The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World(59)

They couldn’t help but sense, during their year in Eugene, a growing interest in their work. “That was the year it was really clear we were onto something,” recalled Danny. “People started treating us with respect.” Irv Biederman, then a visiting associate professor of psychology at Stanford University, heard Danny give a talk about heuristics and biases on the Stanford campus in early 1972. “I remember I came home from the talk and told my wife, ‘This is going to win a Nobel Prize in economics,’” recalled Biederman. “I was so absolutely convinced. This was a psychological theory about economic man. I thought, What could be better? Here is why you get all these irrationalities and errors. They come from the inner workings of the human mind.”

Biederman had been friends with Amos at the University of Michigan and was now a member of the faculty at the State University of New York at Buffalo. The Amos he knew was consumed by possibly important but probably insolvable and certainly obscure problems about measurement. “I wouldn’t have invited Amos to Buffalo to talk about that,” he said—as no one would have understood it or cared about it. But this new work Amos was apparently doing with Danny Kahneman was breathtaking. It confirmed Biederman’s sense that “most advances in science come not from eureka moments but from ‘hmmm, that’s funny.’” He persuaded Amos to pass through Buffalo in the summer of 1972, on his way from Oregon to Israel. Over the course of a week, Amos gave five different talks about his work with Danny, each aimed at a different group of academics. Each time, the room was jammed—and fifteen years later, in 1987, when Biederman left Buffalo for the University of Minnesota, people were still talking about Amos’s talks.

Amos devoted talks to each of the heuristics he and Danny had discovered, and another to prediction. But the talk that lingered in Biederman’s mind was the fifth and final one. “Historical Interpretation: Judgment Under Uncertainty,” Amos had called it. With a flick of the wrist, he showed a roomful of professional historians just how much of human experience could be reexamined in a fresh, new way, if seen through the lens he had created with Danny.

In the course of our personal and professional lives, we often run into situations that appear puzzling at first blush. We cannot see for the life of us why Mr. X acted in a particular way, we cannot understand how the experimental results came out the way they did, etc. Typically, however, within a very short time we come up with an explanation, a hypothesis, or an interpretation of the facts that renders them understandable, coherent, or natural. The same phenomenon is observed in perception. People are very good at detecting patterns and trends even in random data. In contrast to our skill in inventing scenarios, explanations, and interpretations, our ability to assess their likelihood, or to evaluate them critically, is grossly inadequate. Once we have adopted a particular hypothesis or interpretation, we grossly exaggerate the likelihood of that hypothesis, and find it very difficult to see things any other way.

Amos was polite about it. He did not say, as he often said, “It is amazing how dull history books are, given how much of what’s in them must be invented.” What he did say was perhaps even more shocking to his audience: Like other human beings, historians were prone to the cognitive biases that he and Danny had described. “Historical judgment,” he said, was “part of a broader class of processes involving intuitive interpretation of data.” Historical judgments were subject to bias. As an example, Amos talked about research then being conducted by one of his graduate students at Hebrew University, Baruch Fischhoff. When Richard Nixon announced his surprising intention to visit China and Russia, Fischhoff asked people to assign odds to a list of possible outcomes—say, that Nixon would meet Chairman Mao at least once, that the United States and the Soviet Union would create a joint space program, that a group of Soviet Jews would be arrested for attempting to speak with Nixon, and so on. After the trip, Fischhoff went back and asked the same people to recall the odds they had assigned to each outcome. Their memories of the odds they had assigned to various outcomes were badly distorted. They all believed that they had assigned higher probabilities to what happened than they actually had. They greatly overestimated the odds that they had assigned to what had actually happened. That is, once they knew the outcome, they thought it had been far more predictable than they had found it to be before, when they had tried to predict it. A few years after Amos described the work to his Buffalo audience, Fischhoff named the phenomenon “hindsight bias.”?

In his talk to the historians, Amos described their occupational hazard: the tendency to take whatever facts they had observed (neglecting the many facts that they did not or could not observe) and make them fit neatly into a confident-sounding story:

All too often, we find ourselves unable to predict what will happen; yet after the fact we explain what did happen with a great deal of confidence. This “ability” to explain that which we cannot predict, even in the absence of any additional information, represents an important, though subtle, flaw in our reasoning. It leads us to believe that there is a less uncertain world than there actually is, and that we are less bright than we actually might be. For if we can explain tomorrow what we cannot predict today, without any added information except the knowledge of the actual outcome, then this outcome must have been determined in advance and we should have been able to predict it. The fact that we couldn’t is taken as an indication of our limited intelligence rather than of the uncertainty that is in the world. All too often, we feel like kicking ourselves for failing to foresee that which later appears inevitable. For all we know, the handwriting might have been on the wall all along. The question is: was the ink visible?