The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

by Michael Lewis

When choosing between sure things and gambles, people’s desire to avoid loss exceeded their desire to secure gain.

“Happy species endowed with infinite appreciation of pleasures and low sensitivity to pain would probably not survive the evolutionary battle,”

“If you think about the possibilities at all, you think of them too much,” said Danny. “When your daughter is late and you worry, it fills your mind even when you know there is very little to fear.” You’d pay more than you should to rid yourself of that worry.

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

“The idea that it could make you better off to reduce your choices—that idea was alien to economics,”

Economics was meant to be the study of an aspect of human nature, but it had ceased to pay attention to human nature.

If people could be systematically wrong, their mistakes couldn’t be ignored. The irrational behavior of the few would not be offset by the rational behavior of the many. People could be systematically wrong, and so markets could be systematically wrong, too.

That paper was what an economist would call proof of existence. It captured so much of human nature.”

“Science is a conversation and you have to compete for the right to be heard. And the competition has its rules. And the rules, oddly enough, are that you are tested on formal theory.”

“You know, not really,” said Amos. “We study natural stupidity instead of artificial intelligence.”

“You ask who did what?” said Danny. “We didn’t know at that time, not clearly. It was beautiful, not knowing.”

There is constant poking, and people decide that one person gets the short end of the stick. It’s one of the rules of balance, and joint collaboration is an unbalanced structure. It is just not a stable structure.

Discover the mental rules that the mind obeyed when it undid events after they had occurred and you might find, in the bargain, how it simulated reality before it occurred.

“The basic rules of undoing, however, apply alike to frustration and regret,” he wrote. “They require a more or less plausible path leading to the alternative state.”

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.”

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

The first to take their work personally were the psychologists whose work it had trumped.

Their mind latches onto a story of imminent death and the story masks the logic of the situation.

Any prediction, for instance, could be made to seem more believable, even as it became less likely, if it was filled with internally consistent details.

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 it.

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. “For Amos it was one of the core lessons,” said Redelmeier. “It’s not that people think they are perfect. No, no: They can make mistakes. It’s that they don’t appreciate the extent to which they are fallible. ‘I’ve had three or four drinks. I might be 5 percent off my game.’ No! You are actually 30 percent off your game. This is the mismatch that leads to ten thousand fatal accidents in the United States every year.”

How people’s anticipation of happiness differed from the happiness they experienced, and how both differed from the happiness they remembered. How you could measure these things—by, say, questioning people before, during, and after painful colonoscopies. 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?