The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World(100)

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* After the article appeared, in the October 1983 issue of Psychological Review, the best-selling author and computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter sent Amos his own vignettes. Example: Fido barks and chases cars. Which is Fido more likely to be: (1) a cocker spaniel or (2) an entity in the universe?





Coda



BORA-BORA

Consider the following scenario.

Jason K. is a fourteen-year-old homeless boy who lives in a large American city. He is shy and withdrawn but extremely resourceful. His father was murdered when he was young; his mother is an addict. Jason takes care of himself, sleeping sometimes on the sofas at friends’ apartments but mostly on the streets. He manages to stay in school until the ninth grade. He often goes hungry. One day in 2010 he accepts an offer from a local gang to sell drugs, and drops out of school. A few weeks later, the night before his fifteenth birthday, he is shot and killed. He was unarmed when he died.

We are seeking ways to “undo” Jason K.’s death. Rank the following in order of their likelihood.

1) Jason’s father was not murdered.

2) Jason carried a gun and was able to protect himself.

3) The U.S. federal government made it easier for homeless kids to obtain the free breakfast and lunch to which they are entitled. Jason never went hungry, and remained in school.

4) A lawyer steeped in the writings of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman took a federal government job in 2009. Drawing upon Kahneman and Tversky’s work, he pushed for changes in the rules, so that homeless kids no longer needed to enroll in the school meal program. Instead they automatically received free breakfast and lunch. Jason never went hungry, and remained in school.

If you found #4 more probable than #3, you violated perhaps the simplest and most fundamental law of probability. But you’re also onto something. The lawyer’s name is Cass Sunstein.

Among its other consequences, the work that Amos and Danny did together awakened economists and policy makers to the importance of psychology. “I became a believer,” said Nobel Prize–winning economist Peter Diamond of Danny and Amos’s work. “It’s all true. This stuff is not just lab stuff. It’s capturing reality, and it’s important to economists. And I spent years thinking of how to use it—and failing.” By the early 1990s a lot of people thought it was a good idea to bring together psychologists and economists, to allow them to get to know each other better. But as it turned out, they didn’t particularly want to know each other better. Economists were brash and self-assured. Psychologists were nuanced and doubtful. “Psychologists as a rule will only interrupt a presentation for clarification,” says psychologist Dan Gilbert. “Economists will interrupt to show how smart they are.” “In economics it is completely normal to be rude,” says economist George Loewenstein. “We tried to create a psychology and economics seminar at Yale. We had our first meeting. The psychologists came out completely bruised. We never had a second meeting.” In the early 1990s, Amos’s former student Steven Sloman invited an equal number of economists and psychologists to a conference in France. “And I swear to God I spent three-quarters of my time telling the economists to shut up,” said Sloman. “The problem,” says Harvard social psychologist Amy Cuddy, “is that psychologists think economists are immoral and economists think psychologists are stupid.”

In the academic culture war triggered by Danny and Amos’s work, Amos served as a strategic advisor. At least some of his sympathies were with the economists. Amos’s mind had always clashed with most of psychology. He didn’t like emotion, as a subject. His interest in the unconscious mind was limited to a desire to prove it didn’t exist. He was like a man in stripes wandering a land settled by people dressed in plaids and polka dots. Like the economists, he preferred neat formal models to mixed-chocolate boxes of psychological phenomena. Like them, he found it completely normal to be rude. And, like them, he had worldly ambitions for his ideas. Economists sought influence in the arenas of finance and business and public policy. Psychologists hardly ever entered those arenas. That was about to change.

Danny and Amos both saw that there was no point trying to infiltrate economics from psychology. The economists would just ignore intruders. What were needed were young economists with an interest in psychology. Almost magically, after Amos and Danny arrived in North America, they began to appear. George Loewenstein was a good example. A trained economist disillusioned by the psychological sterility of economic models, Loewenstein read Amos and Danny’s work and thought: Wait, maybe I want to be a psychologist! As he happened to be Sigmund Freud’s great-grandson, this was an even more complicated than usual thought. “I had tried to escape the family’s past,” said Loewenstein. “I realized I had never taken a single class in what really interested me.” He approached Amos and asked him for advice: Should he move from economics to psychology? “Amos said, ‘You should stay in economics—we need you there.’ He already knew in 1982 that he was starting a movement. And he needed people inside economics.”

The argument that Danny and Amos started would spill over into law and public policy. Psychology would use economics to enter these places and others. Richard Thaler—the first frustrated economist to stumble onto Danny and Amos’s work and pursue its consequences for economics single-mindedly—would help to create a new field, and give it the name “behavioral economics.” “Prospect Theory,” scarcely cited in the first decade after its publication, would become, by 2010, the second most cited paper in all of economics. “People tried to ignore it,” said Thaler. “Old economists never change their minds.” By 2016 every tenth paper published in economics would have a behavioral angle to it, which is to say it had at least a whisper of the work of Danny and Amos. And Richard Thaler would have just stepped down from his tenure as president of the American Economic Association.