The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World(67)

Redelmeier soon returned with the widely held belief that arthritis pain was related to the weather. For thousands of years, people had imagined this connection; it could be traced back to Hippocrates, who wrote, in 400 BC, about the effect of wind and rain on disease. In the late 1980s, doctors were still suggesting to arthritis patients that they move to warmer climates. Working with Amos, Redelmeier found a large group of arthritis patients and asked them to report their pain levels. He then matched these to weather reports. Pretty quickly, he and Amos established that, despite the patients’ claims that their pain changed with the weather, there was no meaningful correlation between the two. They didn’t stop there, however. Amos wanted to explain why people saw this connection between their pain and the weather. Redelmeier interviewed the patients whose pain he had proven to be unrelated to the weather: All but one of them still insisted that their pain was related to the weather and cited, as evidence, the few random moments that justified their belief. Basketball experts seized on random streaks as patterns in players’ shooting that didn’t exist. Arthritis sufferers found patterns in suffering that didn’t exist. “We attribute this phenomenon to selective matching,” Tversky and Redelmeier wrote.? “. . . For arthritis, selective matching leads people to look for changes in the weather when they experience increased pain, and pay little attention to the weather when their pain is stable. . . . [A] single day of severe pain and extreme weather might sustain a lifetime of belief in a relation between them.”

There might not be a pattern in arthritis pain, but, to Redelmeier’s eye, there appeared to be a very clear pattern in his collaboration with Amos. Amos had all these general ideas about the pitfalls in the human mind when it was required to render judgments in conditions of uncertainty. Their implications for medicine had gone pretty much entirely unexplored. “Sometimes I felt Amos was pilot-testing ideas in front of me,” said Redelmeier. “To see if they were germane to the real world.” Redelmeier could not help but sense that medicine, for Amos, was “just the tiniest little sliver of his interests.” Another human activity in which to explore the specific consequences of the general ideas he had hatched with Danny Kahneman.

Then Danny himself appeared. In late 1988 or maybe early 1989, Amos introduced them in his office. Danny followed up with a phone call to Redelmeier, in which he said how he, too, might like to explore how doctors and patients made decisions. It turned out that Danny had his own ideas, with their own implications. “When he calls me, Danny is working alone,” said Redelmeier. “He wants to introduce another heuristic. One that is all his own, separate from Amos. The introduction of a fourth heuristic. Because there can’t be just three.”

One day in the summer of 1982 Danny, in his third year as a professor at the University of British Columbia, had walked into his lab and surprised his graduate students with an announcement: They’d now study happiness. Danny had always been curious about people’s ability, or inability, to predict their feelings about their own experiences. Now he wanted to study it. Specifically, he wanted to explore the gap—he had sensed it in himself—between a person’s intuitions about what made him happy and what actually made him happy. He thought he might start by having people guess how happy it would make them to come into the lab every day for a week and do something that they said they enjoyed—eat a bowl of ice cream, say, or listen to their favorite song. He might then compare the pleasure they anticipated to the pleasure they experienced, and further compare the pleasure they experienced to the pleasure they remembered. There was clearly a difference to be explored, he argued. At the moment your favorite soccer team wins the World Cup, you are beyond elated; six months later, it means next to nothing to you, really. “For a long time there were no subjects involved,” recalled Dale Miller, a graduate student of Danny’s. “He was just designing these experiments.” What Danny imagined is that people wouldn’t be especially good at predicting their own happiness—and his first experiments, on a handful of subjects, suggested he was onto something. A man whom no one would ever have described as happy was setting out, to the wonder of those who knew him, to discover the rules of happiness.

Or maybe he was merely sowing doubt in the minds of people who thought they knew what it meant to be happy. At any rate, by the time Amos introduced him to Redelmeier, Danny had moved from the University of British Columbia to the University of California, Berkeley, and from happiness to unhappiness. He was now investigating not only the gap between people’s anticipation of pleasure and their experience of pleasure but also the gap between people’s experience of pain and their memory of it. What did it mean if people’s prediction of the misery that might be caused by some event was different from the misery they actually experienced when the event occurred, or if people’s memory of an experience turned out to be meaningfully different from the experience as it had actually played out? A lot, thought Danny. People had a miserable time for most of their vacation and then returned home and remembered it fondly; people enjoyed a wonderful romance but, because it ended badly, looked back on it mainly with bitterness. They didn’t simply experience fixed levels of happiness or unhappiness. They experienced one thing and remembered something else.

When he met Redelmeier, Danny was already running experiments on unhappiness in his Berkeley lab. He’d stick the bare arms of his subjects into buckets of ice water. Each subject was given two painful experiences. He’d then be asked which of the two experiences he’d most like to repeat. Funny things happened when you did this with people. Their memory of pain was different from their experience of it. They remembered moments of maximum pain, and they remembered, especially, how they felt the moment the pain ended. But they didn’t particularly remember the length of the painful experience. If you stuck people’s arms in ice buckets for three minutes but warmed the water just a bit for another minute or so before allowing them to flee the lab, they remembered the experience more fondly than if you stuck their arms in the bucket for three minutes and removed them at a moment of maximum misery. If you asked them to choose one experiment to repeat, they’d take the first session. That is, people preferred to endure more total pain so long as the experience ended on a more pleasant note.