The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

by Michael Lewis

People did not choose between things. They chose between descriptions of things.

Envy was different. Envy did not require a person to exert the slightest effort to imagine a path to the alternative state. “The availability of the alternative appears to be controlled by a relation of similarity between oneself and the target of envy. To experience envy, it is sufficient to have a vivid image of oneself in another person’s shoes; it is not necessary to have a plausible scenario of how one came to occupy those shoes.”

Envy, in some strange way, required no imagination.

Imagination wasn’t a flight with limitless destinations. It was a tool for making sense of a world of infinite possibilities by reducing them. The imagination obeyed rules: the rules of undoing. One rule was that the more items there were to undo in order to create some alternative reality, the less likely the mind was to undo them.

Another, related, rule was that “an event becomes gradually less changeable as it recedes into the past.” With the passage of time, the consequences of any event accumulated, and left more to undo. And the more there is to undo, the less likely the mind is to even try. This was perhaps one way time heals wounds, by making them feel less avoidable.

A more general rule Danny labeled “The Focus Rule.” “We tend to have a hero or an actor operating in a situation,” he wrote. “Wherever possible we’ll keep the situation fixed and have the actor move. . . . We don’t invent a gust of wind to deflect Oswald’s bullet.” An exception to this rule was when the person engaged in the undoing was the main actor of his own fantasy. He was less likely to undo his own actions than he was to undo the situation in which he found himself. “Changing or replacing oneself is much less available than changing or replacing another actor,” wrote Danny. “A world in which I have a new set of traits must be very far from the world in which I live. I may have some freedom, but I am not free to be someone else.”

The most important general rule of undoing had to do with what was surprising or unexpected. A middle-aged banker takes the same route to work every day. One day he takes a different route and is killed when a drugged-out kid in a pickup truck runs a red light and sideswipes his car. Ask people to undo the tragedy, and their minds drift to the route the banker took that day. If only he had gone the usual way! But put that same man back on his normal route, and let him be killed by the same drugged-out boy in the same truck, running a different stoplight, and no one thought: If only he had taken a different route that day! The dista...

In undoing some event, the mind tended to remove whatever felt surprisi...

Their opponents might never admit defeat—intellectuals seldom did—but they might at least decide to change the subject. “Winning by embarrassment,” Amos called it.

People were blind to logic when it was embedded in a story.