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The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds Hardcover – December 6, 2016

by Michael Lewis (Author)

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How a Nobel Prize–winning theory of the mind altered our perception of reality.

Forty years ago, Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky wrote a series of breathtakingly original studies undoing our assumptions about the decision-making process. Their papers showed the ways in which the human mind erred, systematically, when forced to make judgments in uncertain situations. Their work created the field of behavioral economics, revolutionized Big Data studies, advanced evidence-based medicine, led to a new approach to government regulation, and made much of Michael Lewis’s own work possible. Kahneman and Tversky are more responsible than anybody for the powerful trend to mistrust human intuition and defer to algorithms.

The Undoing Project is about a compelling collaboration between two men who have the dimensions of great literary figures. They became heroes in the university and on the battlefield―both had important careers in the Israeli military―and their research was deeply linked to their extraordinary life experiences. Amos Tversky was a brilliant, self-confident warrior and extrovert, the center of rapt attention in any room; Kahneman, a fugitive from the Nazis in his childhood, was an introvert whose questing self-doubt was the seedbed of his ideas. They became one of the greatest partnerships in the history of science, working together so closely that they couldn’t remember whose brain originated which ideas, or who should claim credit. They flipped a coin to decide the lead authorship on the first paper they wrote, and simply alternated thereafter.

This story about the workings of the human mind is explored through the personalities of two fascinating individuals so fundamentally different from each other that they seem unlikely friends or colleagues. In the process they may well have changed, for good, mankind’s view of its own mind.

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December 6, 2016
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9.3 x 6 x 1.3 inches
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0393254593
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978-0393254594
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When they made decisions, people did not seek to maximize utility. They sought to minimize regret.
Highlighted by 7,694 Kindle readers
By changing the context in which two things are compared, you submerge certain features and force others to the surface.
Highlighted by 6,950 Kindle readers
He suggested a new definition of the nerd: a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it.
Highlighted by 6,040 Kindle readers

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Lewis has written one hell of a love story."
― Jennifer Senior, New York Times

"Lewis is the ideal teller of [Tversky and Kahneman’s] story… You see his protagonists in three dimensions―deeply likable, but also flawed, just like most of your friends and family."
― David Leonhardt, New York Times Book Review

"Fascinating stories about intriguing people."
― Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, The New Yorker

"Brilliant… Lewis has given us a spectacular account of two great men who faced up to uncertainty and the limits of human reason."
― William Easterly, Wall Street Journal

"Compelling… The Undoing Project is a history of the birth of behavioral economics, but it’s also Lewis’s testament to the power of collaboration."
― Peter Coy, Bloomberg Businessweek

"Intellectually mesmerizing and inspiring."
― Harper's Bazaar

"Mind-blowing… [The Undoing Project] will raise doubts about how you personally perceive reality."
― Don Oldenburg, USA Today

"Michael Lewis has a genius for finding stories about people who view reality from an unusual angle and telling these stories in a compulsively readable way."
― Geoffrey Kabat, Forbes

"A fantastic read."
― Jesse Singal, New York Magazine

"Lewis [is a] master of the character-driven narrative."
― Charlie Gofen, The National Book Review

"Tantalizing and tender… Lewis is an irresistible storyteller and a master at illuminating complicated and fascinating subjects."
― Booklist, starred review

About the Author

Michael Lewis is the best-selling author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, The Blind Side, The Big Short, The Undoing Project, and The Fifth Risk. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his family.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company; First Edition (December 6, 2016)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 368 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0393254593
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0393254594
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.45 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 9.3 x 6 x 1.3 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #95,238 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #152 in Business Decision Making
- #311 in Decision-Making & Problem Solving
- #321 in Cognitive Psychology (Books)

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Michael Lewis, the best-selling author of The Undoing Project, Liar's Poker, Flash Boys, Moneyball, The Blind Side, Home Game and The Big Short, among other works, lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, Tabitha Soren, and their three children.

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Inna Tysoe

Wonderful story about a friendship and about us

Reviewed in the United States on December 1, 2017

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We understand a lot more about how we make decisions, the kinds of mistakes we seem to make and how we experience our world thanks to Danny and Amos, two grandsons of rabbis who lost their religion. These two men taught us that we are not natural statisticians and that our rules of thumb and gut feelings often lead us astray. They explained that we tell ourselves stories about people and things that are representative, that we make judgments based on insufficient data. For example, we often think that a handsome person is smarter. Or—take another example--have you ever decided that a three-year old is going to be a movie star or a doctor? How did you decide that this three-year old will find that profession appealing? Certainly not by using statistics. One of the first things Danny and Amos discovered is that even trained statisticians are not natural statisticians. We all make decisions based not on probability but on stories.

