The Undoing Project

by Michael Lewis

  Even so, most of the stories people told about Amos had less to do with what came out of his mouth than with the unusual way he moved through the world. He kept the hours of a vampire. He went to bed when the sun came up and woke up at happy hour. He ate pickles for breakfast and eggs for dinner. He minimized quotidian tasks he thought a waste of time—he could be found in the middle of the day, having just woken up, driving himself to work while shaving and brushing his teeth in the rearview mirror. “He never knew what time of the day it was,” said his daughter, Dona. “It didn’t matter. He’s living in his own sphere and you just happened to encounter him there.” He didn’t pretend to be interested in whatever others expected him to be interested in—God help anyone who tried to drag him to a museum or a board meeting. “For those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like,” Amos liked to say, plucking a line from the Muriel Spark novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. “He just skipped family vacations,” says his daughter. “He’d come if he liked the place. Otherwise he didn’t.” The children didn’t take it personally: They loved their father and knew that he loved them. “He loved people,” said his son Oren. “He just didn’t like social norms.”

  A lot of things that most human beings would never think to do, to Amos simply made sense. For instance, when he wanted to go for a run he . . . went for a run. No stretching, no jogging outfit or, for that matter, jogging: He’d simply strip off his slacks and sprint out his front door in his underpants and run as fast as he could until he couldn’t run anymore. “Amos thought people paid an enormous price to avoid mild embarrassment,” said his friend Avishai Margalit, “and he himself decided very early on it was not worth it.”

  What all those who came to know Amos eventually realized was that the man had a preternatural gift for doing only precisely what he wanted to do. Varda Liberman recalled visiting him one day and seeing a table with a week’s worth of mail on it. There were tidy little stacks, one for each day, each filled with requests and entreaties and demands upon Amos’s time: job offers, offers of honorary degrees, requests for interviews and lectures, requests for help with some abstruse problem, bills. When the new mail came in Amos opened anything that interested him and left the rest in its daily pile. Each day the new mail arrived and shoved the old mail down the table. When a pile reached the end of the table Amos pushed it, unopened, off the edge into a waiting garbage can. “The nice thing about things that are urgent,” he liked to say, “is that if you wait long enough they aren’t urgent anymore.” “I would say to Amos I have to do this or I have to do that,” recalled his old friend Yeshu Kolodny. “And he would say, ‘No. You don’t.’ And I thought: lucky man!”

  There was this beautiful simplicity to Amos: His likes and dislikes could be inferred directly and accurately and at all times from his actions. Amos’s three children have vivid memories of watching their parents drive off to see some movie picked by their mother, only to have their father turn up back at their couch twenty minutes later. Amos would have decided, in the first five minutes, whether the movie was worth seeing—and if it wasn’t he’d just come home and watch Hill Street Blues (his favorite TV drama) or Saturday Night Live (he never missed it) or an NBA game (he was obsessed with basketball). He’d then go back and fetch his wife after her movie ended. “They’ve already taken my money,” he’d explain. “Should I give them my time, too?” If by some freak accident he found himself at a gathering of his fellow human beings that held no appeal for him, he’d become invisible. “He’d walk into a room and decide he didn’t want anything to do with it and he would fade into the background and just vanish,” says Dona. “It was like a superpower. And it was absolutely an abnegation of social responsibility. He didn’t accept social responsibility—and so graciously, so elegantly, didn’t accept it.”

  Occasionally Amos offended someone—of course he did. His darting pale blue eyes were enough to unsettle people who didn’t know him. Their constant motion gave them the impression he wasn’t listening to them, when the problem, often, was that he had listened too well. “For him the main thing is the people who don’t know the difference between knowing and not knowing,” says Avishai Margalit. “If he thought you were a bore and there was nothing there, he could cut you like nothing.” Those who knew him best learned how to rationalize whatever he had said or done.

  It never occurred to him that anyone with whom he wanted to spend time wouldn’t want to spend time with him. “He expected first of all to charm you,” said Samuel Sattath. “Which was odd for such a smart person.” “He sort of invited people to love him,” said Yeshu Kolodny. “When you were on the good side of Amos he was very easy to love. Extremely easy. There was a competition around him. People competed for Amos.” It was a very common thing for Amos’s friends to ask themselves: I know why I like him, but why does he like me?

  * * *

  Amnon Rapoport did not lack for admirers. He’d been famously brave in battle. Israeli women, taking in for the first time his blond hair and tanned skin and chiseled features, often decided he was the best-looking man they’d ever laid eyes on. One day he’d earn his PhD in mathematical psychology and become a highly regarded professor, with his pick of the world’s universities. And yet he, too, when he sensed that Amos liked him, wondered why. “I know that what attracted me to Amos was how clever he was,” said Amnon. “I don’t know what attracted him to me. I was supposed to be very handsome, maybe that.” Whatever its source, the attraction was strong. From the moment they met, Amnon and Amos were inseparable. They sat side by side in the same classes; they lived in the same apartments; they spent summers hiking the country together. They were famously a pair. “I think some people thought we were homosexual or something,” said Amnon.

