific body part broke a Guinness book record.
• But this raised a bigger question: Why had so much conventional wisdom been bullshit? And not just in sports but across the whole society. Why had so many industries been ripe for disruption? Why was there so much to be undone? It was curious, when you thought about it, that such a putatively competitive market as a market for highly paid athletes could be so inefficient in the first place. It was strange that when people bothered to measure what happened on the court, they had measured the wrong things so happily for so long.

• Danny’s father was released after six weeks, thanks to his association with Eugène Schueller. Schueller was the founder and head of the giant French cosmetics company L’Oréal, where Danny’s father worked as a chemist. Long after the war Schueller would be exposed as one of the architects of an organization to help the Nazis find and kill French Jews. Somehow he carved out in his mind a special exemption for his star chemist;
• They erected a partition in the middle of the room so Danny’s sister might have some privacy, but the coop wasn’t really meant for anyone to live in. In winter it grew so cold the door froze shut. His sister tried to sleep on the stove and ended up with burn marks on her robe.
• From the age of seven he had been told to trust no one, and he’d obliged. His survival had depended on keeping himself apart, and preventing others from seeing him for what he was. He was destined to become one of the world’s most influential psychologists, and a spectacularly original connoisseur of human error. His work would explore, among other things, the role of memory in human judgment.
• The war of independence lasted for ten months. A Jewish state that was the size of Connecticut before the war wound up a bit bigger than New Jersey. One percent of the Israeli population had been killed (the equivalent of ninety thousand dead in New Jersey). Ten thousand Arabs had died, and three-quarters of a million Palestinians were displaced.
• Tel Aviv was poor, but Jerusalem was even poorer. Basically no one owned a camera, or a phone, or even a doorbell.
• Danny was a refugee in the way that, say, Vladimir Nabokov was a refugee. A refugee who kept his distance. A refugee with airs. And a sharp eye for the locals.
• By then the question of whether God exists left me cold. But the question of why people believe God exists I found really fascinating. I was not really interested in right and wrong. But I was very interested in indignation. Now that’s a psychologist!”
• Danny was allowed to proceed directly to university to pursue a degree in psychology. How to do this was not obvious, as the country’s only college campus lay behind Arab lines, and its plans for a psychology department had been killed in an Arab ambush.
• U.S. Air Force hired him to train pigeons to guide bombs. Skinner taught his pigeons to peck in the right spot on an aerial map of the target, by rewarding them with food each time they did it. (They did this with less enthusiasm when antiaircraft fire was exploding around them, and so were never used in combat.)
• All the leading behaviorists were WASPs—a fact that didn’t go unnoticed by young people entering psychology in the 1950s. Looking back, a casual observer of the field at that time couldn’t help but wonder if there shouldn’t be two entirely unrelated disciplines: “WASP Psychology” and “Jewish Psychology.” The WASPs marched around in white lab coats carrying clipboards and thinking up new ways to torture rats and all the while avoided the great wet mess of human experience. The Jews embraced the mess
• How does a person turn the shards of memory into a coherent life story? Why does a person’s understanding of what he sees change with the context in which he sees it?
• They assigned him to the psychology unit. The chief feature of the Israeli army’s psychology unit in 1954 was that it had no psychologists.
• The young men applying to become officers had been given a weirdly artificial task: to move themselves from one side of a wall to the other without touching the wall, using only a long log that was not permitted to touch either the wall or the ground. “When someone says something, don’t ask yourself if it is true. Ask what it might be true of.” That was his intellectual instinct, his natural first step to the mental hoop: to take whatever someone had just said to him and try not to tear it down but to make sense of it. The question the Israeli military had asked him—Which personalities are best suited to which military roles?—had turned out to make no sense. And so Danny had gone and answered a different, more fruitful question: How do we prevent the intuition of interviewers from screwing up their assessment of army recruits?... he’d found out something about people who try to divine other people’s character: Remove their gut feelings, and their judgments improved.
• After university, in 1961, he flew for the first time in his life without a parachute, to graduate school in the United States. As his plane descended, he looked at the earth below with genuine curiosity, turned to the person sitting beside him, and said, “I’ve never landed.”
