The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World(104)

Danny had not allowed himself to imagine what he would do if he were ever given a Nobel Prize. Which was just as well, as the phone didn’t ring. At some point Anne got up and said, a bit sadly, “Oh well.” Every year there were disappointed people. Every year there were old people waiting by phones. Anne went off to exercise and left Danny alone. He’d always been good at preparing himself for not getting what he wanted, and in the grand scheme of things this was not a hard blow. He was fine with who he was and what he had done. He could now safely imagine what he would have done had he won the Nobel Prize. He would have brought Amos’s wife and children with him. He would have appended to his Nobel lecture his eulogy of Amos. He would have carried Amos to Stockholm with him. He would have done for Amos what Amos could never do for him. There were many things Danny would have done, but now he had things to do. He went back to writing his enthusiastic reference for Terry Odean.

Then the phone rang.





A NOTE ON SOURCES

Papers written for social science journals are not intended for public consumption. For a start, they’re instinctively defensive. The readers of academic papers, in the mind’s eye of their authors, are at best skeptical, and more commonly hostile. The writers of these papers aren’t trying to engage their readers, much less give them pleasure. They’re trying to survive them. As a result, I found that I was able to get a clearer, more direct, and more enjoyable understanding of the ideas in academic papers by speaking with their authors than by reading the papers themselves—though of course I read the papers, too.

The academic papers of Tversky and Kahneman are an important exception. Even as they wrote for a narrow academic audience, Danny and Amos seemed to sense a general reader waiting for them, in the future. Danny’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow was openly directed at the general reader, and that helped this general reader in many ways. Actually, I watched Danny agonize over his book for several years, and even read early drafts of some of it. Everything Danny wrote, like everything he said, was full of interest. Still, every few months he’d be consumed with despair, and announce that he was giving up writing altogether—before he destroyed his own reputation. To forestall his book’s publication he paid a friend to find people who might convince him not to publish it. After its publication, when it landed on the New York Times bestseller list, he bumped into another friend, who later described what must be the oddest response any author has ever had to his own success. “You’ll never believe what happened,” said Danny incredulously. “Those people at the New York Times made a mistake and put my book on the bestseller list!” A few weeks later, he bumped into the same friend. “It’s unbelievable what is going on,” said Danny. “Because those people at the New York Times made that mistake and put my book on their bestseller list, they’ve had to keep it there!”

I would encourage anyone interested in my book to read Danny’s book, too. For those whose thirst for psychology remains unquenched, I’d recommend two other books, which helped me come to grips with the field. The eight-volume Encyclopedia of Psychology will answer just about any question you might have about psychology, clearly and directly. The nine-volume (and counting) A History of Psychology in Autobiography will answer just about any question you might have about psychologists, though less directly. The first volume of this remarkable series was published in 1930, and it continues to motor along, fueled by an endlessly renewable source of energy: the need felt by psychologists to explain why they are the way they are.

At any rate, in grappling with my subject, I obviously leaned on the work of others. Here are those I leaned on:

INTRODUCTION: THE PROBLEM THAT NEVER GOES AWAY

Thaler, Richard H., and Cass R. Sunstein. “Who’s on First.” New Republic, August 31, 2003. https://newrepublic.com/article/61123/whos-first.





CHAPTER 1: MAN BOOBS


Rutenberg, Jim. “The Republican Horse Race Is Over, and Journalism Lost.” New York Times, May 9, 2016.





CHAPTER 2: THE OUTSIDER


Meehl, Paul E. Clinical versus Statistical Prediction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1954.

——— . “Psychology: Does Our Heterogeneous Subject Matter Have Any Unity?” Minnesota Psychologist 35 (1986): 3–9.





CHAPTER 3: THE INSIDER


Edwards, Ward. “The Theory of Decision Making.” Psychological Bulletin 51, no. 4 (1954): 380–417. http://worthylab.tamu.edu/courses_files/01_edwards_1954.pdf.

Guttman, Louis. “What Is Not What in Statistics.” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 26, no. 2 (1977): 81–107. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2987957.

May, Kenneth. “A Set of Independent Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Simple Majority Decision.” Econometrica 20, no. 4 (1952): 680–84.

Rosch, Eleanor, Carolyn B. Mervis, Wayne D. Gray, David M. Johnson, and Penny Boyes-Braem. “Basic Objects in Natural Categories.” Cognitive Psychology 8 (1976): 382–439. http://www.cns.nyu.edu/~msl/courses/2223/Readings/Rosch-CogPsych1976.pdf.

Tversky, Amos. “The Intransitivity of Preferences.” Psychological Review 76 (1969): 31–48.

——— . “Features of Similarity.” Psychological Review 84, no. 4 (1977): 327–52. http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/dm/Tversky-features.pdf.