The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World(22)
A different, more ordinary person would have left the experience brimming with confidence. In a stroke, twenty-one-year-old Danny Kahneman had exerted more influence upon the Israeli army—the institution on which the society depended for its survival—than any psychologist had ever done or ever would do. The obvious next step for him was to go off and get his PhD and become Israel’s leading expert in personality assessment and selection processes. Harvard was home to some of the leading figures in the field, but Danny decided, without anyone’s help, that he wasn’t bright enough to go to Harvard—and didn’t bother to apply. Instead he went to Berkeley.
When he returned to Hebrew University as a young assistant professor in 1961, after four years away, he was freshly inspired by personality studies being done by the psychologist Walter Mischel. In the early 1960s Mischel created these wonderfully simple tests on children that wound up revealing a lot about them. In what became known as the “marshmallow experiment,” Mischel put three-, four-, and five-year-old kids in a room alone with their favorite treat—a pretzel stick, a marshmallow—and told them that if they could last a few minutes without eating the treat they’d receive a second treat. A small child’s ability to wait turned out to be correlated with his IQ and his family circumstances and some other things as well. Tracking the kids through life, Mischel later found that the better a five-year-old resisted the temptation, the higher his future SAT scores and his sense of self-worth, and the lower his body fat and the likelihood he’d suffer from some addiction.
Gripped by a new enthusiasm, Danny designed a bunch of marshmallow test–like experiments. He even coined a phrase for what he was doing: the psychology of single questions. He arranged for Israeli kids on camping trips—this was just one example—to be offered a choice between sleeping in a single tent, a two-person tent, or an eight-person tent. Perhaps their answers, Danny thought, would say something about their tendency to affiliate with a group. The idea yielded either no findings or findings he couldn’t replicate in a subsequent experiment. And so he gave up. “I wanted to be a scientist,” he said. “And I thought, I can’t be a scientist unless I can replicate myself. I couldn’t replicate myself.” Doubting himself once again, he abandoned the study of personality, deciding he had no talent for it.
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* Decades later, when Danny Kahneman was in his forties, he sat in for a day on a class at the University of California, Berkeley, taught by a psychologist named Eleanor Rosch. On that day, Rosch put a group of first-year graduate students through an exercise. She passed around a hat stuffed with slips of paper, on each slip a different occupation: zookeeper, airline pilot, carpenter, thief. The students were told to pick an occupation and then say what, if anything, popped to mind that foreshadowed their fate. Of course I wound up a zookeeper; as a kid I loved to cage our cat. The exercise was meant to illustrate the powerful instinct people have for finding causes for any effect, and also for creating narratives. “The whole group opens their papers at the same time,” recalled Rosch, “and within seconds someone laughs, and the laughter becomes general. And, yes, to their surprise, things have popped into their minds. Danny was the lone exception. “ ‘Nope,’ he said,” according to Rosch. “ ‘I could only have been two things. A psychologist or a rabbi.’”
? The word is German and means “shape” or “form” but, in a manner the Gestalt psychologists would enjoy, has itself tended to change shape, depending on the context in which it is used.
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THE INSIDER
Amnon Rapoport was just eighteen years old when he was identified by the Israeli army’s new selection system as leadership material. They’d made him a tank commander. “I didn’t even know there was a tank corps,” he said. One night in October 1956 he drove his tank into Jordan to avenge the murder of several Israeli civilians. On these raids you never knew what decisions you might have to make quickly. Shoot or hold fire? Kill or let live? Live or die? A few months earlier, an Israeli soldier Amnon’s age had been captured by the Syrians. He’d decided to kill himself before they could question him. When the Syrians sent his body back, the Israeli army found a note in his toenail: “I never betrayed.”
On that night in October 1956, Amnon’s first decision had been to stop firing: His job was to bombard the second floor of a Jordanian police building until Israeli paratroopers stormed the ground floor. He worried about killing his own men. After he’d stopped shelling he heard, over his tank’s radio, reports from the ground. “And all of a sudden, the reality hit me; this was not just an adventure with heroes and villains acting their role. People were dying.” The paratroopers were Israel’s elite fighting force. Their unit, in hand-to-hand combat, was suffering serious causalities, and yet their reports from the battle to Amnon’s ears inside the tank sounded calm, almost casual. “There was no panic,” he said, “indeed, no change of intonation and hardly any expression of emotion.” These Jews had become Spartans: How had that happened? He wondered how he would fare in hand-to-hand combat. He aspired to be a warrior, too.
Two weeks later he drove his tank into Egypt, in what turned out to be the start of a military invasion. In the fog of battle, he was strafed not just by Egyptian but also Israeli warplanes. His most vivid memory was of an Egyptian MiG-15 diving straight down on his tank while he—with his head above the turret to maintain a 360-degree view of the battlefield—shouted at his driver to zig and zag to avoid being hit. It felt like the MiG was on a special assignment to blow off his head. A few days later, desperate Egyptian soldiers in full retreat approached Amnon’s tank with their arms in the air. They begged for water and protection from the Bedouins who hunted them for their rifles and boots. The day before, he was murdering these people; now all he felt toward them was pity. He marveled again—“at how easy it is to shift from an efficient killing machine to compassionate human being, and how quick the switch may be.” How did that happen?