The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World(47)

* * *




* A lot of psychologists at the time, including Danny, were using sample sizes of 40 subjects, which gave them only a 50 percent chance of accurately reflecting the population. To have a 90 percent chance of capturing the traits of the larger population, the sample size needed to be at least 130. To gather a larger sample of course required a lot more work, and thus slowed a research career.





6



THE MIND’S RULES



In 1960 Paul Hoffman, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon with a special interest in human judgment, persuaded the National Science Foundation to give him sixty thousand dollars so that he could quit his teaching job and create what he described as a “center for basic research in the behavioral sciences.” He’d never really enjoyed teaching all that much and was frustrated by how slowly academic life moved, especially in granting him promotions. And so he quit and bought a building in a leafy Eugene neighborhood that had most recently housed a Unitarian church, and renamed it the Oregon Research Institute. A private institution devoted exclusively to the study of human behavior, there was nothing in the world like it, and it soon attracted both curious assignments and unusual people. “Here brainy people, working in the proper atmosphere, go quietly about their task of finding out what makes us tick,” a local Eugene paper reported.

The vagueness of that account became typical of descriptions of the Oregon Research Institute. No one really knew what the psychologists inside were up to—only that they could no longer say “I’m a professor” and leave it at that. After Paul Slovic left the University of Michigan to join Hoffman in his new research center, and his small children asked him what he did for a living, he would point to a poster that depicted a brain sectioned into its various compartments and say, “I study the mysteries of the mind.”

Psychology had long been an intellectual garbage bin for problems and questions that for whatever reason were not welcome in other academic disciplines. The Oregon Research Institute became a practical extension of that bin. One early assignment came from a contracting company based in Eugene that had been hired to help build a pair of audacious skyscrapers in lower Manhattan, to be called the World Trade Center. The twin towers were to be 110 stories and built from light steel frames. The architect, Minoru Yamasaki, who had a fear of heights, had never designed any building higher than twenty-eight stories. The owner, New York Port Authority, planned to charge higher rents for the upper floors, and wanted the engineer, Les Robertson, to ensure that the high-paying tenants on the upper floors never sensed that the buildings moved with the wind. Realizing that this was not so much an engineering problem as a psychological one—how much could a building move before a person sitting at a desk on the ninety-ninth floor felt it?—Robertson turned to Paul Hoffman and the Oregon Research Institute.

Hoffman rented another building in another leafy Eugene neighborhood and built a room inside of it on top of the hydraulic wheels used to roll logs through Oregon’s lumber mills. At the press of a button the entire room could be made to rock back and forth, silently, like the top of a Manhattan skyscraper in a breeze. All of this was done in secrecy. The Port Authority didn’t want to alert its future tenants that they’d be swinging in the wind, and Hoffman worried that if his subjects knew they were in a building that moved, they would become more sensitive to movement and queer the experiment’s results. “After they’d designed the room,” recalled Paul Slovic, “the question was, how do we get people into the room without them knowing why?” And so after the “sway room” was built, Hoffman stuck a sign outside that read Oregon Research Institute Vision Research Center, and offered free eye exams to all comers. (He’d found a graduate student in psychology at the University of Oregon who happened also to be a certified optometrist.)

As the graduate student performed eye exams, Hoffman turned up the hydraulic rollers and made the room roll back and forth. The psychologists soon discovered that people in a building that was moving were far quicker to sense that something was off about the place than anyone, including the designers of the World Trade Center, had ever imagined. This is a strange room,” said one. “I suppose it’s because I don’t have my glasses on. Is it rigged or something? It really feels funny.” The psychologist who ran the eye exams went home every night seasick.*

When they learned of Hoffman’s findings, the World Trade Center’s engineer, its architect, and assorted officials from the New York Port Authority flew to Eugene to experience the sway room themselves. They were incredulous. Robertson later recalled his reaction for the New York Times: “A billion dollars right down the tube.” He returned to Manhattan and built his very own sway room, where he replicated Hoffman’s findings. In the end, to stiffen the buildings, he devised, and installed in each of them, eleven thousand two-and-a-half-foot-long metal shock absorbers. The extra steel likely enabled the buildings to stand for as long as they did after they were struck by commercial airliners, and it allowed some of the fourteen thousand people who escaped to flee before the buildings collapsed.

For the Oregon Research Institute, the sway room was a bit of a diversion. Many of the psychologists who joined the place shared Paul Hoffman’s interest in human judgment. They also shared an uncommon interest in Paul Meehl’s book, Clinical versus Statistical Prediction, about the inability of psychologists to outperform algorithms when trying to diagnose, or predict the behavior of, their patients. It was the same book Danny Kahneman had read in the mid-1950s before he replaced the human judges of new Israeli soldiers with a crude algorithm. Meehl was himself a clinical psychologist, and kept insisting that of course psychologists like him and those he admired had many subtle insights that could never be captured by an algorithm. And yet by the early 1960s there was a swelling pile of studies that supported Meehl’s initial pie-chucking skepticism of human judgment.?