PsycCRITIQUES

April 24, 2017, Vol. 62, No. 17, Article 1

© 2017 American Psychological Association

Blending Remarkable Minds,

Friendship, and Science: The Story of
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky

A Review of

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

by Michael Lewis
New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2017. 362 pp. ISBN 978-0393254594.
$28.95

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0040831

Reviewed by

Alan E. Kazdin

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds focuses on the work of Daniel
Kahneman and Amos Tversky that led to award of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002.
Tversky could not share in the prize because of his premature death (1996) and the policy
that the prize cannot be awarded posthumously. Kahneman and Tversky reflect a novel
collaboration that was not only a meeting of the powerful minds but also what also seemed
to be a meeting of the souls. Add to that a model of interacting Kahneman (2002) refers to
as adversarial collaboration (in a good way) in which challenges are central to the process of
creating novel products.

Lewis is well established as a best-selling author and with other successes (e.g., Moneyball:
The Art of Winning an Unfair Game; Lewis, 2003). Many of his writings include financial and
economic topics for which he has extensive career experience and credentials (MA, London
School of Economics). Some of the resources for the book are publicly available. For
example, some of the content can be seen in Kahneman’s autobiographical statement
prepared for the Nobel committee; that document is well worth a separate read (Kahneman,
2002). Yet, Lewis knew Kahneman and the Tversky family well and over time had extensive
one-on-one discussions with Kahneman. The interactions extended to many family
members, colleagues, friends, and former students in the United States and Israel, where
both Kahneman and Tversky spent portions of their careers. The information and source
material are artfully blended into a very readable book.

The book has been extensively reviewed and commented upon (e.g., Financial Times,
Guardian, National Post, New York Times, New Yorker). Some of the sources deserve special
mention, including a conversation with Lewis about development of the book (Lam, 2017)
and a review by researchers whose contributions to behavioral economics and connections
with Kahneman and Tversky provide especially well-informed perspectives (Sunstein &
Thaler, 2016). In addition, at the various online book sellers, hundreds of readers have
provided their own reviews and commentaries. The availability of so many reviews and
perspectives allows me to focus more narrowly in ways that might be especially relevant to
readers of this journal.

Content and Style

Lewis conveys that the authors’ work was grounded in many practical applications where
choices and decisions are needed (e.g., screening of pilots, diagnosis of disease). Kahneman
and Tversky showed time and again that we make systematic mental or judgment errors;
our decisions can be influenced by contexts or background information that ought not to
influence our choices but reliably do. Similarly, how the alternatives were presented (e.g., to
obtain something positive or avert a potential loss) influenced our decisions and choices,
even if the actual benefit from each alternative was the same. In short, in conditions of
uncertainty and where choice and decision making are needed, we make mental errors and
do so naturally. (When asked if his work related in any way to artificial intelligence, Tversky
is quoted as replying, “Not really. We study natural stupidity instead of artificial intelligence”
[p. 293].)

Kahneman and Tversky designed and presented hypothetical situations that are seemingly
simple choices often with “right” answers to achieve a gain and revealed operation of these
biases rather starkly. The work was relevant to so many disciplines and tasks within them
where decision making and choice were relevant but especially to economics, in which
rationality of markets and decision making played a long-standing role. Kahneman and
Tversky provided persuasive and pervasive evidence that rationality was violated and
markets and thinking about them had to be reconsidered in fundamental ways.

The book has an informal, anecdotal breezy style; it is about two fellows constantly referred
to as Amos and Danny, to keep the informality, rather than Tversky and Kahneman, more
familiar to readers of this journal. The book is many little stories about specific events and
periods, including many quotes of what this or that person said who knew them.
Occasionally, a formula or research concept is mentioned (e.g., statistical regression,
sample size) but nothing very heavy and all accessible to a nonscience reader. A few key
psychological phenomena and concepts are presented briefly related to perception (e.g.,
Müller-Lyer illusion), schools of psychology (e.g., Gestalt psychology), and perennial issues
(e.g., clinical vs. statistical prediction). All are presented lightly, provide context, and hint
early that what Kahneman and Tversky are studying will have broad implications.

The early chapters of the book include concrete examples of sports teams and decision
making, famous coaches and athletes in current news, the family life and personalities of
Kahneman and Tversky, Israeli wars and battles and their participation, and more. This
situates the book in the present and recent past, as well as develops the characters and
personalities, perhaps to make the reader more intrigued by how two such different
personalities could ever get along yet have the depth of intellectual intimacy and friendship
their collaboration enjoyed. I found the early pace of the book (first 50 pages) slow and
heavy on intricate details and stories, not clearly connected to the topic at the moments
they are presented or later in the book. After a couple of chapters, the book was at full
stride and we see the empirical and conceptual contributions unfold in fine and fascinating
detail.
Special Strengths

Although not intended as a central or explicit theme, the book illustrates science at its best.
Key steps can be extracted that include developing the ideas, drawing them from and
grounding them in everyday experience, thinking about their limits, devising empirical tests,
testing across diverse samples, delineating key constructs (e.g., a specific cognitive bias)
that a set of tests reflect, and then moving to theory. The iterative process of developing,
testing, and challenging one’s own views as much as the views of others is amazing to
behold and inspiring. We need more books that bring science, the thrill of invention,
dialogue, and the process of discovery to public attention and by gifted writers such as
Lewis.