And there is more. It turns out we are very, very risk averse. We will do a lot to avoid feeling (or remembering the feel of) pain. Indeed, we are “happy” to experience (on the whole) more pain in order to remember less pain. And we will risk a lot to avoid losing things that we own or think we own. And by think we own, I mean we have an ingrained sense of what we are entitled to. There is a famous case study of monkeys who are all perfectly happy eating cucumbers so long as they all get cucumbers. But the minute some of them got bananas and some got cucumbers the monkeys who got cucumbers threw their cucumbers away in fury. They had no interest in being treated unequally. Humans are the same way. If you treat people equally, we’re OK with that; if you obviously advantage some people over some others, we get mad. Really mad. We know all this thanks to two Israeli psychologists.

When we make decisions when very little is or can be known, things are even worse. Then we use shortcuts called framing (the stories we tell to explain an event that often have little or nothing with the decision we have to make) and rules of thumb or gut feelings to make our choices. Not only that but we make decisions by referring to a story or something we recall that we think may be similar. On top of that, because we are really risk averse, we may well end up gambling in a manner that, if were able to look at our own actions from a statistical point of view, we would describe as reckless. But, as I mentioned before, we are not natural statisticians. All of this means that our decisions when little is known (say our decisions in the middle of the 2008 Crash) are uncertain at best.

All this probably sounds trite to you. At any rate, you probably heard all or most of these ideas already. They’re everywhere these days. In the New York Times op-eds and in school textbooks on everything from politics to economics to biology. But when Amos and Danny started, this idea of an irrational man was hardly trite at all. The prevailing idea of man at that time was that of a rational being. Smart people believed that we were able to know and order our preferences and if we made irrational decisions it was because strong emotions got in the way of our otherwise unbounded rationality. Amos and Danny turned that view of human nature upside down.

Amos Tversky and Danny Kahneman were as unlike as two people could be. Danny survived the Holocaust, hiding in various French safe houses, and that experience left him constantly doubting himself. A student’s mean review could throw him into a panic and if his ideas were not working out he would abandon them. Amos, on the other hand, was bold, brash, confident. He filled up the room. To this day, people remember his voice. The psychology they practiced was different too. Amos used formal, mathematical models to characterize and explain human behavior. Danny, Lewis tells us, was a poet who became a psychologist. So Amos and Danny were very different – but different in a way that complimented each other.

When these two unlikely people formed a kind of couple—became one mind—as they Danny it, they completely changed our understanding of ourselves. And yet it was the all-too human emotion of jealousy that drove them apart. They reconciled when Amos had only six months left to live.

This is a wonderful, human story about a friendship, about human nature, and about us and it is told by a wonderful story teller. I highly recommend it.

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Max Rudolph

Behavioral finance - avoid being prey on the way to a Nobel Prize

Reviewed in the United States on October 27, 2017

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I tend to get excited when the best story tellers write a new book, and when the book covers a topic I have been focused on recently this is even more so. Such was the case when Lewis covered the Nobel Prize winning duo of Daniel (Danny) Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two psychologists who developed much of the base work behind behavioral finance. I also see its roots in Robert Cialdini’s books (Influence, Pre-suasion). While Kahneman (Tversky died in 1996 so did not share in the Nobel) wrote Thinking Fast and Slow to share their life work, here Lewis tries to identify why they worked so well together. In fact I don’t recall him talking about thinking fast (immediate response) or slow (long-term investor) at all. It reads somewhere between biography and non-fiction about behavioral finance.

Some of the more interesting thoughts in the book have nothing to do with behavioral finance, but have lots to do with psychology. Lewis discusses Daryl Morey, who I would call a basketball sabermatrician. He has been GM for the Houston Rockets since 2007 using tactics similar to those described for baseball in the book Moneyball (also by Lewis). In this same chapter Lewis provides a definition of a nerd – a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it. This sounds like something Charlie Munger would say (high praise).

Both Kahneman and Tversky lived in Israel, where everyone serves a stint in the military, and both saw action in the Six Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973 (when they returned from America to take up arms). Kahneman helped the Israelis design better tools for selecting officers and training pilots. Tversky was a paratrooper. Both were professors at Hebrew University at the beginning of the first war.

Our mind tricks us. After the fact, we know exactly why we saw the event coming that no one anticipated (see Taleb’s Black Swan) and surveys weigh more heavily toward events that have recently occurred. The reasons often given relate back to our days as prey on the plains of Africa (thinking fast keeps you alive in that context – you run away from a predator, as fast as you can). One of the ways to catch these inconsistencies is to devise three options, where a person chooses A over B, B over C, and C over A. This violates the law of transitivity, familiar to anyone who has ever studied algebra or logic. Lewis provides many of these examples, as did Kahneman in Thinking Fast and Slow, and I fall for nearly every one. Even after I’ve seen them before (sometimes, occasionally, I remember).

