The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

by Michael Lewis

“Confirmation bias,” he’d heard this called. The human mind was just bad at seeing things it did not expect to see, and a bit too eager to see what it expected to see. “Confirmation bias is the most insidious because you don’t even realize it is happening,”

“He’s incredibly athletic,” said Morey. “But the reality is that every fucking person, including me, thought he was unathletic. And I can’t think of any reason for it other than he was Asian.”

In some strange way people, at least when they were judging other people, saw what they expected to see and were slow to see what they hadn’t seen before. How bad was the problem?

Morey enrolled in an executive education course at Harvard Business School and took a class in behavioral economics.

“the endowment effect.” To combat the endowment effect, he forced his scouts and his model to establish, going into the draft, the draft pick value of each of their own players.

the endowment effect, confirmation bias, and others.

Skinner’s success with the pigeons was the start of a spectacularly influential career underpinned by the idea that all animal behavior was driven not by thoughts and feelings but by external rewards and punishments. He locked rats inside what he called “operant conditioning chambers” (they soon became known as “Skinner boxes”) and taught them to pull levers and push buttons. He taught pigeons to dance and play Ping-Pong and bang out “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” on a piano. The behaviorists presumed that whatever they discovered about rats and pigeons applied to people—on whom, for various reasons, it was simply less practical to conduct experiments. “To the reader who is anxious to advance to the human subject a word of caution is in order,” Skinner wrote, in an essay called “How to Teach Animals.” “We must embark upon a program in which we sometimes apply relevant reinforcement and sometimes withhold it. In doing this, we are quite likely [in humans] to generate emotional effects.

The Gestalt psychologists had made careers uncovering interesting phenomena and demonstrating them with great flair: a light appeared brighter when it emerged from total darkness; the color gray looked green when it was surrounded by violet and yellow if surrounded by blue; if you said to a person, “Don’t step on that banana eel!,” he’d be sure that you had said not “eel” but “peel.” The Gestalists showed that there was no obvious relationship between any external stimulus and the sensation it created in people, as the mind intervened in many curious ways.