The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

But if you presented people with situations in which the evidence they needed to judge them accurately was hard for them to retrieve from their memories, and misleading evidence came easily to mind, they made mistakes. “Consequently,” Amos and Danny wrote, “the use of the availability heuristic leads to systematic biases.” Human judgment was distor

He suggested a new definition of the nerd: a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it.

People had a miserable time for most of their vacation and then returned home and remembered it fondly; people enjoyed a wonderful romance but, because it ended badly, looked back on it mainly with bitterness.

For instance, when he wanted to go for a run he . . . went for a run. No stretching, no jogging outfit or, for that matter, jogging: He’d simply strip off his slacks and sprint out his front door in his underpants and run as fast as he could until he couldn’t run anymore. “Amos thought people paid an enormous price to avoid mild embarrassment,” sai

Two decades later, in 1995, the American psychologist Thomas Gilovich, who collaborated in turn with Danny and Amos, coauthored a study that examined the relative happiness of silver and bronze medal winners at the 1992 Summer Olympics. From video footage, subjects judged the bronze medal winners to be happier than the silver medal winners. The sil

player, the more likely you will think him to be an NBA player. They had a hunch that people, when they formed judgments,

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

What all those who came to know Amos eventually realized was that the man had a preternatural gift for doing only precisely what he wanted to do.

The failure of decision makers to grapple with the inner workings of their own minds, and their desire to indulge their gut feelings, made it “quite likely that the fate of entire societies may be sealed by a series of avoidable mistakes committed by their leaders.”