The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

by Michael Lewis

People’s minds coped with loss by drifting onto fantasy paths, where loss never occurred. But this drifting, Danny noticed, wasn’t random. There appeared to be constraints on the mind when it created alternatives to reality.

There is a lot that I can relate to here. I spend an good amount of time in these deconstruction scenarios to the point it prompted the question about the snippet about Maladaptive Day Dreaming.

There were of course a million ways that any plane crash might have been avoided, but people seemed to consider only a few of them. There were patterns in the fantasies that people created to undo his nephew’s tragedy, and they resembled patterns in the alternative versions of his own life that played out in Danny’s mind.

They’d been interested chiefly in people’s anticipation of the unpleasant emotion, and how this anticipation might alter the choices they made.

He wanted to study how people undid events that had already happened. Both he and Amos could see how such a study might feed into their work on both judgment and decision making. “There is nothing in the framework of decision theory that would prohibit the assignment of utilities to states of frustrated hope, relief or regret, if these are identified as important aspects of the experience of consequences,”

“However, there is a reason to suspect a major bias against the acknowledgment of the true impact of such states on experience. . . . It is expected of mature individuals that they should feel the pain or pleasure that is appropriate to the circu...

Danny now had an idea that there might be a fourth heuristic—to add to availability, representativeness, and anchoring. “The simulation heuristic,” he’d eventually call it, and it was all about the power of...

The situation of the two men was identical. Both expected to miss their planes and both had. And yet 96 percent of the subjects to whom Danny put the question said that Mr. Tees was more upset.

The emotion was also fed by its proximity to another reality—how “close” Mr. Tees came to making his flight. “The only reason for Mr. Tees to be more upset is that it was more ‘possible’ for him to reach his flight,” Danny wrote, in notes for a talk on the subject. “There is an Alice-in-Wonderland quality to such examples, with their odd mixture of fantasy and reality. If Mr. Crane is capable of imagining unicorns—and we expect he is—why does he find it relatively difficult to imagine himself avoiding a thirty-minute delay, as we suggest he does? Evidently there are constraints on the freedom of fantasy.”

“The emotions of unrealized possibility,” Danny called them, in a letter to Amos. These emotions could be described using simple math.

Gigerenzer

Gigerenzer had shown that, by changing the simplest version of the problem, he could lead people to the correct answer. Instead of asking people to rank the likelihood of the two descriptions of Linda, he asked: To how many of 100 people who are like Linda do the following statements apply? When you gave people that hint, they realized that Linda was more likely to be a bank teller than a bank teller active in the feminist movement.

* After the article appeared, in the October 1983 issue of Psychological Review, the best-selling author and computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter sent Amos his own vignettes. Example: Fido barks and chases cars. Which is Fido more likely to be: (1) a cocker spaniel or (2) an entity in the universe?

As a child during the war, he’d cultivated an active fantasy life. He would play out elaborate scenes with himself at the center of them. He imagined himself single-handedly winning the war and ending it, for example. But because he was Danny, he made a rule about his fantasy life: He never fantasized about something that might happen. He established this private rule for his imagination once he realized that, after he had fantasized about something that might actually happen, he lost his drive to make it happen. His fantasies were so vivid that “it was as if you actually had it,” and if you actually had it, why would you bother to work hard to get it? He’d never end the war that killed his father, so what did it matter if he created an elaborate scenario in which he won it single-handedly?

This has been an interedting long time problem for me...losing my drive after elaborate flights of fancy.