The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

by Michael Lewis

“Confirmation bias,” he’d heard this called. The human mind was just bad at seeing things it did not expect to see, and a bit too eager to see what it expected to see. “Confirmation bias is the most insidious because you don’t even realize it is happening,”

The way he’d gone on reminded Daryl Morey of a joke. “The guy walks around with a banana in his ear. And people are like, ‘Why do you have a banana in your ear?’ He says, ‘To keep the alligators away! There are no alligators! See?’”

Psychology wasn’t like physics, or even economics. It lacked a single persuasive theory to organize itself around, or even an agreed-upon set of rules for discussion. Its leading figures could, and did, say of the work of other psychologists, Basically, what you are doing and saying is total bullshit, without any discernible effect on the behavior of those psychologists.

Reuven Gal, the author of A Portrait of the Israeli Soldier.

He’d been asked to divine the character of the nation’s youth. Instead he’d found out something about people who try to divine other people’s character: Remove their gut feelings, and their judgments improved. He’d been handed a narrow problem and discovered a broad truth.

Two American college students in the United States might look at each other and see a total stranger; the same two college students on their junior year abroad in Togo might find that they are surprisingly similar: They’re both Americans! By changing the context in which two things are compared, you submerge certain features and force others to the surface.

“conservative Bayesians.” That is, they behaved more or less as if they knew Bayes’s rule.

The bias was the footprint of the heuristic. The biases, too, would soon have their own names, like the “recency bias” and the “vividness bias.” But in hunting for errors that they themselves had made, and then tracking them back to their source in the human mind, they had stumbled upon errors without a visible trail.

“Last impressions can be lasting impressions.”

“The Linda problem”