  Amnon also had the best seat in the house when Amos decided what he was going to do with his life. Hebrew University in the late 1950s required students to pick two fields of concentration. Amos had chosen philosophy and psychology. 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.’” The mind-body problem was a good example. How are our various mental events—what you believe, what you think—related to our physical states? What is the relationship between our bodies and our minds? The question was at least as old as Descartes, but there was still no answer in sight—at least not in philosophy. The trouble with philosophy, 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. Psychology at least pretended to be a science. It kept at least one hand at all times on hard data. A psychologist might test whatever theory he devised on a representative sample of humanity. His theories might be tested by others, and his findings reproduced, or falsified. If a psychologist stumbled upon a truth he might make it stick.

  To Amos’s closest Israeli friends, there was never anything mysterious about his interest in psychology. Questions of why people behaved as they behaved, and thought as they thought, were thick in the air they breathed. “You never discussed art,” recalls Avishai Margalit. “You discussed people. It was a constant thing, a constant puzzle: What makes others tick? It comes from the shtetl. Jews were petty merchants. They had to assess others, all the time. Who is dangerous? Who is not dangerous? Who will repay the debt, who won’t repay the debt? People were basically dependent on their psychological judgment.” Still, to many, the presence of a mind as clear as Amos’s in a field as murky as psychology remained a mystery. How had this relentlessly optimistic person, with his clear and logical mind and zero tolerance for bullshit, wound up in a field cluttered with unhappy souls and mystic
ism?

  Amos, when he talked about it, which he usually didn’t, made it seem as if it had started as a whim. When he was in his midforties and many of the brightest young minds in the field wanted to study with him, he sat down with a professor of psychiatry at Harvard named Miles Shore. Shore asked him how he had become a psychologist. “It’s hard to know how people select a course in life,” Amos said. “The big choices we make are practically random. The small choices probably tell us more about who we are. Which field we go into may depend on which high school teacher we happen to meet. Who we marry may depend on who happens to be around at the right time of life. On the other hand, the small decisions are very systematic. That I became a psychologist is probably not very revealing. What kind of psychologist I am may reflect deep traits.”

  What kind of psychologist would he be? In most of psychology Amos found little to interest him. After taking classes in child psychology and clinical psychology and social psychology, he concluded that the vast majority of his chosen field was safely ignorable. To his assigned work he paid shockingly little attention. His classmate Amia Lieblich witnessed Amos’s insouciance after he’d been assigned by a professor to administer an intelligence test to a five-year-old child. “The night before the work was due, Amos turned to Amnon and said, ‘Amnon, lie down on the couch. I am going to ask you some questions. Pretend you are five years old.’ And he got away with it!” Amos was the only student who never took notes in class. When the time came to study for some test, Amos would simply ask to see Amnon’s notes. “He would read my notes once and know the material better than I did,” said Amnon. “It was the same way he could meet a physicist in the street, talk to him for thirty minutes, without knowing anything about physics, and then tell the physicist something about physics the physicist didn’t know. I first thought he was a superb superficial person—that it was a party trick. And that was a mistake. Because it wasn’t a trick.”

  It didn’t help that so many of the professors seemed to be flying by the seat of their pants. The guy who had come from Scotland to teach the history of psychology was sent back when it was discovered he had fabricated his PhD. A guy they brought in to teach a class on personality testing—a Polish Jew who had survived the Holocaust by hiding in the woods—fled the classroom in tears under questioning from Amos and Amnon. “We basically had to teach psychology to ourselves,” recalled Amnon. Amos compared clinical psychology—everywhere on the rise, and the field of greatest interest to their fellow students, most of whom hoped to become therapists—to medicine. 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, and he had lots of evidence to support his case.

  One day during their second year at Hebrew University, in 1959, Amnon came across a paper called “The Theory of Decision Making,” by a psychology professor at Johns Hopkins named Ward Edwards. “Many social scientists other than psychologists try to account for the behavior of individuals,” it opened. “Economists and a few psychologists have produced a large body of theory and a few experiments that deal with individual decision making. The kind of decision making with which this body of theory deals is as follows: given two states, A and B, into either one of which an individual may put himself, the individual chooses A in preference to B (or vice versa). For instance, a child standing in front of a candy counter may be considering two states. In state A the child has $0.25 and no candy. In state B the child has $0.15 and a ten-cent candy bar. The economic theory of decision making is a theory about how to predict such decisions.” Edwards went on to lay out a problem: Economic theory, the design of markets, public policy making, and a lot more depended on theories about how people made decisions. But psychologists—the people most likely to test these theories and determine how people actually made decisions—hadn’t paid much attention to the subject.

