The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

by Michael Lewis

He groped for titles, so that he might know what he was writing about.

the context of alternatives or the possibility set determines our expectations, our interpretations, our recollection and our attribution of reality, as well as the affective states which it induces.”

“Reality is a cloud of possibility, not a point.”

Danny and Amos both saw that there was no point trying to infiltrate economics from psychology. The economists would just ignore intruders. What were needed were young economists with an interest in psychology.

People didn’t choose between things, they chose between descriptions of things.

The decisions people made were driven by the way they were presented. People didn’t simply know what they wanted; they took cues from their environment. They constructed their preferences. And they followed paths of least resistance, even when they paid a heavy price for

A part of good science is to see what everyone else can see but think what no one else has ever said.

The brain is limited. There are gaps in our attention. The mind contrives to make those gaps invisible to us. We think we know things we don’t. We think we are safe when we are not.

It is sometimes easier to make the world a better place than to prove you have made the world a better place.

How people’s anticipation of happiness differed from the happiness they experienced, and how both differed from the happiness they remembered.

If happiness was so malleable, it made a mockery of economic models that were premised on the idea that people maximized their “utility.” What, exactly, was to be maximized?