• during the Sinai campaign, his battalion captured a train of Egyptian fighting camels. Amos had never ridden a camel, but when the military operation ended, he won the competition to ride the lead camel home. He got seasick after fifteen minutes and spent the next six days walking the caravan across the Sinai.
• “if a bullet is going to kill me, it has my name on it anyway.” (To which Amos said, “What about all those bullets addressed ‘To Whom It May Concern’?”)
• But Amos approached intellectual life strategically, as if it were an oil field to be drilled, and after two years of sitting through philosophy classes he announced that philosophy was a dry well. “I remember his words,” recalled Amnon. “He said, ‘There is nothing we can do in philosophy. Plato solved too many of the problems. We can’t have any impact in this area. There are too many smart guys and too few problems left, and the problems have no solutions.’”
• Amos thought, was that it didn’t play by the rules of science. The philosopher tested his theories of human nature on a sample size of one—himself.
• If you went to a doctor in the seventeenth century, you were worse off for having gone. By the end of the nineteenth century, going to the doctor was a break-even proposition: You were as likely to come away from the visit better off as you were to be worse off. Amos argued that clinical psychology was like medicine in the seventeenth century,
• As Milholland reached his desk, Amos turned to the person seated next to him and said, “Forever and forever, farewell, John Milholland / If we do meet again, why, we shall smile / If not, why then, this parting was well made”: lines spoken by Brutus to Cassius in act 5, scene 1, of Julius Caesar. He aced the test.
• Though entirely self-taught in mathematics, Amos chose math as one of his languages and passed the test. For his second language he picked French. The test was to translate three pages from a book in the language: The student chose the book, and the tester chose the pages to translate. Amos went to the library and dug out a French math textbook with nothing but equations in it. “It might have had the word donc in it,”
• The reigning theories in psychology of how people made judgments about similarity all had one thing in common: They were based on physical distance. When you compare two things, you are asking how closely they resemble each other... People said some strange things. For instance, they said that magenta was similar to red, but that red wasn’t similar to magenta. Amos spotted the contradiction and set out to generalize it.
• “The directionality and asymmetry of similarity relations are particularly noticeable in similes and metaphors,” Amos wrote... they did not pay much attention to symmetry. To Amos—and to no one else before Amos—it followed from this simple observation that all the theories that intellectuals had dreamed up to explain how people made similarity judgments had to be false.
• Amos had his own theory, which he called “features of similarity.”† He argued that when people compared two things, and judged their similarity, they were essentially making a list of features. These features are simply what they notice about the objects... Hot drinks didn’t exist as points on some mental map at fixed distances from some ideal. They were collections of features. Those features might become more or less noticeable; their prominence in the mind depended on the context in which they were perceived. And the choice created its own context: Different features might assume greater prominence in the mind when the coffee was being compared to tea (caffeine) than when it was being compared to hot chocolate (sugar). And what was true of drinks might also be true of people, and ideas, and emotions.
• By changing the context in which two things are compared, you submerge certain features and force others to the surface... “the similarity of objects is modified by the manner in which they are classified. Thus, similarity has two faces: causal and derivative. It serves as a basis for the classification of objects, but is also influenced by the adopted classification.”
• Things are grouped together for a reason, but, once they are grouped, their grouping causes them to seem more like each other than they otherwise would. That is, the mere act of classification reinforces stereotypes. If you want to weaken some stereotype, eliminate the classification.
• If you needed a carpenter or a painter you didn’t bother to phone them, even if you owned a phone, because they never answered. You went downtown in the afternoon and hoped to bump into them. “Everything was personal, all transactions. The standard joke was: Someone runs out of their burning house to ask a friend on the street if they know someone in the Fire Department.”
• People found it hard to assign probabilities to the potential outcomes: A war with Egypt alone would probably be ugly but survivable; a war with the combined Arab states might mean total annihilation. The Israeli government arranged quietly for the public parks to be consecrated, to allow them to be used as mass graves.
