The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World(27)

Amnon also had the best seat in the house when Amos decided what he was going to do with his life. Hebrew University in the late 1950s required students to pick two fields of concentration. Amos had chosen philosophy and psychology. But Amos approached intellectual life strategically, as if it were an oil field to be drilled, and after two years of sitting through philosophy classes he announced that philosophy was a dry well. “I remember his words,” recalled Amnon. “He said, ‘There is nothing we can do in philosophy. Plato solved too many of the problems. We can’t have any impact in this area. There are too many smart guys and too few problems left, and the problems have no solutions.’” The mind-body problem was a good example. How are our various mental events—what you believe, what you think—related to our physical states? What is the relationship between our bodies and our minds? The question was at least as old as Descartes, but there was still no answer in sight—at least not in philosophy. The trouble with philosophy, Amos thought, was that it didn’t play by the rules of science. The philosopher tested his theories of human nature on a sample size of one—himself. Psychology at least pretended to be a science. It kept at least one hand at all times on hard data. A psychologist might test whatever theory he devised on a representative sample of humanity. His theories might be tested by others, and his findings reproduced, or falsified. If a psychologist stumbled upon a truth he might make it stick.

To Amos’s closest Israeli friends, there was never anything mysterious about his interest in psychology. Questions of why people behaved as they behaved, and thought as they thought, were thick in the air they breathed. “You never discussed art,” recalls Avishai Margalit. “You discussed people. It was a constant thing, a constant puzzle: What makes others tick? It comes from the shtetl. Jews were petty merchants. They had to assess others, all the time. Who is dangerous? Who is not dangerous? Who will repay the debt, who won’t repay the debt? People were basically dependent on their psychological judgment.” Still, to many, the presence of a mind as clear as Amos’s in a field as murky as psychology remained a mystery. How had this relentlessly optimistic person, with his clear and logical mind and zero tolerance for bullshit, wound up in a field cluttered with unhappy souls and mysticism?

Amos, when he talked about it, which he usually didn’t, made it seem as if it had started as a whim. When he was in his midforties and many of the brightest young minds in the field wanted to study with him, he sat down with a professor of psychiatry at Harvard named Miles Shore. Shore asked him how he had become a psychologist. “It’s hard to know how people select a course in life,” Amos said. “The big choices we make are practically random. The small choices probably tell us more about who we are. Which field we go into may depend on which high school teacher we happen to meet. Who we marry may depend on who happens to be around at the right time of life. On the other hand, the small decisions are very systematic. That I became a psychologist is probably not very revealing. What kind of psychologist I am may reflect deep traits.”

What kind of psychologist would he be? In most of psychology Amos found little to interest him. After taking classes in child psychology and clinical psychology and social psychology, he concluded that the vast majority of his chosen field was safely ignorable. To his assigned work he paid shockingly little attention. His classmate Amia Lieblich witnessed Amos’s insouciance after he’d been assigned by a professor to administer an intelligence test to a five-year-old child. “The night before the work was due, Amos turned to Amnon and said, ‘Amnon, lie down on the couch. I am going to ask you some questions. Pretend you are five years old.’ And he got away with it!” Amos was the only student who never took notes in class. When the time came to study for some test, Amos would simply ask to see Amnon’s notes. “He would read my notes once and know the material better than I did,” said Amnon. “It was the same way he could meet a physicist in the street, talk to him for thirty minutes, without knowing anything about physics, and then tell the physicist something about physics the physicist didn’t know. I first thought he was a superb superficial person—that it was a party trick. And that was a mistake. Because it wasn’t a trick.”

It didn’t help that so many of the professors seemed to be flying by the seat of their pants. The guy who had come from Scotland to teach the history of psychology was sent back when it was discovered he had fabricated his PhD. A guy they brought in to teach a class on personality testing—a Polish Jew who had survived the Holocaust by hiding in the woods—fled the classroom in tears under questioning from Amos and Amnon. “We basically had to teach psychology to ourselves,” recalled Amnon. Amos compared clinical psychology—everywhere on the rise, and the field of greatest interest to their fellow students, most of whom hoped to become therapists—to medicine. If you went to a doctor in the seventeenth century, you were worse off for having gone. By the end of the nineteenth century, going to the doctor was a break-even proposition: You were as likely to come away from the visit better off as you were to be worse off. Amos argued that clinical psychology was like medicine in the seventeenth century, and he had lots of evidence to support his case.

One day during their second year at Hebrew University, in 1959, Amnon came across a paper called “The Theory of Decision Making,” by a psychology professor at Johns Hopkins named Ward Edwards. “Many social scientists other than psychologists try to account for the behavior of individuals,” it opened. “Economists and a few psychologists have produced a large body of theory and a few experiments that deal with individual decision making. The kind of decision making with which this body of theory deals is as follows: given two states, A and B, into either one of which an individual may put himself, the individual chooses A in preference to B (or vice versa). For instance, a child standing in front of a candy counter may be considering two states. In state A the child has $0.25 and no candy. In state B the child has $0.15 and a tencent candy bar. The economic theory of decision making is a theory about how to predict such decisions.” Edwards went on to lay out a problem: Economic theory, the design of markets, public policy making, and a lot more depended on theories about how people made decisions. But psychologists—the people most likely to test these theories and determine how people actually made decisions—hadn’t paid much attention to the subject.