Even to Ross it was unclear that the sales pitch was necessary. “Everyone who came across the work congratulated themselves on their own good judgment and insight in appreciating the work,” said Ross. “But nobody didn’t get it.” That same day, the Stanford Psychology Department went to the Stanford president and said: We have none of the usual paperwork. No recommendations or anything else. Just trust us. Stanford made Amos an offer of lifetime employment that afternoon.
Amos would later tell people that in choosing between Harvard and Stanford, he imagined the regret he would experience at each. At Harvard he’d regret passing up Palo Alto’s weather and living conditions, and resent the commute; at Stanford he’d regret, and only briefly, not being able to say he was a Harvard professor. If it occurred to him or anyone else that Amos, to be Amos, needed Danny close at hand, he didn’t show it. Stanford showed not the slightest interest in Danny. “There’s a practical issue,” said Ross. “Do you want two guys doing the same thing? And the cold fact is we got the full benefit of Danny and Amos just by hiring Amos.” Danny would have loved for them all to go to Michigan, but Amos clearly had no interest in anyplace but Harvard or Stanford. After Harvard and Stanford had ignored him, and Berkeley had let him know that he would not be offered a job, Danny accepted a position beside Anne at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver. He and Amos agreed they would take turns flying to visit each other every other weekend.
Danny was still floating on air. “We were on such a high from having finished prospect theory and embarked on framing that we must have felt pretty invulnerable,” he said. “There was not a shadow between us at the time.” He watched Amos give the traditional job-application talk at Stanford, after Stanford had made him what was likely the fastest job offer in its history. Amos presented prospect theory. “I noticed that I felt nothing but pride for him,” said Danny. “I noticed it because envy would have been natural.” When Danny left Palo Alto for Vancouver for the start of the 1978–79 academic year, he was even more aware than usual of the serendipity of life. His two children were now on the other side of the world, along with his old lab, a department full of former colleagues, and a society to which he once assumed he belonged. He had left behind in Israel a ghost of himself. “The background to what I was thinking was that I had just changed my life,” he said. “I’d changed my wife. The counterfactuals were with me all the time. I was constantly comparing my life to what it might have been.”
In this curious state of mind, he found his thoughts settling on a nephew, Ilan. Ilan had been a twenty-one-year-old navigator in the back of an Israeli fighter during the Yom Kippur war. After the war, he had sought out Danny and asked him to listen to an audiotape he had kept from it. He’d been in the backseat of the fighter when an Egyptian MiG got behind them, locking in for a kill. On the tape, you could hear Ilan scream at his pilot, “Break! Break! Break! He’s on our tail!” As Ilan played the tape, Danny noticed that the young man was shaking; for some reason, he wanted his uncle to hear what had happened to him. Ilan had survived the war, but a year and a half later, in March 1975, five days before he was to be released from service, he was killed. Blinded by a flare, his pilot had flown upside down straight into the ground.
They’d thought they were rising when in fact they were falling. It wasn’t an original mistake. Pilots in flight often became disoriented. The inner ear wasn’t designed for a gravity-defying chamber pitching and rolling at 650 miles an hour a mile above the earth’s surface any more than the mind was designed to calculate the probabilities of complex situations. It had evolved to stabilize people on their own two feet. People who flew airplanes were susceptible to sensory illusions—which was why a pilot without an instrument rating who flew into clouds had an average life expectancy of 178 seconds.*
After Ilan’s death, Danny couldn’t help but notice the urge in those who loved him to mentally undo his plane crash. Many of the sentences that came from their lips might just as well have started with the words “if only.” If only Ilan had been released from the Air Force a week earlier. If only he’d taken charge after his pilot was blinded by that flare. People’s minds coped with loss by drifting onto fantasy paths, where loss never occurred. But this drifting, Danny noticed, wasn’t random. There appeared to be constraints on the mind when it created alternatives to reality. If Ilan had still had a year of service remaining when his plane crashed, no one would have said, “If only he had been released a year ago.” No one said, “If only the pilot had the flu that day” or “If only Ilan’s plane had been grounded for mechanical problems.” For that matter, no one said, “If only Israel had not had an Air Force.” Any of those counterfactuals would have saved his life, but none of them came to the minds of those who loved him.
There were of course a million ways that any plane crash might have been avoided, but people seemed to consider only a few of them. There were patterns in the fantasies that people created to undo his nephew’s tragedy, and they resembled patterns in the alternative versions of his own life that played out in Danny’s mind.
Soon after his arrival in Vancouver, Danny asked Amos to send him any notes that he’d kept from their discussions about regret. In Jerusalem they’d spent more than a year talking about the rules of regret. They’d been interested chiefly in people’s anticipation of the unpleasant emotion, and how this anticipation might alter the choices they made. Now Danny wanted to explore regret, and other emotions, from the opposite direction. He wanted to study how people undid events that had already happened. Both he and Amos could see how such a study might feed into their work on both judgment and decision making. “There is nothing in the framework of decision theory that would prohibit the assignment of utilities to states of frustrated hope, relief or regret, if these are identified as important aspects of the experience of consequences,” they wrote, in what amounted to a memo to themselves. “However, there is a reason to suspect a major bias against the acknowledgment of the true impact of such states on experience. . . . It is expected of mature individuals that they should feel the pain or pleasure that is appropriate to the circumstances without undue contamination by unrealized possibilities.”
Danny now had an idea that there might be a fourth heuristic—to add to availability, representativeness, and anchoring. “The simulation heuristic,” he’d eventually call it, and it was all about the power of unrealized possibilities to contaminate people’s minds. As they moved through the world, people ran simulations of the future. What if I say what I think instead of pretending to agree? What if they hit it to me and the grounder goes through my legs? What happens if I say no to his proposal instead of yes? They based their judgments and decisions in part on these imagined scenarios. And yet not all scenarios were equally easy to imagine; they were constrained, much in the way that people’s minds seemed constrained when they “undid” some tragedy. Discover the mental rules that the mind obeyed when it undid events after they had occurred and you might find, in the bargain, how it simulated reality before it occurred.
Alone in Vancouver, Danny was gripped by his new interest in the distance between worlds—the world that existed and worlds that might have come to pass but never did. Much of the work he and Amos had done was about finding structure where no one had ever thought to look for it. Here was another chance to do that. He wanted to investigate how people created alternatives to reality by undoing reality. He wanted, in short, to discover the rules of the imagination.
With one eye on a prickly colleague in his new department named Richard Tees, Danny sat down and created a vignette for a new experiment:
Mr. Crane and Mr. Tees are scheduled to leave the airport on different flights, at the same time. They traveled from town in the same limousine, were caught in the same traffic jam, and arrived at the airport thirty minutes after the scheduled departure time of their flights.