• On the morning of June 5, with Egypt’s army massed along the Israeli border, the Israeli Air Force launched a surprise attack. In a few hours Israeli pilots destroyed four hundred or so planes—virtually the entire Egyptian Air Force. Then the Israeli army rolled into the Sinai. By June 7 Israel was at war on three fronts against the armies of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. Barbara went to a bomb shelter in Jerusalem and passed the time sewing sandbags.
• Just a week before, it had been the size of New Jersey; now it was bigger than West Virginia, with far more defensible borders. The radio stopped airing battle reports and played joyous Hebrew songs about Jerusalem. Here was another way Israel was different from the United States: Its wars were short, and someone always won.
• simply were regressing to the mean. They’d have tended to perform better (or worse) even if the teacher had said nothing at all. An illusion of the mind tricked teachers—and probably many others—into thinking that their words were less effective when they gave pleasure than when they gave pain... Danny later wrote, “it is part of the human condition that we are statistically punished for rewarding others and rewarded for punishing them.”
• Oh, he said, You’re comparing them to Danny Kahneman. You can’t do that. It’s not fair to them. There’s a category of teacher called Kahnemans. You cannot compare teachers to Kahnemans.
• The only way to understand a mechanism such as the eye, he thought, was by studying the mistakes that it made. Error wasn’t merely instructive; it was the key that might unlock the deep nature of the mechanism. “How do you understand memory?” he asked. “You don’t study memory. You study forgetting.”
• They found that it wasn’t just emotional arousal that altered the size of the pupil: Mental effort had the same effect. There was, quite possibly, as they put it, “an antagonism between thinking and perceiving.”
• what were you supposed to say when Danny brought in a copy of a doctor’s prescription from the twelfth century, sloppily written, in a language you didn’t know a word of, and asked you to decode it? “Someone once said that education was knowing what to do when you don’t know,”
• People shifted the odds in the right direction, in other words; they just didn’t shift them dramatically enough. Ward Edwards had coined a phrase to describe how human beings responded to new information. They were “conservative Bayesians.” That is, they behaved more or less as if they knew Bayes’s rule... In Danny’s view, people were not conservative Bayesians. They were not statisticians of any kind. They often leapt from little information to big conclusions.
• Unlike Danny, he wasn’t dismissive of theory. Theories for Amos were like mental pockets or briefcases, places to put the ideas you wanted to keep. Until you could replace a theory with a better theory—a theory that better predicted what actually happened—you didn’t chuck a theory out. Theories ordered knowledge, and allowed for better prediction.
• Even people trained in statistics and probability theory failed to intuit how much more variable a small sample could be than the general population—and that the smaller the sample, the lower the likelihood that it would mirror the broader population.
• And Danny had a far better feel for statistics than most psychologists, or even most statisticians. The entire project, in other words, was rooted in Danny’s doubts about his own work, and his willingness, which was almost an eagerness, to find error in that work. In their joint hands, Danny’s tendency to look for his own mistakes became the most fantastic material. For it wasn’t just Danny who made those mistakes: Everyone did. It wasn’t just a personal problem; it was a glitch in human nature.
• At the press of a button the entire room could be made to rock back and forth, silently, like the top of a Manhattan skyscraper in a breeze. All of this was done in secrecy. The Port Authority didn’t want to alert its future tenants that they’d be swinging in the wind, and Hoffman worried that if his subjects knew they were in a building that moved, they would become more sensitive to movement and queer the experiment’s results... And so after the “sway room” was built, Hoffman stuck a sign outside that read Oregon Research Institute Vision Research Center, and offered free eye exams to all comers. (He’d found a graduate student in psychology at the University of Oregon who happened also to be a certified optometrist.)
• Amos had a gift for avoiding what he called “overcomplicated” people. But every now and then he ran into a person, usually a woman, whose complications genuinely interested him.
• His relationship with Danny had the same effect. An old friend of Amos’s would later recall, “Amos would say, ‘People are not so complicated. Relationships between people are complicated.’ And then he would pause, and say: ‘Except for Danny.’”
• “Amos almost suspended disbelief when we were working together,” said Danny. “He didn’t do that much for other people. And that was the engine of the collaboration.”
