Book Review: The Undoing Project
After a 2-month hiatus, I’m back to blogging! But with many other things on my plate, I decided to keep it simple, and do some short reviews of books that I have read recently. We will start with a series of books on decision making psychology and behavioural economics (the type that I love), in the following order that I recommend for better appreciation: The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis, Misbehaving by Richard Thaler and Inside the Nudge Unit by David Halpern.
Ideally, it would also be best to have read Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman before starting on The Undoing Project, to understand why Michael Lewis decided to write a biography of Kahneman and his partner Amos Tversky. Kahneman won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002, for the work that he and Tversky did in the psychology of judgment and decision-making, which revolutionised the way people understood economic sciences. But it wasn’t their work or achievements that Michael Lewis wanted to focus on in this book — it was their one of a kind friendship.
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While they were both incredible Israeli scientists who eventually moved to the United States, Kahneman and Tversky both led very different lives.
Kahneman was born in Tel Aviv in 1934, but spent most of his childhood years growing up in Paris with his family, and lived through the Holocaust of World War II. After the war, Kahneman’s family moved back to Israel when he was around 13 years old, even though he did not speak a word of Hebrew. Nonetheless, Kahneman learnt to speak Hebrew fluently within a year, and after high school, he was identified as intellectually gifted, and was allowed to proceed to university directly instead of being conscripted into the military. After completing his psychology degree at Hebrew University, he was posted to the psychology unit in the Israeli Defence Force, where he revamped the personnel selection test, which is still being used today.
Born to pioneers of modern Israel in 1937, Tversky unlike Kahneman spent most of his early life in Haifa. Despite having a gift for math and science, Tversky chose to pursue humanities in high school, with the belief that he could teach himself math. Upon conscription, Tversky signed up to be a paratrooper as part of an elite unit in the Israeli Defence Force, and later became a platoon commander. In this combat role, he fought in the Suez Crisis and the Six-Day War, and received the military’s highest award for bravery for selflessly saving one of his men. While Tversky could intellectually comment on any discipline, he strategically chose to study philosophy and psychology for his bachelor’s at Hebrew University, thinking that psychology had the most number of difficult unsolved problems. In fact, Tversky’s intelligence was so well-respected, that fellow psychologist Richard Nisbett designed a one-line intelligence test — the sooner you figure out that Amos is smarter than you are, the smarter you are.
Kahneman and Tversky formally got to know each other in 1969 when they were both teaching at Hebrew University. While both were stars of the psychology department, their paths seldom crossed, and graduate students had the impression that there was some sort of rivalry going on between them. That was until Kahneman invited Tversky to give a talk at his seminar, but Kahneman turned out to be unimpressed with the research that Tversky shared, and challenged him that the findings did not reflect the real world. In this rare occasion, Tversky was confronted with doubt — that Kahneman was right and he was wrong. That thought actually excited him, and it gave birth to an unparalleled academic collaboration and friendship. From that year onwards, the both of them became joined at the hip, and thoroughly enjoyed each other’s company.
Yet their friendship was seemingly unlikely, given their vastly different personalities. Kahneman was quite reserved, while Tversky was very outgoing; Kahneman preferred not to get into arguments, but Tversky enjoyed being combative; Kahneman was mostly pessimistic, while Tversky on the other hand forced himself to be optimistic because he felt pessimism was pointless; Kahnman was rather disorganised, but Tversky, he had nothing to organise in his office. Amazingly, the polar differences between these two individuals somehow complemented each other like yin and yang, and the papers that they wrote together sounded nothing like what either of them would have written alone. Their collaboration was so perfect that they never wanted to take the credit of being the lead author, and that decision was often left to the flip of a coin.
By 1973, their relationship with each other became so intense, that even Tversky’s wife described it as something more than a marriage. Kahneman himself was quoted saying, “Just to be with him, I never felt that way with anyone else, really. You are in love and things, but I was rapt! And that’s what it was like — it was truly extraordinary.” They continued to engage each other in intellectual discussions, conducted studies to test their hypotheses, and even participated in the Yom Kippur War together. But as they were finally working on their Nobel Prize winning paper on Prospect Theory in 1976, something happened — Kahneman fell in love and was spending a considerable amount of time with his new beau. Kahneman eventually decided to get married and settle down in the United States, forcing Tversky to leave Hebrew University and move to Stanford University in order to continue working with Kahneman in the US.
However, the move was not easy. While they continued to publish papers together in the early 1980s, it was not the same as before — they had lost their former chemistry. Tversky was somehow getting more recognition than Kahneman for the work they did together, much to the frustration of Kahneman. Their work also drew the attention of many critics, and Tversky was obsessed with crushing their opponents, while Kahneman preferred to stay out of the fight. Their values diverged and they drifted apart. When Kahneman finally moved to UC Berkeley in the late 1980s, Tversky thought that it was an opportunity for them to work together again, but Kahneman was by this time averse towards Tversky. Their communication had completely broken down.
Tired of being in Tversky’s shadow, Kahneman exhibited avoidant attachment behaviour in this troubled relationship. Kahneman wanted to prove that he did not need Tversky to make his own name, but at the same time he could not get Tversky out of his mind. While Kahneman seemed angry at Tversky for not recommending him for positions or nominating him for awards, what he truly wanted was to obtain Tversky’s approval, and for Tverksy to once again acknowledge that they were equals. Yet none of that mattered, when Tversky called Kahneman one day in February 1996, breaking the news to him that he had terminal stage cancer with only 6 months left to live. Poignantly, Tverksy’s words to Kahneman were, “We’re friends, whatever you think we are.”
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It was apt for Michael Lewis to name this book “The Undoing Project” for more than one reason — the project was one of the last that Kahneman and Tversky worked on together. Kahneman also became interested in the phenomenon of “undoing”, when he realised that people experienced regret based on the perceived ability to undo a given situation. He noted that there are two rules of undoing:
- The more items there were to undo in order to create some alternative reality, the less likely the mind was to undo them.
- With the passage of time, the consequences of any event accumulated, and left more to undo. And the more there is to undo, the less likely the mind is to even try.
Perhaps subconsciously as he worked on this idea, Kahneman regretted what had become of the friendship between him and Tversky, and he was trying to understand why he could not undo the situation that they were in. But with Tversky’s assurance that their friendship still meant very much to him before he left, time will hopefully heal Kahneman’s wounds, as he slowly sees that the series of events were unavoidable.
“The Undoing Project” is a delightful read for anyone who is a fan of Kahneman and Tversky’s work. Never before have their lives been captured in such great detail, for one to fully appreciate the brilliance of their academic collaboration. However, the events in the book were not exactly chronologically written, giving a disjointed feeling at various junctures. The interjection of episodes concerning other famous names in the field was quite interesting, but they did not always add value to the storytelling. Regrettably, I personally wished that there was more emphasis on the time that they were working on Prospect Theory, and for the struggle towards the end to have more content. The book did leave me a feeling of starting out heavy but ending thin.
Nonetheless, I hope that my chronological summary above piques the interest of those who have not read the book, to pick it up and dive into the friendship of these two men. If not, stay tune while I work on my next book review on Richard Thaler’s Misbehaving!
If you would like to know more about Richard Thaler’s “Misbehaving”, check out this book review:
If you would like to know more about David Halpern’s “Inside the Nudge Unit”, check out this book review:
Originally published at: https://learncuriously.wordpress.com/2020/02/21/book-review-the-undoing-project
