44 pages • 1 hour read
Michael LewisThe Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Perceptions of Reality
When studying the nature of human decision making, Danny and Amos needed to understand how humans understand and perceive reality. If, for instance, someone receives an unfavorable medical diagnosis and must decide which treatment to select for their recovery, their understanding of reality would inform their decision. Even more important was the idea that people might have to modify their preconceived notions of reality to accept what was actually true. When Donald Redelmeier worked with Amos to understand decision making within a medical context, they found that a large group of arthritis patients insisted on the connection between their pain and their surrounding weather conditions, even when only a “few random moments […] justified their belief” (231).
All throughout Danny and Amos’s experiments, human decision making relied on what they called a “model” in one’s mind, in which every decision needed to be filtered through before the decision was made. As Lewis writes, “Danny and Amos had their first big general idea—the mind had these mechanisms for making judgments and decisions that were usually useful but also capable of generating serious error” (188). Therefore, if the mind could lead itself to make serious mistakes, its subsequent decision making might represent a disconnect from reality. As highly practical scientists, having inherited the idea of their need to contribute something to the world from their shared Israeli culture, Danny and Amos demonstrated an urgency to their work. If people were so detached from reality that their decisions became consistently based on conjecture or fleeting sentiment, the implications for human society would be insurmountable. As Danny and Amos pulled the thread on their hypothesis that “people, when they formed judgments, weren’t just making random mistakes [but actually] doing something systematically wrong” (184), they tried to identify the source of the error, of when and how the human mind led to false or incomplete conclusions about a vast array of issues.
The Complexity of Friendship
The friendship at the center of The Undoing Project is not an easy one to decipher. In terms of their respective personalities, Amos and Danny were polar opposites. Lewis enumerates their stark differences:
“Danny was always sure he was wrong. Amos was always sure he was right. Amos was the life of every party; Danny didn’t go to parties. Amos was loose and informal; even when he made a stab at informality, Danny felt as if he had descended from some formal place” (155).
Despite these dissimilarities, the two spent countless hours together, theorizing and speculating and researching, until they left a legacy in their field. They sought to better understand the mystery of the human mind, and due to their shared efforts, they succeeded, at least in part. Amos and Danny had found in each other a counterpart for ideas, a companion to venture down the rabbit holes of their professional pursuits. Thus, their friendship was also defined by their commonalities, as “both men were blessed with shockingly fertile minds […] both were Jews, in Israel, who did not believe in God” (156).
Their differences and similarities laid side by side, their egos and motivations driving each other forward while also constantly colliding, paint a picture of a friendship and collaboration as dense as the work Danny and Amos conducted in psychology and behavioral economics. In the collapse of their collaboration and friendship, Amos and Danny proved to be exactly what they had found human reasoning and decision making to be: flawed. Despite their falling out, however, Danny was the second person Amos called after discovering his cancer diagnosis and prognosis.
The Significance of Paradigm Shifts
One of the principal outcomes of Danny and Amos’s work was their subversion of existing paradigms. When their work confronted the notion that human beings were more or less intuitive statisticians, for instance, they found that “whatever human beings did when presented with a problem that had a statistically correct answer, it wasn’t statistics” (157). Thus, human beings rely on other factors, other influences, even when trying to solve problems that are predominantly statistical in nature. The errors in judgment or inference that people often make are not rooted in mathematical miscalculation but existing mental paradigms based in bias or subjective experience. To illustrate the need for paradigms shifts, therefore, Danny and Amos relentlessly pursued new ways of thinking and novel solutions to age-old problems. Yet their work was not intentionally provocative or controversial, engineered to undermine the establishment. Rather, their intellectual curiosity led them to these paradigm shifts, which in turn revolutionized the science of human decision making.
Danny and Amos’s joint approach to helping people make paradigm shifts was grounded in a sense that their work could actually impact society in tangible ways. As Lewis writes, they hoped that their work would be “devoted primarily to the extension and application […] to other high-level professional activities, e.g., economic planning, technological forecasting, political decision making, medical diagnosis, and the evaluation of legal evidence” (204). Further, “they wanted to turn the real world into a laboratory” (204). If the experts in such fields could learn how to think differently, how to shift their own bias-riddled paradigms, then the methodology for decision making would improve in quality.
The Fallibility of Human Judgment
The Undoing Project constantly highlights the human mind, its complexities, and its flaws. Danny and Amos, problem solvers by nature, sought to understand the inner workings of the human mind and to gain a deeper understanding of its fallibility. All aspects of society, from environmental science to global economics, are governed by human judgment, but these judgments are made in biased and inconsistent contexts. Whereas psychology is largely governed by a vast expanse of observational and experimental data, not all fields require data-based decisions. As Lewis writes:
“most spheres of human activity lacked the data to build the algorithms that might replace the human judge. For most of the thorny problems in life, people would need to rely on the expert judgment of some human being: doctors, judges, investment advisors, government officials, admission officers, movie studio executives, baseball scouts, personnel managers, and all the rest of the world’s deciders of things” (169).
Danny and Amos’s work exposed that these judgments often lack real evidence, and that they instead rely on either self-proclaimed expertise or feelings-based decisions. Yet Danny and Amos were not fatalistic in their approach to either their research or its subsequent implications, nor were they particularly interesting in proving that the human mind was often irrational, an idea they both took for granted. Thus, rather than declaring the human mind a hopelessly unreliable decision maker, Danny and Amos suggested that the mind simply needs training to trust different sets of evidence when making important decisions.
Logic Versus Intuition
Both Danny and Amos chose to study psychology to better understand how and why people make decisions. Throughout the scope of their research, the tension between data-based logic and intuition was evidenced in various ways. For instance, Danny and Amos’s experiments in understanding people’s interpretation of history was governed largely by what they called “recency bias.” Instead of analyzing evidence, the human mind was often led to make judgments based on the availability of a “story” within the person’s mind. Danny and Amos argued that “images of the future are shaped by experience of the past” (194). In other words, if people have a frame of reference within their mind, they will make a judgment based on this frame, this story, rather than objectively analyzing the evidence in the present.
Danny and Amos’s work also suggests that intuition is not based on some sophisticated inner mechanism but on biases that perpetuate themselves if not challenged by undeniable evidence. Embedded into the book, however, is the irony that Danny and Amos’s relationship was messy, in many ways contradictory to the applications that their joint work would infer. Even though Danny and Amos had meticulously studied the human mind and its pitfalls, they were unable to apply their findings to improve their dysfunctional friendship or their other relationships. Even when Danny was in Paris with Anne Treisman, the woman who became his second wife, he was more concerned about what Amos was thinking and feeling: “When I came to Paris I found an envelope from you […] I just glanced to see how you finish it […] I saw the words ‘Yours, as ever’ and I had goose bumps from emotion” (288). Thus, even as Danny and Amos conducted research to improve human decision making and by extension human relations, their own lives were marked by the same fallibility that they observed in their research subjects; they were bound by complicated emotions and unable to extricate themselves from situations that would benefit from objective analysis. Logic often takes a backseat to intuition, even in those who study the mind meticulously.
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