• said Danny. “We were quicker in understanding each other than we were in understanding ourselves. The way the creative process works is that you first say something, and later, sometimes years later, you understand what you said. And in our case it was foreshortened. I would say something and Amos would understand it. When one of us would say something that was off the wall, the other would search for the virtue in it. We would finish each other’s sentences and frequently did. But we also kept surprising each other. It still gives me goose bumps.”
• In a funny way, they didn’t even want themselves in the room. They wanted to be the people they became when they were with each other. Work, for Amos, had always been play: If it wasn’t fun, he simply didn’t see the point in doing it. Work now became play for Danny, too. This was new. Danny was like a kid with the world’s best toy closet who is so paralyzed by indecision that he never gets around to enjoying his possessions
• “They wrote together sitting right next to each other at the typewriter,” recalls Michigan psychologist Richard Nisbett. “I cannot imagine. It would be like having someone else brush my teeth for me.” The way Danny put it was, “We were sharing a mind.”
• The world’s not just a stage. It’s a casino, and our lives are games of chance. And when people calculate the odds in any life situation, they are often making judgments about similarity—or (strange new word!) representativeness. You have some notion of a parent population: “storm clouds” or “gastric ulcers” or “genocidal dictators” or “NBA players.” You compare the specific case to the parent population.
• “People can be taught the correct rule, perhaps even with little difficulty. The point remains that people do not follow the correct rule, when left to their own devices.”
• Any fact or incident that was especially vivid, or recent, or common—or anything that happened to preoccupy a person—was likely to be recalled with special ease, and so be disproportionately weighted in any judgment... It was almost too easy to dramatize this weird trick of the mind. People could be anchored with information that was totally irrelevant to the problem they were being asked to solve.
• it was hard to explain what he and Amos were doing in the beginning: “How can you explain a conceptual fog?”... Were they investigating the biases or the heuristics? The errors, or the mechanisms that produced the errors? The errors enabled you to offer at least a partial description of the mechanism: The bias was the footprint of the heuristic. The biases, too, would soon have their own names, like the “recency bias” and the “vividness bias.” But in hunting for errors that they themselves had made, and then tracking them back to their source in the human mind, they had stumbled upon errors without a visible trail. What were they to make of systematic errors for which there was no apparent mechanism?
• The stories we make up, rooted in our memories, effectively replace probability judgments. “The production of a compelling scenario is likely to constrain future thinking,” wrote Danny and Amos. “There is much evidence showing that, once an uncertain situation has been perceived or interpreted in a particular fashion, it is quite difficult to view it in any other way.”
• One unlikely survivor is a single scrap of paper with a few badly typed words on it, drawn from conversations he had with Danny in the spring of 1972 as they neared the end of their time in Eugene. For some reason Amos saved it: People predict by making up stories People predict very little and explain everything People live under uncertainty whether they like it or not People believe they can tell the future if they work hard enough People accept any explanation as long as it fits the facts The handwriting was on the wall, it was just the ink that was invisible People often work hard to obtain information they already have And avoid new knowledge Man is a deterministic device thrown into a probabilistic Universe In this match, surprises are expected
• There was a reason for this: To acknowledge uncertainty was to admit the possibility of error. The entire profession had arranged itself as if to confirm the wisdom of its decisions. Whenever a patient recovered, for instance, the doctor typically attributed the recovery to the treatment he had prescribed, without any solid evidence that the treatment was responsible.
• “The heart rate of an old man with pneumonia is not supposed to be normal!” said Redelmeier. “It’s supposed to be ripping along!” An old man with pneumonia whose heart rate appears normal is an old man whose heart may well have a serious problem. But the normal reading on the heart rate monitor created a false sense in doctors’ minds that all was well.
• A better shooter was of course more likely to make his next shot than a less able shooter, but the streaks observed by fans and announcers and the players themselves were illusions. He asked Redelmeier to find in medicine the same sort of false pattern–seeking behavior exhibited by basketball announcers. Redelmeier soon returned with the widely held belief that arthritis pain was related to the weather. For thousands of years, people had imagined this connection; it could be traced back to Hippocrates, who wrote, in 400 BC, about the effect of wind and rain on disease.
