The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World(86)
Shore found Danny and Amos together in August 1983, in Anaheim, California, where they were attending the American Psychological Association meeting. Danny was now forty-nine and Amos forty-six. They spoke with Shore together for several hours and then, for several hours more, separately. They walked Miles Shore through the history of the collaboration, starting with their early excitement. “In the beginning we were able to answer a question that had not been asked,” Amos told him. “We were able to take psychology out of the contrived laboratory and address the topic from the experiences all around us.” Trying to pin them down on the question they thought they were answering, Shore asked if their work fed into the new and growing field of artificial intelligence. “You know, not really,” said Amos. “We study natural stupidity instead of artificial intelligence.”
The Harvard psychiatrist thought that Danny and Amos had a lot in common with other successful pairs. The way they had created what amounted to an exclusive private club of two, for example. “They were crazy about each other, and not indiscriminate,” said Shore. “They were not generally crazy about other people. They hated editors.” As with some of the other fertile pairs, the partnership had created strains on their other close relationships. “The collaboration has put a lot of pressure on my marriage,” Danny confessed. Like the other pairs, they had lost any sense of individual contribution. “You ask who did what?” said Danny “We didn’t know at that time, not clearly. It was beautiful, not knowing.” Shore thought that both Amos and Danny realized, or seemed to realize, how much they needed each other. “There are geniuses who work on their own,” said Danny. “I am not a genius. Neither is Tversky. Together we are exceptional.”
What set Amos and Danny apart from the nineteen other couples Shore had interviewed for his book was their willingness to speak about the problems in their relationship. “When I asked about conflicts, most people just ignored it,” said Shore. “A number didn’t want to admit there was any conflict.” Not Amos and Danny. Or, at any rate, not Danny. “It’s been difficult since I got married and since we moved to this continent,” he confessed. Amos remained evasive, and yet great chunks of Shore’s conversation with Danny and Amos wound up being about the many troubles they’d had since leaving Israel six years earlier. With Amos in the room, Danny complained at length about how different the public perception of the collaboration was from its reality. “I am perceived as attending him, which is not the case,” he said, less to Shore than to Amos. “I clearly lose by the collaboration. There is a quality that is clearly contributed by you. Formal analysis is not my strength and it shows up very distinctly in our work. My contributions are less unique.” Amos spoke, at less length, about how the blame for their unequal status fell squarely on other people. “The credit business is very hard,” said Amos. “There is a lot of wear and tear, and the outside world isn’t helpful to collaborations. There is constant poking, and people decide that one person gets the short end of the stick. It’s one of the rules of balance, and joint collaboration is an unbalanced structure. It is just not a stable structure. People aren’t happy with it.”
Alone with the Harvard psychiatrist, Danny said more. He hinted that he didn’t believe the outside world was entirely responsible for the problems in their relationship. “The spoils of academic success, such as they are—eventually one person gets all of it, or gets a lot of it,” he said. “That’s an unkindness built in. Tversky cannot control this, though I wonder whether he does as much to control it as he should.” Then he came straight out with his own feelings about Amos getting the lion’s share of the glory for work they had done together. “I am very much in his shadow in a way that is not representative of our interaction,” he said. “It induces a certain strain. There is envy! It’s just disturbing. I hate the feeling of envy. . . . I am maybe saying too much now.”
Shore left the interview feeling that Amos and Danny had just come through a rough patch, but that the worst lay behind them. Their openness about their problems he took as a good sign. They hadn’t exactly been fighting during their interview; their attitude toward conflict was just different than that of the other couples he had spoken with. “They played the Israeli card,” said Shore. “We’re Israeli, so we yell at each other.” Amos, especially, sounded optimistic that he and Danny would continue to work together as much as they had. It helped, Danny and Amos agreed, that the American Psychological Association had just honored both of them with its Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award. “I have lived in some fear that he might get it alone,” Danny confessed to Shore. “That would have been a disaster, and I couldn’t have coped very elegantly.” The award had eased some pain. Or so it seemed to Miles Shore.
As it happened, Shore never wrote his book about fertile pairs. But years later, he sent Danny an audiotape of their conversation. “I listened to it,” Danny said, “and it is absolutely clear from it that we are finished.”
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In late 1977, after Danny had told him that he wasn’t returning to Israel, word spread through academia that Amos Tversky might leave, too. The job market for college professors typically moves slowly and with great reluctance, but in this instance it leapt into action. It was as if an especially deliberate fat man watching TV on his couch suddenly realized that his house was on fire. Harvard University quickly offered Amos tenure, though it took them a few weeks to throw in an assistant professorship for Barbara. The University of Michigan, which had the advantage of sheer size, scrambled to find four tenured professorships—and, by making places for Danny, Anne, and Barbara, also snag Amos. The University of California at Berkeley, which left Danny with the clear impression, when he made overtures, that he was too old to be hired, prepared to offer a job to Amos. But no place moved quite so dramatically as Stanford.