Books
Mind
games
An American author tells the tale of the storied
friendship of Israels two most famous psychologists
By Tibor Krausz
IN HIS 2012 bestseller Thinking, Fast and much to their science as to each other.
Slow, a tour de force of popular science, Their storied friendship and their cele-
world-renowned Israeli psychologist Daniel brated collaborative scholarship deserve
Kahneman laid bare our cognitive foibles. fleshing out, and the American writer Mi-
Our minds, he explained, frequently play chael Lewis does just that in The Undoing
weird tricks on us, but we believe ourselves Project.
to be firmly in control. Lewis is the author of the 2003 bestseller
The book, too, played a trick of sorts by Moneyball, in which he chronicled a mid-
having had a dead man partly in control dling US baseball teams quest to become
of its creation. Kahneman, 82, dedicat- more competitive by relying not on tradi-
ed his magnum opus to his late friend and tional expert opinions but on cold-headed
long-time academic collaborator, Amos statistical analysis. The Undoing Project,
Tversky, with whom he claimed to have the author notes, was inspired by a psychol-
possessed a shared mind that was superior ogists critique of Moneyball, which first less they could be seen to have something
to our individual minds. Absent his friend, brought the Israel duos insights into hu-
Kahneman could never have done most of man judgments and decision-making to his
his groundbreaking research for Thinking, attention.
Fast and Slow.
Tversky, who coauthored numerous in- THE RESULT is an informative, occasion-
fluential academic papers and scientific ally arresting but vexingly discursive book,
articles with Kahneman over almost two which can give you severe whiplash as it
decades before his death in 1996, duly frequently bounds from topic to topic with
looms large in the book. There he is, page nary a dollop of narrative or thematic glue.
after page, usually in the recurring phrase The first chapter kicks off with a lengthy
Amos and I, thinking, brainstorming, exposition on the vagaries of recruiting new
opining, theorizing and analyzing with talents for NBA teams. Neither Kahneman
Kahneman. In the dog-eat-dog world of nor Tversky makes even a cameo.
academe, riven by jealousies and domi- Then, in the second chapter, we sudden-
nated by self-serving ambitions, the two ly encounter Kahneman doing his best, as
Israeli scientists were a remarkable pair: a precocious Jewish teenager, to elude cap-
kindred spirits and fine minds devoted as ture in Nazi-occupied France. After the war,
40 THE JERUSALEM REPORT APRIL 3, 2017
Kahneman immigrates to Israel, where he
studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusa-
lem, which is partly and temporarily housed
inside a monastery owing to the Jordanian
occupation of the citys eastern half. He cuts
his teeth under charismatic teachers like
the temperamental intellectual Yeshayahu
Leibowitz.
Theres not one more word about basket-
ball, or any other sport, for the rest of the
book. Presumably, Lewis, or his publisher,
felt that his American readers wouldnt care
much about two Israeli psychologists un-
to contribute to a better understanding of an
all-American pursuit like basketball.
Be that as it may, in the third chapter,
we leave Kahneman and meet a young
Tversky, a whip-smart, charismatic maver-
ick from Haifa who rises to command units
of paratroopers and infantrymen, fights in
the wars of 1956 and 1967, and receives an
award for bravery from Moshe Dayan. Like
Kahneman, Tversky, too, is something of a
prodigy and is naturally drawn to the field
of psychology, which is still a nascent disci-
pline in Israeli academia.
Separately, Kahneman and Tversky are
both creative and original thinkers; togeth-
er, they will become a formidable team.
Clearly enamored of his subjects, whom he
 LARRY DOWNING / REUTERS

Former US president Barack Obama awards Daniel Kahneman the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013 at the White House

