The duo who upended intuition
Trusting one’s intuition to make good decisions is still a popular practice, but it shouldn’t be. Behavioral scientists have long known that the human mind is hard-wired for error and that our misplaced faith in “gut” judgments is further proof of innate human fallibility. After writing several best-selling books that examined unsung mavericks who changed the way people think about and operate in baseball and on Wall Street by using data to help sidestep such cognitive blind spots, author Michael Lewis set his sights on the two men who first identified the flaws embedded in our thinking. In his new book, “The Undoing Project,” Lewis explores the colorful lives of Daniel Kahneman and the late Amos Tversky, who were sometimes called the “Lennon and McCartney of psychology.” During the 1970s and ’80s, the brilliant Israeli-American psychologists had pioneering insights into human judgment and decision-making that gave birth to the field of behavioral economics. Their...