Together, the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman made the world a better place.
In 2003, we reviewed “Moneyball,” Michael Lewis’s book about Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s. The book, we noted, had become a sensation, despite focussing on what would seem to be the least exciting aspect of professional sports: upper management. Beane was a failed Major League Baseball player who went into the personnel side of the business and, by applying superior “metrics,” had remarkable success with a financial underdog.
In 1968, Tversky and Kahneman were both rising stars in the psychology department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. They had little else in common. Tversky was born in Israel and had been a military hero. He had a bit of a quiet swagger . He was an optimist, not only because it suited his personality but also because, as he put it, “when you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice. Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens.
A constant worrier, Kahneman is an early riser who often wakes up alarmed about something. He is prone to pessimism—claiming that, by expecting the worst, he is never disappointed. This pessimism extends to the expectations he has for his own research, which he likes to question: “I get a sense of movement and discovery whenever I find a flaw in my thinking.
Before long, Kahneman and Tversky were in constant conversation. They worked intensely in a small seminar room or a coffee shop, or while taking a long walk. The sessions were private; no one else was invited to join. As they began to produce work together, each sentence would be written, rewritten, and rewritten again, with Kahneman manning the typewriter. On a good day, they would write a paragraph or two.
Kahneman and Tversky showed that, in both of these domains, human beings hardly behave as if they were trained or intuitive statisticians. Rather, their judgments and decisions deviate in identifiable ways from idealized economic models. Most of the importance of Kahneman and Tversky’s work lies in the claim that departures from perfect rationality can be anticipated and specified. In other words, errors are not only common but also predictable.
The Kahneman and Tversky partnership was extraordinary in terms of its scientific impact—they are the Lennon and McCartney of social science—and even now, when joint work is increasingly common in academia, enduring teams like theirs are extremely rare. In Lewis’s account, the relationship between Kahneman and Tversky was as intense as a marriage. As anyone who has been married knows, marriages can be fraught, and they sometimes dissolve entirely, rarely amicably.
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