K/T developed several heuristics, where laws of chance are replaced by rules of thumb. “We often decide that an outcome is extremely unlikely, or impossible, because we are unable to imagine any chain of events that could cause it to occur. The defect, often, is in our imagination.”

• Representativeness – we see a previously developed mental model rather than thinking through the facts as presented (and are generally correct). This creates systematic errors, such as looking at a kid and immediately deciding whether they are athletic. Looking at the negative can help avoid these problems. For example, the WW2 bombs landing in London appeared to target certain areas, but really were random. If you have 23 randomly selected people in a room, the odds are better than half that at least two share a birthday.
• Availability – we more easily recall memorable events.
• Conditionality – we make contingent assumptions when none are stated. We assume normal operating conditions (e.g., normal distribution, VaR). “…people don’t know what they don’t know, but that they don’t bother to factor their ignorance into their judgments.”
• Anchoring (and adjustment) – if you are shown a large (or small) number, for example, then your response is then large (or small).
• Simulation – what could happen dominates what is likely to happen – this can lead to analysis paralysis (I find it difficult to overcome this when investing for my personal accounts – it’s hard to pull the trigger).
• Recency bias – recent events influence our probability assumptions.
• Hindsight bias - once we know how something turns out, our recollection is that we predicted it in advance (similar to Black Swans – Taleb)

How do ideas form in our mind? Is it conscious, or indirect? When we study in school, or for a credential, the focus is on repeating the “right” answer. While hard to grade, I’ve always thought it would be better to provide an answer and ask the student to improve it.

Who knew that a bad experience could be remembered more fondly if the final part of the event was not so distasteful – the peak-end rule? This was tested using colonoscopies that ended with the medical instruments brought out of the body slowly or quickly. Doing so slowly made it more likely that the person would return for future tests.

The risk manager will discover, usually the hard way, that avoiding a risk receives no reward but if you miss a risk then you will get the blame. This is a human bias.

Accounting does not consider the impact on the environment, to limited supply, or to emotions. Utility theory overstates the value. Risk aversion is a fee willingly paid to avoid regret. In any case we all prefer to avoid pain more than we want to secure gain. We react more to relative changes than absolute ones, and probability is not straightforward.

The benefits of a group often conflict with the benefit to an individual. Antibiotics are such an example. In total, limiting antibiotics is better because viruses have less chance to mutate successfully. For an individual, antibiotics are either useful or neutral. There is no downside to an individual to being treated with antibiotics.

One of the fascinating revelations in the book (for me, at least) was the need to invert. “How do you understand memory? You don’t study memory. You study forgetting.” As we study other topics we should look for opportunities to utilize this strategy.

While much of the interest in this branch of psychology is applied to investment strategies, K/T worried more about geopolitical biases and the series of avoidable mistakes that could be made by political leaders relying on gut feel. They thought that intelligence reports written as essays should be replaced by probabilities. Telling a story is not helpful in this context, but politicians tend to be afraid of numbers. We have seen evidence of this recently as briefings to the US president are said to be focused on charts and short sound bites.

As you read about financial economics, this should not be your first book. I believe it is more useful to someone already familiar with the concepts from other sources. For someone starting out on this topic I personally like Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes and How to Correct Them by Gary Belsky and Thomas Gilovich to start and then Thinking Fast and Slow by Kahneman before reading the Lewis book.

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Sagar Singh

A book about friendship.

Reviewed in India on March 2, 2024

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The book is full of information about how we make decisions and the most important thing the book is about Daniel and Amos's friendship. Maybe Amos is smiling at me from heaven while I am writing this review. Love you Danny.

Bernard H.

Enjoyable and enlightening

Reviewed in France on January 30, 2024

Verified Purchase

Statistics play an inordinate role in our lifes.
This is True also in software engineering, and identifying potential psychological causes is thrilling.
Teaching statistics in IT classes, and its impact on bug creation, should be mandatory.
Overall, à good read.
Thank you mr Lewis

Anglolena

a brilliant account of a collaborative partnership in science. like a thriller

Reviewed in Italy on September 14, 2023

Verified Purchase

The protagonists suspect that people are not entirely rational, and figure out how to prove it and help society benefit from their insights

Alter Hase

Great Book

Reviewed in Germany on April 20, 2023

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Generally very entertaining, insightful in relation to Tversky's and Kahneman's work and a friendship story that touched me emotionally.

Aristoteles N.

Muito bom

Reviewed in Brazil on December 2, 2017

Verified Purchase

Excelente livro.
Obviamente não espere a completude do thinking, fast or slow.
Mas diversos conceitos de behavior são introduzidos enquanto uma biografia da dupla kahneman tversky é revelada.

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