The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World(88)
After Ilan’s death, Danny couldn’t help but notice the urge in those who loved him to mentally undo his plane crash. Many of the sentences that came from their lips might just as well have started with the words “if only.” If only Ilan had been released from the Air Force a week earlier. If only he’d taken charge after his pilot was blinded by that flare. People’s minds coped with loss by drifting onto fantasy paths, where loss never occurred. But this drifting, Danny noticed, wasn’t random. There appeared to be constraints on the mind when it created alternatives to reality. If Ilan had still had a year of service remaining when his plane crashed, no one would have said, “If only he had been released a year ago.” No one said, “If only the pilot had the flu that day” or “If only Ilan’s plane had been grounded for mechanical problems.” For that matter, no one said, “If only Israel had not had an Air Force.” Any of those counterfactuals would have saved his life, but none of them came to the minds of those who loved him.
There were of course a million ways that any plane crash might have been avoided, but people seemed to consider only a few of them. There were patterns in the fantasies that people created to undo his nephew’s tragedy, and they resembled patterns in the alternative versions of his own life that played out in Danny’s mind.
Soon after his arrival in Vancouver, Danny asked Amos to send him any notes that he’d kept from their discussions about regret. In Jerusalem they’d spent more than a year talking about the rules of regret. They’d been interested chiefly in people’s anticipation of the unpleasant emotion, and how this anticipation might alter the choices they made. Now Danny wanted to explore regret, and other emotions, from the opposite direction. He wanted to study how people undid events that had already happened. Both he and Amos could see how such a study might feed into their work on both judgment and decision making. “There is nothing in the framework of decision theory that would prohibit the assignment of utilities to states of frustrated hope, relief or regret, if these are identified as important aspects of the experience of consequences,” they wrote, in what amounted to a memo to themselves. “However, there is a reason to suspect a major bias against the acknowledgment of the true impact of such states on experience. . . . It is expected of mature individuals that they should feel the pain or pleasure that is appropriate to the circumstances without undue contamination by unrealized possibilities.”
Danny now had an idea that there might be a fourth heuristic—to add to availability, representativeness, and anchoring. “The simulation heuristic,” he’d eventually call it, and it was all about the power of unrealized possibilities to contaminate people’s minds. As they moved through the world, people ran simulations of the future. What if I say what I think instead of pretending to agree? What if they hit it to me and the grounder goes through my legs? What happens if I say no to his proposal instead of yes? They based their judgments and decisions in part on these imagined scenarios. And yet not all scenarios were equally easy to imagine; they were constrained, much in the way that people’s minds seemed constrained when they “undid” some tragedy. Discover the mental rules that the mind obeyed when it undid events after they had occurred and you might find, in the bargain, how it simulated reality before it occurred.
Alone in Vancouver, Danny was gripped by his new interest in the distance between worlds—the world that existed and worlds that might have come to pass but never did. Much of the work he and Amos had done was about finding structure where no one had ever thought to look for it. Here was another chance to do that. He wanted to investigate how people created alternatives to reality by undoing reality. He wanted, in short, to discover the rules of the imagination.
With one eye on a prickly colleague in his new department named Richard Tees, Danny sat down and created a vignette for a new experiment:
Mr. Crane and Mr. Tees are scheduled to leave the airport on different flights, at the same time. They traveled from town in the same limousine, were caught in the same traffic jam, and arrived at the airport thirty minutes after the scheduled departure time of their flights.
Mr. Crane is told that his flight left on time.
Mr. Tees is told that his flight was delayed, and just left five minutes ago.
Who is more upset?
The situation of the two men was identical. Both expected to miss their planes and both had. And yet 96 percent of the subjects to whom Danny put the question said that Mr. Tees was more upset. Everyone seemed to understand that reality wasn’t the only source of frustration. The emotion was also fed by its proximity to another reality—how “close” Mr. Tees came to making his flight. “The only reason for Mr. Tees to be more upset is that it was more ‘possible’ for him to reach his flight,” Danny wrote, in notes for a talk on the subject. “There is an Alice-in-Wonderland quality to such examples, with their odd mixture of fantasy and reality. If Mr. Crane is capable of imagining unicorns—and we expect he is—why does he find it relatively difficult to imagine himself avoiding a thirty-minute delay, as we suggest he does? Evidently there are constraints on the freedom of fantasy.”
It was those constraints that Danny set out to investigate. He wanted to understand better what he was now calling “counterfactual emotions,” or the feelings that spurred people’s minds to spin alternative realities in order to avoid the pain of the emotion. Regret was the most obvious counterfactual emotion, but frustration and envy shared regret’s essential trait. “The emotions of unrealized possibility,” Danny called them, in a letter to Amos. These emotions could be described using simple math. Their intensity, Danny wrote, was a product of two variables: “the desirability of the alternative” and “the possibility of the alternative.” Experiences that led to regret and frustration were not always easy to undo. Frustrated people needed to undo some feature of their environment, while regretful people needed to undo their own actions. “The basic rules of undoing, however, apply alike to frustration and regret,” he wrote. “They require a more or less plausible path leading to the alternative state.”