The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World(2)

That was an understatement. Until that moment I don’t believe I’d ever heard of either Kahneman or Tversky, even though one of them had somehow managed to win a Nobel Prize in economics. And I hadn’t actually thought much about the psychological aspects of the Moneyball story. The market for baseball players was rife with inefficiencies: why? The Oakland front office had talked about “biases” in the marketplace: Foot speed was overrated because it was so easy to see, for instance, and a hitter’s ability to draw walks was undervalued in part because walks were so forgettable—they seemed to require the hitter mainly to do nothing at all. Fat or misshapen players were more likely to be undervalued; handsome, fit players were more likely to be overvalued. All of these biases that the Oakland front office talked about I’d found interesting, but I hadn’t really pushed further and asked: Where do the biases come from? Why do people have them? I’d set out to tell a story about the way markets worked, or failed to work, especially when they were valuing people. But buried somewhere inside it was another story, one that I’d left unexplored and untold, about the way the human mind worked, or failed to work, when it was forming judgments and making decisions. When faced with uncertainty—about investments or people or anything else—how did it arrive at its conclusions? How did it process evidence—from a baseball game, an earnings report, a trial, a medical examination, or a speed date? What were people’s minds doing—even the minds of supposed experts—that led them to the misjudgments that could be exploited for profit by others, who ignored the experts and relied on data?

And how did a pair of Israeli psychologists come to have so much to say about these matters that they more or less anticipated a book about American baseball written decades in the future? What possessed two guys in the Middle East to sit down and figure out what the mind was doing when it tried to judge a baseball player, or an investment, or a presidential candidate? And how on earth does a psychologist win a Nobel Prize in economics? In the answers to those questions, it emerged, there was another story to tell. Here it is.





1



MAN BOOBS

You never knew what a kid in the interview room might say to jolt you out of your slumber and back to your senses and force you to pay attention. And once you were paying attention, you naturally placed far greater weight on whatever he had just said than you probably should: The most memorable moments in job interviews for the National Basketball Association were hard to consign to some appropriately sized compartment in the brain. In certain cases it was as if the players were trying to screw up your ability to judge them. For instance, when the Houston Rockets interviewer asked one player if he could pass a drug test, the guy had gone wide-eyed and grabbed the table and said, “You mean today!!!???” There was the college player who’d been arrested on charges (subsequently dropped) of domestic violence, and whose agent claimed it had been a simple misunderstanding. When they’d asked the player about it he’d explained, chillingly, that he’d grown weary of his girlfriend’s “bitching, so I just put my hands around her neck and I squeezed. ’Cause I needed her to shut up.” There was Kenneth Faried, the power forward out of Morehead State. When he showed up for his interview they’d asked him, “Do you prefer to be called Kenneth or Kenny?” “Manimal,” Faried said. He wanted to be called Manimal. What did you do with that? Roughly three out of every four of the black American players who came for NBA interviews—or at least came for interviews with the NBA’s Houston Rockets—had never really known their father. “It’s not uncommon, when you ask these guys who their biggest male influence was, for them to say, ‘My mom,’” said the Rockets’ director of player personnel, Jimmy Paulis. “One said, ‘Obama.’”

Then there was Sean Williams. Back in 2007 Sean Williams, six foot ten, was an off-the-charts player who had been suspended from his Boston College team the first two of his three seasons after being arrested for possession of marijuana (a charge that was later dropped). He’d played only fifteen games his sophomore year and still blocked 75 shots; the fans referred to his college games as The Sean Williams Block Party. Sean Williams looked like a big-time NBA player and was expected to be a first-round pick—in part because everyone assumed that his ability to get through his junior year without being suspended meant that he’d gotten his marijuana use under control. Before the 2007 NBA draft, he’d flown to Houston, at his agent’s request, to practice his interviewing skills. The agent cut the Rockets a deal: Williams would talk to the Rockets and the Rockets alone, and the Rockets would offer the agent tips about how to make Sean Williams more persuasive in a job interview. It actually went pretty well, until they got onto the topic of marijuana. “So you got caught smoking weed your freshman and sophomore years,” said the Rockets interviewer. “What happened your junior year?” Williams just shook his head and said, “They stopped testing me. And if you’re not going to test me, I’m gonna smoke!”

After that, Williams’s agent decided it was best for Sean Williams not to grant any more interviews. He still got himself drafted in the first round by the New Jersey Nets, and made brief appearances in 137 NBA games before leaving to play in Turkey.

Millions of dollars were at stake—NBA players were, on average, by far the highest-paid athletes in all of team sports. The future success of the Houston Rockets was on the line. These young people were hurling information about themselves at you that was meant to help you to make an employment decision. But a lot of times it was hard to know what to do with it.