The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World(17)
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Most Israelis, upon finishing high school, were conscripted into the military. Identified as intellectually gifted, Danny was allowed to proceed directly to university to pursue a degree in psychology. How to do this was not obvious, as the country’s only college campus lay behind Arab lines, and its plans for a psychology department had been killed in an Arab ambush. And so, on a morning in the fall of 1951, the seventeen-year-old Danny Kahneman sat in math class, held in a Jerusalem monastery that served as one of several temporary homes for Hebrew University. Even here, Danny seemed out of place. Most of the students had just come from serving three years in the army, and a lot of them had seen combat. Danny was younger, and dressed in a jacket and tie, which struck the other students as preposterous.
For the next three years Danny essentially taught himself great swaths of his chosen field, as his teachers could not. “My statistics teacher I loved,” Danny recalled, “but she didn’t know statistics from beans. I taught myself statistics, from a book.” His professors were less an assemblage of specialists than a collection of characters, most of them European refugees, who happened to be willing to live in Israel. “Basically it was organized around charismatic teachers, people who had biographies, not just curriculum vitaes,” recalled Avishai Margalit, who would go from Hebrew University to become a philosophy professor at Stanford, among other places. “They had lived big lives.”
The most vivid was Yeshayahu Leibowitz—whom Danny adored. Leibowitz had come to Palestine from Germany via Switzerland in the 1930s, with advanced degrees in medicine, chemistry, the philosophy of science and—it was rumored—a few other fields as well. Yet he’d tried and failed to get his driver’s license seven times. “You’d see him walking the streets,” recalled one former Leibowitz student, Maya Bar-Hillel. “His pants pulled up to his neck, he had these hunched shoulders and a Jay Leno chin. He’d be talking to himself and making these rhetorical gestures. But his mind attracted youth from all over the country.” Whatever Leibowitz happened to be teaching—and there seemed no subject he could not teach—he never failed to put on a show. “The course I took from him was called biochemistry, but it was basically about life,” recalled another student. “A large part of the class was devoted to explaining how stupid Ben-Gurion was.” He was referring to David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister. One of Leibowitz’s favorite stories was about a donkey placed equidistant from two bundles of hay. In the story the donkey can’t decide which bundle of hay is closer to him, and so dies of hunger. “Leibowitz would then say that no donkey would do this; a donkey would just go at random to one or the other and eat. It’s only when decisions are made by people that they get more complicated. And then he said, ‘What happens to a country when a donkey makes the decisions that people are supposed to make you can read every day in the paper.’ His class was always full.”
What Danny recalled of Leibowitz was typically peculiar: not so much what the man had said but the sound made by the chalk hitting the board when he wanted to make a point. It was like a gunshot.
Even at that young age, and in those circumstances, it was possible to detect a drift in Danny’s mind, by the currents it resisted. Freud was in the air but Danny didn’t want anyone lying on his couch, and he really didn’t want to lie upon anyone else’s. He’d decided to attach no particular importance to his own childhood experience, or even his memories: Why should he care about other people’s? By the early 1950s, some large number of the psychologists who insisted that the discipline be subject to the standards of science had given up the ambition to study the inner workings of the human mind. If you can’t observe what is happening in the mind, how can you even pretend to make a study of it? What was deemed worthy of scientific attention—and what could be studied scientifically—was how living creatures behaved.
The dominant school of thought was called behaviorism. Its king, B. F. Skinner, had gotten his start during the Second World War, after the U.S. Air Force hired him to train pigeons to guide bombs. Skinner taught his pigeons to peck in the right spot on an aerial map of the target, by rewarding them with food each time they did it. (They did this with less enthusiasm when antiaircraft fire was exploding around them, and so were never used in combat.) Skinner’s success with the pigeons was the start of a spectacularly influential career underpinned by the idea that all animal behavior was driven not by thoughts and feelings but by external rewards and punishments. He locked rats inside what he called “operant conditioning chambers” (they soon became known as “Skinner boxes”) and taught them to pull levers and push buttons. He taught pigeons to dance and play Ping-Pong and bang out “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” on a piano.
The behaviorists presumed that whatever they discovered about rats and pigeons applied to people—on whom, for various reasons, it was simply less practical to conduct experiments. “To the reader who is anxious to advance to the human subject a word of caution is in order,” Skinner wrote, in an essay called “How to Teach Animals.” “We must embark upon a program in which we sometimes apply relevant reinforcement and sometimes withhold it. In doing this, we are quite likely [in humans] to generate emotional effects. Unfortunately the science of behavior is not yet as successful in controlling emotion as it is in shaping behavior.” The allure of behaviorism was that the science appeared clean: the stimuli could be observed, the responses could be recorded. It seemed “objective.” It didn’t rely on anyone telling anyone else what he thought or felt. All the important stuff was observable and measurable. There was a joke that captured the antiseptic spirit of behaviorism that Skinner himself liked to tell: A couple makes love. Afterward, one of them turns to the other and says, “It was good for you. How was it for me?”