The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World(101)

Cass Sunstein had been a young law professor at the University of Chicago when he came upon Thaler’s first war cry on psychology’s behalf. A paper Thaler had titled in his mind “Stupid Shit That People Do” he’d finally published as “Toward a Positive Theory of Consumer Choice.” Thaler’s bibliography led Sunstein directly to the article written by Danny and Amos in Science about judgment, and to “Prospect Theory.” “For a lawyer both of these were difficult,” said Sunstein. “I had to read them more than once. But I remember the feeling: It was an explosion of lightbulbs. You have thoughts in your mind and you read something that immediately puts them in order and it’s electrifying.” In 2009, at the invitation of President Obama, Sunstein went to work at the White House. There he oversaw the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and made scores of small changes that had big effects on the daily lives of all Americans.

The changes Sunstein made had a unifying theme: They sprang directly or indirectly from the work of Danny and Amos. You couldn’t say that Danny and Amos’s work led President Obama to ban federal employees from texting while driving, but it wasn’t hard to draw a line from their work to that act. The federal government now became sensitive to both loss aversion and framing effects: People didn’t choose between things, they chose between descriptions of things. The fuel labels on new automobiles went from listing only miles per gallon to including the number of gallons a car consumed every hundred miles. What used to be called the food pyramid became MyPlate, a graphic of a dinner plate with divisions for each of the five food groups, and it was suddenly easier for Americans to see what made for a healthy diet. And so on. Sunstein argued that the government needed, alongside its Council of Economic Advisers, a Council of Psychological Advisers. He wasn’t alone. By the time Sunstein left the White House, in 2015, calls for a greater role for psychologists, or at any rate for psychological insight, were coming from inside governments across the world.

Sunstein was particularly interested in what was now being called “choice architecture.” The decisions people made were driven by the way they were presented. People didn’t simply know what they wanted; they took cues from their environment. They constructed their preferences. And they followed paths of least resistance, even when they paid a heavy price for it. Millions of U.S. corporate and government employees had woken up one day during the 2000s and found they no longer needed to enroll themselves in retirement plans but instead were automatically enrolled. They probably never noticed the change. But that alone caused the participation in retirement plans to rise by roughly 30 percentage points. Such was the power of choice architecture. One tweak to the society’s choice architecture made by Sunstein, once he’d gone to work in the U.S. government, was to smooth the path between homeless children and free school meals. In the school year after he left the White House, about 40 percent more poor kids ate free school lunches than had done so before, back when they or some adult acting on their behalf had to take action and make choices to get them.



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Even in Canada, Don Redelmeier still heard the sound of Amos in his head. He’d been back from Stanford for several years, but Amos’s voice was so clear and overpowering that it made it hard for Redelmeier to hear his own. Redelmeier could not pinpoint the precise moment that he sensed that his work with Amos was not all Amos’s doing—that it had some Redelmeier in it, too. His sense of his own distinct value began with a simple question—about homeless people. The homeless were a notorious drag on the local health care system. They turned up in emergency rooms more often than they needed to. They were a drain on resources. Every nurse in Toronto knew this: If you see a homeless person wander in, hustle him out the door as fast as you can. Redelmeier wondered about the wisdom of that strategy.

And so, in 1991, he created an experiment. He arranged for large numbers of college students who wanted to become doctors to be given hospital greens and a place to sleep near the emergency room. Their job was to serve as concierges to the homeless. When a homeless person entered the emergency room, they were to tend to his every need. Fetch him juice and a sandwich, sit down and talk to him, help arrange for his medical care. The college students worked for free. They loved it: They got to pretend to be doctors. But they serviced only half of the homeless people who entered the hospital. The other half received the usual curt and dismissive service from the nursing staff. Redelmeier then tracked the subsequent use of the Toronto health care system by all the homeless people who had visited his hospital. Unsurprisingly, the group that received the gold-plated concierge service tended to return slightly more often to the hospital where they had received it than the unlucky group. The surprise was that their use of the greater Toronto health care system declined. When homeless people felt taken care of by a hospital, they didn’t look for other hospitals that might take care of them. The homeless said, “That was the best that can be done for me.” The entire Toronto health care system had been paying a price for its attitude to the homeless.

A part of good science is to see what everyone else can see but think what no one else has ever said. Amos had said that to him, and it had stuck in Redelmeier’s mind. By the mid-1990s, in startling ways, Redelmeier was taking what everyone could see and thinking to say what no one had ever said. For instance, one day he had a phone call from an AIDS patient who was suffering side effects of medication. In the middle of the conversation, the patient cut him off and said, “I’m sorry, Dr. Redelmeier, I have to go. I just had an accident.” The guy had been talking to him on a cell phone while driving. Redelmeier wondered: Did talking on a cell phone while driving increase the risk of accident?