The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

by Michael Lewis

The frequency of appearance of letters in the English language was studied. A typical text was selected, and the relative frequency with which various letters of the alphabet appeared in the first and third positions of the words was recorded. Words of less than three letters were excluded from the count. You will be given several letters of the alphabet, and you will be asked to judge whether these letters appear more often in the first or in the third position, and to estimate the ratio of the frequency with which they appear in these positions. . . . Consider the letter K Is K more likely to appear in ____the first position? ____the third position? (check one) My estimate for the ratio of these two values is:________:1 If you thought that K was, say, twice as likely to appear as the first letter of an English word than as the third letter, you checked the first box and wrote your estimate as 2:1. This was what the typical person did, as it happens. Danny and Amos replicated the demonstration with other letters—R, L, N, and V. Those letters all appeared more frequently as the third letter in an English word than as the first letter—by a ratio of two to one. Once again, people’s judgment was, systematically, very wrong. And it was wrong, Danny and Amos now proposed, because it was distorted by memory. It was simply easier to recall words that start with K than to recall words with K as their third letter. The more easily people can call some scenario to mind—the more avai...