• If you asked them to choose one experiment to repeat, they’d take the first session. That is, people preferred to endure more total pain so long as the experience ended on a more pleasant note. Danny wanted Redelmeier to find him a real-world medical example of what he was calling the “peak-end rule.”
• Danny noticed the huge piles of garbage on the roadsides: the leftovers from the canned meals supplied by the U.S. Army. He examined what the soldiers had eaten and what they had thrown out. (They liked the canned grapefruit.) His subsequent recommendation that the Israeli army analyze the garbage and supply the soldiers with what they actually wanted made newspaper headlines.
• In the history of Danny and Amos, there are periods when it is difficult to disentangle their enthusiasm for their ideas from their enthusiasm for each other. The moments before and after the Yom Kippur war appear, in hindsight, less like a natural progression from one idea to the next than two men in love scrambling to find an excuse to be together.
• Situation 2. You must choose between having:  3) An 11 percent chance of winning $5 million, with an 89 percent chance to win zero or  4) A 10 percent chance of winning $25 million, with a 90 percent chance to win zero... The trouble, as Amos’s textbook explained, was that “this seemingly innocent pair of preferences is incompatible with utility theory.” What was now called the Allais paradox had become the most famous contradiction of expected utility theory.
• He sensed that Allais himself hadn’t given much thought to why people might choose in a way that violated the major theory of decision making. But to Danny the reason seemed obvious: regret. In the first situation people sensed that they would look back on their decision, if it turned out badly, and feel they had screwed up; in the second situation, not so much. Anyone who turned down a certain gift of $5 million would experience far more regret, if he wound up with nothing, than a person who turned down a gamble in which he stood a slight chance of winning $5 million... Regret was the ham in the back of the deli that caused people to switch from turkey to roast beef.
• Danny found that silly: There was no contradiction. There was just psychology. The understanding of any decision had to account not just for the financial consequences but for the emotional ones, too... Danny thought that people anticipated regret, and adjusted for it, in a way they did not anticipate or adjust for other emotions. “What might have been is an essential component of misery,’” he wrote to Amos. “There is an asymmetry here, because considerations of how much worse things could have been is not a salient factor in human joy and happiness.”
• When they made decisions, people did not seek to maximize utility. They sought to minimize regret.
• “The pain that is experienced when the loss is caused by an act that modified the status quo is significantly greater than the pain that is experienced when the decision led to the retention of the status quo,” Danny wrote in a memo to Amos. “When one fails to take action that could have avoided a disaster, one does not accept responsibility for the occurrence of the disaster.”
• It was instantly obvious to them that if you stuck minus signs in front of all these hypothetical gambles and asked people to reconsider them, they behaved very differently than they had when faced with nothing but possible gains. “It was a eureka moment,” said Danny.
• Thaler. “As if I have discovered the secret pot of gold. For a while I wasn’t sure why I was so excited. Then I realized: They had one idea. Which was systematic bias.” If people could be systematically wrong, their mistakes couldn’t be ignored. The irrational behavior of the few would not be offset by the rational behavior of the many. People could be systematically wrong, and so markets could be systematically wrong, too. Thaler got someone to send him a draft of “Value Theory.” He instantly saw it for what it was, a truck packed with psychology that might be driven into inner sanctums of economics and exploded.
• Danny’s interest ended with the psychological insights; Amos was obsessed with the business of using the insights to create a structure. What Amos saw, perhaps more clearly than Danny, was that the only way to force the world to grapple with their insights into human nature was to embed them in a theory. That theory needed to explain and predict behavior better than existing theory, but it also needed to be expressed in symbolic logic. “What made the theory important and what made it viable were completely different,” said Danny, years later. “Science is a conversation and you have to compete for the right to be heard. And the competition has its rules. And the rules, oddly enough, are that you are tested on formal theory.”
• “You know, not really,” said Amos. “We study natural stupidity instead of artificial intelligence.”