  Edwards wasn’t setting himself, or his field, in opposition to economics. He was merely proposing that psychologists be invited, or perhaps invite themselves, to test both the assumptions and the predictions made by economists. Economists assumed that people were “rational.” What did they mean by that? At the very least, they meant that people could figure out what they wanted. Given some array of choices, they could order them logically, according to their tastes. For example, if they were handed a menu that listed three hot drinks, and they said that at some given moment they preferred coffee to tea, and tea to hot chocolate, they should logically prefer coffee to hot chocolate. If they preferred A to B and B to C, they should prefer A to C. In the academic jargon, they were “transitive.” If people couldn’t order their preferences logically, how would any market ever function properly? If people preferred coffee to tea and tea to hot chocolate—but then turned around and chose hot chocolate over coffee—they’d never finish choosing. They’d be willing, in principle, to pay to switch from hot chocolate to tea and also to switch from tea to coffee—and then pay again to switch from coffee to hot chocolate. They’d never settle on a drink but instead would be stuck in this mad infinite loop in which they kept paying to upgrade from the drink they had to a drink they liked better.

  Here was one of the predictions that economists made that Edwards thought psychologists might test: Are actual human beings transitive? If at any given moment they preferred coffee to tea and tea to hot chocolate, did they prefer coffee to hot chocolate? A few people had recently looked into the matter, Edwards noted, among them a mathematician named Kenneth May. Writing in a leading economics journal, Econometrica, May described how he had tested just how logical his own students were when asked to choose a spouse. He’d presented students with three potential mates, ranked by three qualities: how good-looking they were, how smart they were, and how much money they had. None of the three potential mates was extreme in any one way: No one was so poor, dumb, or hard on the eye as to be repugnant. Each had relative strengths and weaknesses: Each ranked highest in one category, second highest in another, and last in the third. May’s students, in making their choices, never faced all three potential marriage partners at the same time. Instead they were shown pairs, and asked to choose between them. For example, they might be asked to choose between the potential mate who was the brightest, second-best-looking, but poorest, and the potential mate who was the richest, the second-brightest, but the least good-looking.

  Once the dust had settled in this flurry of decision making, more than a quarter of the students had revealed themselves as irrational, at least from the point of view of economic theory. They’d decided that they would rather marry Jim than Bill, and Bill than Harry—but then also said that they would rather marry Harry than Jim. If people could buy and sell spouses like hot drinks, some large number of them would never settle on one spouse but would instead keep paying to upgrade. Why? May didn’t offer a full explanation, but he suggested the beginning of one: Because Jim and Bill and Harry each had relative strengths and weaknesses, they were hard to compare. “It is just these non-comparable cases that are of interest,” wrote May. “Comparison of alternatives in which one is superior to the other in every respect makes for a simple but rather trivial theory.”

  Amnon showed Ward Edwards’s paper on decision making to Amos, and Amos grew very excited. “Amos will smell gold before anyone else will smell it,” said Amnon. “And he smelled gold.”

  * * *

  In the fall of 1961, a few weeks after Amnon flew to the University of North Carolina, Amos left Jerusalem for the University of Michigan—where Ward Edwards had moved after being fired by Johns Hopkins, supposedly for not bothering to show up for the classes he was meant to be teaching. Neither Amnon nor Amos knew much about American universities. Amnon, who had just been assigned to North Carolina by a Fulbright scholarship committee, had to pu
ll out his Atlas of the World to find it. Amos was able to read English, but he spoke so little that, when he told people where he planned to go, they assumed he was joking. “How will he even survive?” his friend Amia Lieblich asked herself. Neither Amnon nor Amos saw that they had any real choice. “There was nobody to teach us at Hebrew University,” Amnon said. “We had to leave.” Both Amnon and Amos assumed that the move was temporary: They would learn whatever there was to learn about this new field of decision making in the United States and then return to Israel and work together.

  The earliest sightings of Amos Tversky in the United States are anomalies in the History of Amos. In their first week of classes, fellow students saw a silent, seemingly dutiful foreigner taking notes. They looked upon him with pity. “My first memory is of him being really, really quiet,” recalls fellow graduate student Paul Slovic. “Which is funny, because later on he really wasn’t quiet.” Seeing Amos writing from right to left, one student suggested that he might suffer from some mental disorder. (He was writing in Hebrew.) Stripped of the power of speech, Amos was jolted out of character. Long after the fact, Paul Slovic guessed that in his first few months away from home Amos merely had been biding his time. Until he knew exactly what he was saying, he wouldn’t say it.