The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World(87)

The psychologist Lee Ross, a rising young star on the Stanford faculty, led the charge. He knew that the big public American universities who wanted Amos might, in the bargain, offer jobs to Barbara and Danny and Anne. Stanford was smaller and didn’t have four jobs to offer. “We figured there were two things we could do that those schools might not,” said Ross. “One was to make the offer early, and the other was to make it fast. We wanted to convince him to come to Stanford, and the best way we can convince him to come is to show him how quickly we can act.”

What happened next was, Ross believed, unprecedented in the history of the American university. The morning he learned Amos was on the market, he convened Stanford’s Psychology Department. “I was supposed to present the case for Amos,” said Ross. “I said, I’m going to tell you a classic Yiddish story. There’s a guy, an eligible bachelor. A happy bachelor. The matchmaker comes to him and says, ‘Listen, I have for you a match.’ ‘Ah, I’m not so sure,’ says the bachelor. ‘She’s really special,’ says the matchmaker. ‘What, is she beautiful?’ asks the bachelor. ‘Beautiful? She looks like Sophia Loren, only younger.’ ‘What, does she have family money?’ asks the bachelor. ‘Money? She’s an heiress to the Rothschild fortune.’ ‘Then she must be a dope,’ says the bachelor. ‘A dope? She has been nominated for Nobel Prizes in both physics and chemistry.’ ‘I accept!’ says the bachelor. To which the matchmaker replies, ‘Good, we have half a match!’” Ross told the Stanford faculty, “After I tell you about Amos, you will say, ‘I accept!’ and I will say, ‘I’m sorry to tell you we have half a match.’”

Even to Ross it was unclear that the sales pitch was necessary. “Everyone who came across the work congratulated themselves on their own good judgment and insight in appreciating the work,” said Ross. “But nobody didn’t get it.” That same day, the Stanford Psychology Department went to the Stanford president and said: We have none of the usual paperwork. No recommendations or anything else. Just trust us. Stanford made Amos an offer of lifetime employment that afternoon.

Amos would later tell people that in choosing between Harvard and Stanford, he imagined the regret he would experience at each. At Harvard he’d regret passing up Palo Alto’s weather and living conditions, and resent the commute; at Stanford he’d regret, and only briefly, not being able to say he was a Harvard professor. If it occurred to him or anyone else that Amos, to be Amos, needed Danny close at hand, he didn’t show it. Stanford showed not the slightest interest in Danny. “There’s a practical issue,” said Ross. “Do you want two guys doing the same thing? And the cold fact is we got the full benefit of Danny and Amos just by hiring Amos.” Danny would have loved for them all to go to Michigan, but Amos clearly had no interest in anyplace but Harvard or Stanford. After Harvard and Stanford had ignored him, and Berkeley had let him know that he would not be offered a job, Danny accepted a position beside Anne at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver. He and Amos agreed they would take turns flying to visit each other every other weekend.

Danny was still floating on air. “We were on such a high from having finished prospect theory and embarked on framing that we must have felt pretty invulnerable,” he said. “There was not a shadow between us at the time.” He watched Amos give the traditional job-application talk at Stanford, after Stanford had made him what was likely the fastest job offer in its history. Amos presented prospect theory. “I noticed that I felt nothing but pride for him,” said Danny. “I noticed it because envy would have been natural.” When Danny left Palo Alto for Vancouver for the start of the 1978–79 academic year, he was even more aware than usual of the serendipity of life. His two children were now on the other side of the world, along with his old lab, a department full of former colleagues, and a society to which he once assumed he belonged. He had left behind in Israel a ghost of himself. “The background to what I was thinking was that I had just changed my life,” he said. “I’d changed my wife. The counterfactuals were with me all the time. I was constantly comparing my life to what it might have been.”

In this curious state of mind, he found his thoughts settling on a nephew, Ilan. Ilan had been a twenty-one-year-old navigator in the back of an Israeli fighter during the Yom Kippur war. After the war, he had sought out Danny and asked him to listen to an audiotape he had kept from it. He’d been in the backseat of the fighter when an Egyptian MiG got behind them, locking in for a kill. On the tape, you could hear Ilan scream at his pilot, “Break! Break! Break! He’s on our tail!” As Ilan played the tape, Danny noticed that the young man was shaking; for some reason, he wanted his uncle to hear what had happened to him. Ilan had survived the war, but a year and a half later, in March 1975, five days before he was to be released from service, he was killed. Blinded by a flare, his pilot had flown upside down straight into the ground.

They’d thought they were rising when in fact they were falling. It wasn’t an original mistake. Pilots in flight often became disoriented. The inner ear wasn’t designed for a gravity-defying chamber pitching and rolling at 650 miles an hour a mile above the earth’s surface any more than the mind was designed to calculate the probabilities of complex situations. It had evolved to stabilize people on their own two feet. People who flew airplanes were susceptible to sensory illusions—which was why a pilot without an instrument rating who flew into clouds had an average life expectancy of 178 seconds.*