• As with some of the other fertile pairs, the partnership had created strains on their other close relationships. “The collaboration has put a lot of pressure on my marriage,” Danny confessed. Like the other pairs, they had lost any sense of individual contribution.
• Danny now had an idea that there might be a fourth heuristic—to add to availability, representativeness, and anchoring. “The simulation heuristic,” he’d eventually call it, and it was all about the power of unrealized possibilities to contaminate people’s minds.
• Discover the mental rules that the mind obeyed when it undid events after they had occurred and you might find, in the bargain, how it simulated reality before it occurred.
• Later he would point to it and say: That is the beginning of the end of us. He would later seek to undo the moment, but when he did, he did not say, “If only Clyde Coombs had not asked that question.” Or: “If only I felt as invulnerable as Amos.” Or: “If only I had never left Israel.” He said, “If only Amos was capable of self-effacement.” Amos was the actor in Danny’s imagination. Amos was the object in focus. Amos had been handed on a platter a chance to give Danny credit for what he had done, and Amos had declined to take it.
• It wasn’t long before Danny and Miller were working on a paper together that might just as well have been called “The Undoing Project.” “I thought that they had agreed to see other people,” said Miller. “And he was insistent that his days of collaborating with Amos were over. I remember a lot of fraught conversations. At some point he said to be gentle with him, because this was his first relationship after Amos.”
• With one exception, the Russians knew nothing about decision theory, and didn’t even seem particularly interested in the subject. “There was one guy,” said Wandell, “who gave this great talk, at least compared to the others.” That guy turned out to be a KGB agent, whose training in psychology consisted of the talk he had given. “The way we discovered he was a KGB guy was that he showed up later at a physics conference and gave a great talk there, too,” said Wandell. “That was the only guy Amos liked.”
• The University of Illinois flew him to a conference about metaphorical thinking, for instance, only to have Amos argue that a metaphor was actually a substitute for thinking. “Because metaphors are vivid and memorable, and because they are not readily subjected to critical analysis, they can have considerable impact on human judgment even when they are inappropriate, useless, or misleading,” said Amos. “They replace genuine uncertainty about the world with semantic ambiguity. A metaphor is a cover-up.”
• Amos accused Danny of “identifying with the enemy,” and he wasn’t far off. Danny almost found it easier to imagine himself in his opponent’s shoes than in his own. In some strange way Danny contained within himself his own opponent. He didn’t need another. Amos, to be Amos, needed opposition. Without it he had nothing to triumph over. And Amos, like his homeland, lived in a state of readiness for battle.
• but after Danny told Amos that Harvard had asked him to join its faculty, Amos said, “It’s me they want.” He’d just blurted that out, and then probably regretted saying it—even if he wasn’t wrong to think it. Amos couldn’t help himself from wounding Danny, and Danny couldn’t help himself from feeling wounded. Barbara Tversky occupied the office beside Amos at Stanford. “I would hear their phone calls,” she said. “It was worse than a divorce.”
• What Danny needed was for Amos to continue to see him and his ideas uncritically, as he had when they were alone together in a room. If that involved some misperception on Amos’s part—some exaggeration of the earthly status of Danny’s ideas—well, then, Amos should continue to misperceive. After all, what is a marriage if not an agreement to distort one’s perception of another, in relation to everyone else? “I wanted something from him, not from the world,” said Danny.
• Richard Thaler—the first frustrated economist to stumble onto Danny and Amos’s work and pursue its consequences for economics single-mindedly—would help to create a new field, and give it the name “behavioral economics.” “Prospect Theory,” scarcely cited in the first decade after its publication, would become, by 2010, the second most cited paper in all of economics.
• Sunstein argued that the government needed, alongside its Council of Economic Advisers, a Council of Psychological Advisers. He wasn’t alone. By the time Sunstein left the White House, in 2015, calls for a greater role for psychologists, or at any rate for psychological insight, were coming from inside governments across the world. Sunstein was particularly interested in what was now being called “choice architecture.” The decisions people made were driven by the way they were presented. People didn’t simply know what they wanted; they took cues from their environment. They constructed their preferences. And they followed paths of least resistance, even when they paid a heavy price for it.