The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World(94)

Amos took the trouble to answer, almost politely, that first letter from his former professor. “It was certainly a pleasure to read your detailed comments on our papers and to see that, right or wrong, you have not lost any of your old fighting spirit,” he began, before describing his former professor as “not cogent.” “In particular,” Amos continued, “the objections you raised against our experimental method are simply unsupported. In essence, you engage in the practice of criticizing a procedural departure without showing how the departure might account for the results obtained. You do not present either contradictory data or a plausible alternative interpretation of our findings. Instead, you express a strong bias against our method of data collection and in favor of yours. This position is certainly understandable, yet it is hardly convincing.”

Edwards was not pleased, but he kept his anger to himself for a few years. “No one wanted to get in a fight with Amos,” said the psychologist Irv Biederman. “Not in public! I only once ever saw anyone ever do it. There was this philosopher. At a conference. He gets up to give his talk. He’s going to challenge heuristics. Amos was there. When he finished talking Amos got up to rebut. It was like an ISIS beheading. But with humor.” Edwards must have sensed, in any open conflict with Amos, the possibility of being on the painful end of an ISIS beheading, with humor. And yet Amos had championed the idea that man was a good intuitive statistician. He needed to say something.

In the late 1970s he finally found a principle on which to take a stand: The masses were not equipped to grasp Amos and Danny’s message. The subtleties were beyond them. People needed to be protected from misleading themselves into thinking that their minds were less trustworthy than they actually were. “I do not know whether you realize just how far that message has spread, or how devastating its effects have been,” Edwards wrote to Amos in September of 1979. “I attended the organizational meeting of the Society for Medical Decision Making one and a half weeks ago. I would estimate that every third paper mentioned your work in passing, mostly as justification for avoiding human intuition, judgment, decision making, and other intellectual processes.” Even sophisticated doctors were getting from Danny and Amos only the crude, simplified message that their minds could never be trusted. What would become of medicine? Of intellectual authority? Of experts?

Edwards sent Amos a working draft of his assault on Danny and Amos’s work and hoped that Amos would leave him with his dignity. Amos didn’t. “The tone is snide, the evaluation of evidence is unfair and there are too many technical difficulties to begin to discuss,” Amos wrote, in a curt note to Edwards. “We are in sympathy with your attempt to redress what you regard as a distorted view of man. But we regret that you chose to do so by presenting a distorted view of our work.” In his reply, Edwards did a fair impression of a man who has just realized that his fly is unzipped, as he backpedals off a cliff. He offered up his personal problems—they ranged from serious jet lag to “a decade’s worth of personal frustrations”—as excuses for his failed paper, and then went on to more or less concede that he wished he’d never written it. “What especially embarrasses me is that after working so long as I did on trying to put this thing together I should have been as blind to its many flaws as I was,” he wrote to both Amos and Danny, before saying how he intended to entirely rewrite his paper and hoped very much to avoid any public controversy with them.

Not everyone knew enough to be afraid of Amos. An Oxford philosopher named L. Jonathan Cohen raised a small philosophy-sized ruckus with a series of attacks in books and journals. He found alien the idea that you might learn something about the human mind by putting questions to people. He argued that as man had created the concept of rationality he must, by definition, be rational. “Rational” was whatever most people did. Or, as Danny put it in a letter that he reluctantly sent in response to one of Cohen’s articles, “Any error that attracts a sufficient number of votes is not an error at all.” Cohen labored to demonstrate that the mistakes discovered by Amos and Danny either were not mistakes or were the result of “mathematical or scientific ignorance” in people, easily remedied by a bit of exposure to college professors. “We both make a living by teaching probability and statistics,” Stanford’s Persi Diaconis and David Freedman, of the University of California at Berkeley, wrote to the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, which had published one of Cohen’s attacks. “Over and over again we see students and colleagues (and ourselves) making certain kinds of mistakes. Even the same mistake may be repeated by the same person many times. Cohen is wrong in dismissing this as the result of ‘mathematical or scientific ignorance.’” But by then it was clear that no matter how often people trained in statistics affirmed the truth of Danny and Amos’s work, people who weren’t would insist that they knew better.



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Upon their arrival in North America, Amos and Danny had published a flurry of papers together. Mostly it was stuff they’d had in the works when they’d left Israel. But in the early 1980s what they wrote together was not done in the same way as before. Amos wrote a piece on loss aversion under both their names, to which Danny added a few stray paragraphs. Danny wrote up on his own what Amos had called “The Undoing Project,” titled it “The Simulation Heuristic,” and published it with both their names on top, in a book that collected their articles, along with others by students and colleagues. (And then set out to explore the rules of the imagination not with Amos but with his younger colleague at the University of British Columbia, Dale Miller.) Amos wrote an article, addressed directly to economists, to repair technical flaws in prospect theory. “Advances in Prospect Theory,” it was called, and though Amos did much of the work on it with his graduate student Rich Gonzalez, it ran as a journal article by Danny and Amos. “Amos said that it had always been Kahneman and Tversky and that this had to be Kahneman and Tversky, and that it would be really strange to add a third person to it,” said Gonzalez.