The development of the theory and research is placed in the context of an intimate
friendship. Lewis conveys how that changed over time from closeness to more distance,
owing in part to geographical separation, differences in personalities, and professional
issues related to acknowledgment of their contributions between themselves and perhaps
others. Lewis paints these highs and lows and conflicts as tensions not only to reflect what
emerged but also to combine select features of a biography, documentary, and novel—into
one book. In keeping with tension to engage the reader, the book ends by Kahneman and
his wife (Professor Anne Treisman) waiting by the phone for the possible early morning
phone call from the Nobel Committee. Alas, the call does not come at the anticipated time,
and Kahneman and Triesman start to begin their normal daily routine, but that is quickly
interrupted. Lewis ends the book with a lovely, single-sentence, four-word paragraph, “Then
the phone rang” (p. 352).

An Embedded Negative View of Psychology

Other features incidental to the book but perhaps not to most readers of this journal pertain
to here-and-there throwaway comments about psychology and psychological science. Many
of these are negative, feed stereotypes and do not help with any public image of
psychologists or academics, other than the two main characters who are featured. For
example, we are told the following:

• People who want to be psychologists include “a rattle-bag of characteristics with

motives that ranged from the urge to rationalize their own unhappiness, to a
conviction that they had deep insights into human nature but lacked the literary
power to write a decent novel” (p. 72).

• There is a “grandma’s attic quality of the field: Psychology was a place all sorts of
unrelated and seemingly unsolvable problems simply got tossed” (p. 73).

• In the 1950s, psychology was divided into two camps, “WASP Psychology” and
“Jewish Psychology.” “The WASPs marched around in white lab coats carrying
clipboards and thinking up new ways to torture rats” (p. 70).

• “To many, the presence of a mind as clear as Amos’s (Tversky) in a field as murky
as psychology remained a mystery” (p. 101).
 • Papers written for social science journals are “instinctively defensive” and the
readers of the papers are “at best skeptical and more commonly hostile” (p. 353).

Several groups are identified, in addition to WASPs and Jews (e.g., Gestaltists, behaviorists,
mathematical psychologists), with sweeping general and generally negative statements
(e.g., “Mathematical psychologists tended to view nonmathematical psychologists as simply
too stupid to understand the importance of what they were saying.” [p. 143]). Really?
Labeling groups by one feature and then imbuing them in a homogeneous way might reflect
an irony in a book on cognitive bias and processes by unwittingly displaying some tricks of
the mind that were not otherwise intended but pejorative nonetheless. The negativism these
points reflect served no purpose I could tell and simply was not needed. Establishing the
brilliance of Kahneman and Tversky and the uniqueness of their relationship and
contributions does not require implying that they rose from the detritus of contemporary
social science and a bevy of unnamed psychologists with checkered motivations.

Closing Comment

Overall, the book is worth a read, along with that Kahneman’s (2011) own best seller,
Thinking, Fast and Slow (reviewed in PsycCRITIQUES by Holcomb, 2012). The book weaves
real-world experience, an intimate collaboration, and great research and theory. The
process of identifying phenomena, refuting, testing, and moving to theory is so difficult to
teach, and here we have a lovely model. The resulting products of their work in the form of
multiple biases and heuristics that elaborate how we choose, make decisions, and perceive
the world are well known. Seeing the process of the growth of these concepts from
seedlings to conceptual forests is both fascinating and inspiring.

References

Holcomb, W. (2012). How easy it is to make bad choices [Review of the book Thinking, fast
and slow. D. Kahneman]. PsycCRITIQUES, 57. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0027527
PsycINFO →
Kahneman, D. (2002). Biographical. Nobel media. Retrieved from www.nobelprize.org/
nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2002/kahneman-bio.html
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
PsycINFO →
Lam, B. (2017, January 3). The friendship that created behavioral economics: A
conversation with Michael Lewis about his new book on the research of Daniel
Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Atlantic.
Lewis, M. (2003). Moneyball: The art of winning an unfair game. New York, NY: W. W.
Norton.
Sunstein, C., & Thaler, R. (2016, December 7). The two friends who changed how we think
about how we think. The New Yorker. Retrieved from http://www.newyorker.com/
books/page-turner/the-two-friends-who-changed-how-we-think-about-how-we-think