The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World (181 POCHE)

psychology was a noisy dinner party during which the guests talked past one another and changed the subject with bewildering frequency. The Gestalt psychologists and the behaviorists and the psychoanalysts might all be jammed into the same building with a plaque on the front that said Department of Psychology, but they didn’t waste a lot of time li

Amos liked to say that if you are asked to do anything—go to a party, give a speech, lift a finger—you should never answer right away, even if you are sure that you want to do it.

“When someone says something, don’t ask yourself if it is true. Ask what it might be true of.”

To Redelmeier the very idea that there was a great deal of uncertainty in medicine went largely unacknowledged by its authorities. There was a reason for this: To acknowledge uncertainty was to admit the possibility of error.

“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.

Maybe the mind’s best trick of all was to lead its owner to a feeling of certainty about inherently uncertain things.

When they made decisions, people did not seek to maximize utility. They sought to minimize regret. As the starting point for a new theory, it sounded promising.

The first was the realization that people responded to changes rather than absolute levels. The second was the discovery that people approached risk very differently when it involved losses than when it involved gains. Exploring people’s responses to specific gambles, they found a third raisin: People did not respond to probability in a straightfor

“Someone once said that education was knowing what to do when you don’t know,” said one of his students. “Danny took that idea and ran with it.”