THE JERUSALEM REPORT APRIL 3, 2017 41

Books
familiarly calls Danny and Amos through-
out, Lewis often winds up tottering precari-
ously on the verge of hagiography. At times
he topples headlong into it. Tversky, he re-
ports breathlessly, was the last to go to bed,
the life of every party, the light to which all
butterflies flew, and the freest, happiest,
and most interesting person anyone knew.
Good to know.
Just by wearing a suit and tie to work at
Hebrew University, where he becomes an
assistant professor, Tversky causes a sensa-
tion in the Spartan, no-nonsense and causti-
cally irreverent social milieu of the 1960s.
Good to know that, too. But were a third
way into the book, and Amos and Danny
have yet to meet or so much as be men-
tioned in the same breath.
Meet they finally do, in 1969 and Chap-
ter 5. In short order, Tversky becomes yin
to Kahnemans yang, the ebullient, gung-
ho extrovert complementing the reserved,
brooding introvert, as the two set about
tackling a series of daunting problems in
psychology. Both wanted to search for
simple, powerful truths, Lewis writes.
IN THOSE days, most of psychology
wasnt (as it still largely isnt) a proper sci-
ence with empirically sound, quantifiable
properties underlying the various grand
hypotheses about the animating forces of
human behavior. Instead, it was like a form
of art, a field of creative intuition where the
ideas of prominent psychologists became
received wisdom among their followers.
Yet both Kahneman and Tversky, each a
polymath of sorts in his own way, were fas-
cinated by it not so much by the academic
discipline itself as the quest that it purported
to embody: the search for key insights into
why we think and behave the way we do.
Kahneman was influenced by experimen-
tal Gestalt psychology, a field originated
and dominated by German Jews in the 1920s
42
Daniel Kahneman (right)
and Amos Tversky
became an unusual
duo in the dog-eat-
dog world of academe,
fusing their talents
to tackle daunting
problems in psychology
and which holds that our perceptions of the
world are mediated by our pattern-seeking
tendencies, which we often employ to im-
pose meanings arbitrarily, even when there
are none. As one of Israels first army psy-
chologists, Kahneman learned at firsthand
that what may seem like sound judgments of
peoples potentials based on their apparent
temperaments and abilities can be fraught
with errors and misconceptions. Our first
impressions and initial expectations of oth-
ers can badly skew our judgments of them.
To reduce such mistakes, he devised new
personality assessment techniques for the
IDF, which are still in use.
Kahneman, whom Lewis aptly dubs a
spectacularly original connoisseur of human
error, set out to find a method for ameliorat-
ing the impact of flawed personal opinions
on decisions be it in the military, politics,
business or medicine. The key, he thought,
was to eliminate our innate biases by rein-
ing in our gut feelings. Independently,
Tversky arrived at similar conclusions about
the flaws in human decision-making. People,
he realized, choose between two or more op-
tions based not only on the various features
of each but also on which of those features
they regard as more relevant whenever they
happen to make their choice. In other words,
context can greatly influence the outcome of
their choice. Tversky was also expert at math
and statistics, which would soon help anchor
THE JERUSALEM REPORT APRIL 3, 2017
BARBARA TVERSKY
the twos formative insights in quantifiable
foundations.
AS ONE of their first tasks, the dynamic
duo proved that people, experts included,
are ready to draw sweeping, and frequently
wrong, conclusions from a few random or
select facts or observations. This may not
seem like a revolutionary insight but it went
against the prevailing idea at the time that
credited people with being intuitive, natu-
ral-born statisticians, who could somehow
divine hard truths from a few bits of data. In-
nate probabilistic reasoning, the two Israeli
experts showed, is not one of our strengths
as a species. Thats why computerized algo-
rithms, not being prone to the human minds
frequent erroneous judgments, can do the
job of analyzing, diagnosing and predicting
far better than flesh-and-blood experts.
Through a series of similar experiments,
Kahneman and Tversky documented that we
understand the world by the help of instinc-
tive habits of mind that serve us well in some
situations but let us badly down in others.
As a result, we often err in our judgments
but rarely realize it. We use mental short-
cuts, or heuristics in academic parlance, to
evaluate probabilities and make judgments
accordingly, but we arent very good at it.
Were slaves to a whole host of built-in cog-
nitive biases confirmation bias, hindsight
bias, illusory correlation bias.
 They carried on for years and years, tack-
ling problems, slaying sacred cows of utili-
ty theory and decision analysis, and prying
ever further into the whims of human folly.
All the while they remained fast friends.
Theyd become a single mind, creating
ideas about why people did what they did,
Lewis writes, echoing Kahnemans own as-
sessment of their relationship.
SOME OF the two Israelis findings about
human psychology proved seminal, such as
their insight that people approach risks dif-
ferently when theyre faced with the pros-
pect of a certain gain or a certain loss. They
act more circumspectly in the former case
but are more willing to gamble in the latter
so as to avoid incurring a loss. The reason:
our greater sensitivity to negative rather
than positive changes, as they put it. For
most people, they elucidated, the happi-
ness involved in receiving a desirable object
is smaller than the unhappiness involved in
losing the same object.
Likewise, we evaluate gains and losses
according to our reference point, our sub-
jective and transient baseline for what we
see as gains and losses. If, for example, we
expect a year-end bonus of $100,000 but
receive only $50,000, we will likely feel
cheated, even though we still have made a
gain. If, on the other hand, we receive the
full $100,000 but learn that everyone else at
work has received $150,000, we will like-
ly feel cheated again because our reference
point will suddenly have shifted to what
everyone else has got. This quirk of hu-
man nature means we can easily be coaxed
into taking or avoiding risks, depending on
whether were made to believe, through a
simple reframing of context, that were fac-
ing a net gain or a net loss.
The Israeli pair presented their new pros-
pect theory, a form of value theory, to a
select group of leading experts during an
international conference held at a kibbutz
near Jerusalem in 1975. And so it was
on a farm that a theory that would become
among the most influential in the history of
economics made its public debut, Lewis
observes. It would help Kahneman win the
Nobel Prize in economics in 2002. Tversky
was equally deserving of the honor, but by
then he had died of cancer, at age 59.
Other findings of theirs that Lewis re-
lays appear less momentous. Take this one:
Kahneman and Tversky prove, through a
series of experiments, that people are es-
sentially risk averse. Given a choice, say,
between the certainty of receiving $400 and
a 50 percent chance of receiving $1,000,
most people, loath to gamble as they are,
will forfeit the prospect of the larger sum
and settle for $400. This will come as a sur-
prise only to someone unfamiliar with the
age-old proverb a bird in the hand is worth
two in the bush, which has long testified to
just such pecuniary prudence.
Human affairs are animated by what the
American psychologist Paul Meehl called
the ubiquity and recalcitrance of irratio-
nality, but you need not be a trained psy-
chologist to see that. Lewis has done us a
favor by documenting the long and intel-
lectually fruitful friendship of Kahneman
and Tversky while simultaneously helping
popularize their insights. Ultimately, how-
ever, The Undoing Project is an uneven
book, in turns riveting and prosaic, astute
and humdrum.
Regretfully, it also leaves some issues it
raises unexplored. [T]he question of wheth-
er God exists left me cold, Kahneman, the
grandson of Lithuanian rabbis, explains at
one point apropos his burgeoning atheism
in his youth, But the question of why peo- The Undoing Project: A Friendship
ple believe God exists I found really fas- That Changed Our Minds
cinating. We never learn what answers to Michael Lewis
that question hes found. Too bad, because W. W. Norton
itd be worth finding out. 368 pages; $28.95
THE JERUSALEM REPORT APRIL 3, 2017 43