The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis

I loved the movie Moneyball, based on the book by Michael Lewis.  The idea of using baseball statistics and the laws of economics to find highly undervalued players fascinated me.  So when I saw Lewis interviewed by Charlie Rose recently about his new book The Undoing Project, I was immediately intrigued.

This new book seeks to uncover why the human brain is so susceptible to errors in judgement.  To continue the Moneyball analogy, The Undoing Project explores why the old-school baseball scouts were sometimes (often?) so wrong in their judgement.  Lewis' discoveries are fascinating.

The book centers on the stories of two Israeli researchers who practically invented the science of behavioral psychology in the 1960s and 1970s.  Amos Tversky and Danny Kahneman uncovered some brilliant, hidden truths about how the human mind works.

What's so intriguing about their discoveries isn't that humans make errors in judgement (duh?), it's that we often make such errors in a systematic way.  In certain circumstances we all fall into the same traps, over and over.

Just one, simple example of their findings is how major life decisions can be dramatically impacted by the exact wording of a sentence.  When a doctor explains that one will have a 90% chance of surviving a given surgical procedure, most people will opt for the procedure.  But when that same doctor explains that one will have a 10% chance of dying during the procedure, far fewer will opt for the surgery.

Previous to Tversky and Kahneman's work the science of economics assumed that humans behaved completely rationally when deciding between two options.  As the example above points out, humans do not always behave rationally in certain conditions.  The odds of living/dying remain the same in both scenarios, but the outcomes are very different simply because of the way the options are presented to the patient.

The book is filled with such examples that show over and over again the systematic errors in judgement that we all make.

As the book closes, Lewis writes about some of the far reaching effects of Tversky and Kahneman's work.  Their research was crucial in the passage of laws related to texting and talking on the phone while driving.  The USDA's decade's-old food pyramid chart was replaced by MyPlate, as a much more descriptive way to communicate proper portion sizes.  The human brain can't relate to the pyramid nearly as much as the visual of a dinner plate.

Such seemingly simple policy changes, applied across governments, businesses and other organizations around the world have had the net effect of saving and improving countless lives.  Their work - and this book by Lewis - have real world applications that can't be measured.