I was hoping that Michael Lewis’s new book, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds, would offer up a bit of post-election escapism. In the book, which is published by W.W. Norton & Company and came out today, Lewis tells the story of Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two Israeli psychologists whose friendship and collaboration changed the way we look at human behavior forever.
Together, the extroverted Tversky and much more withdrawn Kahneman effectively rewrote the rules of psychology, developing behavioral economics, a subfield concerned with human biases in perception and decision-making. By asking countless respondents a never-ending series of questions involving everything from estimates of various figures to their preferences between two bets with different odds and payouts, the researchers realized that all over the place, fields like psychology and economics were operating under false assumptions about how people make judgments and decisions — in many cases because the models in use assumed humans to be more rational and better at calculating than we really are.
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