The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World(93)

Danny couldn’t help but keep noticing the new attention Amos was receiving for the work they had done together. Economists now wanted Amos at their conferences, but then so did linguists and philosophers and sociologists and computer scientists—even though Amos hadn’t the faintest interest in the PC that came with his Stanford office. (“What could I do with computers?” he said, after he’d declined Apple’s offer to donate twenty new Macs to the Stanford Psychology Department.) “You get fed up with not being invited to the same conferences, even when you would not want to go,” Danny confessed to the Harvard psychiatrist Miles Shore. “My life would be better if he weren’t invited to so many.”

In Israel, Danny had been the person real-world people came to when they had some real-world problem. The people in real-world America came to Amos, even when it wasn’t obvious that Amos had any reason to know what he was talking about. “He had a hell of an impact on what we did,” said Jack Maher, who was in charge of training seven thousand pilots at Delta Air Lines when he sought Amos’s help. In the late 1980s, Delta had suffered a series of embarrassing incidents. “We didn’t kill anyone,” said Maher. “But we’d had people getting lost, people landing at the wrong airports.” The incidents nearly always could be traced back to some bad decision made by a Delta captain. “We needed a decision model and I looked for one, but they didn’t exist,” said Maher. “And Tversky’s name kept popping up.” Maher met with Amos for a few hours and told him his problems. “He started speaking in math,” said Maher. “When he got into linear regression equations I just started to laugh, then he laughed, and stopped doing it.” Amos then explained, in plain English, his work with Danny. “He helped us to understand why pilots sometimes made bad decisions,” said Maher. “He said, ‘You’re not going to change people’s decision making under duress. You aren’t going to stop pilots from making these mental errors. You aren’t going to train the decision-making weaknesses out of the pilots.’”

What Delta Air Lines should do, Amos suggested, was to change its decision-making environments. The mental mistakes that led pilots of planes bound for Miami to land boneheadedly in Fort Lauderdale were woven into human nature. People had trouble seeing when their minds were misleading them; on the other hand, they could sometimes see when other people’s minds were misleading them. But the cockpit culture of a commercial airliner did not encourage people to point out the mental errors of the man in charge. “Captains at the time would be complete autocratic jerks who insisted on running the show,” said Maher. The way to stop the captain from landing the plane in the wrong airport, Amos insisted, was to train others in the cockpit to question his judgment. “He changed the way we trained pilots,” said Maher. “We changed the culture in the cockpit and the autocratic jerk became no longer acceptable. Those mistakes haven’t happened since.”

By the 1980s, the ideas that Danny and Amos had hatched together were infiltrating places the two had never imagined them entering. Success created, among other things, a new market for critics. “We started this unknown field,” Amos told Miles Shore in the summer of 1983. “We were shaking trees and challenging the establishment. Now we are the establishment. And people are shaking our tree.” Those people tended to be self-serious intellectuals. Upon encountering Danny and Amos’s work, more than a few academics experienced the sensation that a person feels when a total stranger walks up and begins a sentence, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but. . . .” Whatever might follow, you just know that you’re not going to like it. The sound of laughter coming from the other side of Amos and Danny’s closed door hadn’t helped. It caused other intellectuals to wonder about their motives. “The glee is what created the suspicion,” said the philosopher Avishai Margalit. “They looked like people standing in front of a monkey cage, making faces at the monkeys. There was too much joy there. They said, ‘We’re monkeys, too.’ But no one believed them. The feeling was that the joy that they have is to trick people. And it stuck. It was a real problem for them.”

At a conference back in the early 1970s, Danny was introduced to a prominent philosopher named Max Black and tried to explain to the great man his work with Amos. “I’m not interested in the psychology of stupid people,” said Black, and walked away. Danny and Amos didn’t think of their work as the psychology of stupid people. Their very first experiments, dramatizing the weakness of people’s statistical intuitions, had been conducted on professional statisticians. For every simple problem that fooled undergraduates, they could come up with a more complicated version to fool professors. At least a few professors didn’t like the idea of that. “Give people a visual illusion and they say, ‘It’s only my eyes,’” said Princeton psychologist Eldar Shafir. “Give them a linguistic illusion. They’re fooled, but they say, ‘No big deal.’ Then you give them one of Amos and Danny’s examples and they say, ‘Now you’re insulting me.’”

The first to take their work personally were the psychologists whose work it had trumped. Amos’s former teacher Ward Edwards had written the original journal article in 1954 inviting psychologists to investigate the assumptions of economics. Still, he’d never imagined this—two Israelis walking into the room and making a mockery of the entire conversation. In late 1970, after reading early drafts of Amos and Danny’s papers on human judgment, Edwards wrote to complain. In what would be the first of many agitated letters, he adopted the tone of a wise and indulgent master speaking to his naive pupils. How could Amos and Danny possibly believe that there was anything to learn from putting silly questions to undergraduates? “I think your data collection methods are such that I don’t take seriously a single ‘experimental’ finding you present,” wrote Edwards. These students they had turned into their lab rats were “careless and inattentive. And if they are confused and inattentive, they are much less likely to behave more like competent intuitive statisticians.” For every supposed limitation of the human mind Danny and Amos had uncovered, Edwards had an explanation. The gambler’s fallacy, for instance. If people thought that a coin, after landing on heads five times in a row, was more likely, on the sixth toss, to land on tails, it wasn’t because they misunderstood randomness. It was because “people get bored doing the same thing all the time.”