Edwards sent Amos a working draft of his assault on Danny and Amos’s work and hoped that Amos would leave him with his dignity. Amos didn’t. “The tone is snide, the evaluation of evidence is unfair and there are too many technical difficulties to begin to discuss,” Amos wrote, in a curt note to Edwards. “We are in sympathy with your attempt to redress what you regard as a distorted view of man. But we regret that you chose to do so by presenting a distorted view of our work.” In his reply, Edwards did a fair impression of a man who has just realized that his fly is unzipped, as he backpedals off a cliff. He offered up his personal problems—they ranged from serious jet lag to “a decade’s worth of personal frustrations”—as excuses for his failed paper, and then went on to more or less concede that he wished he’d never written it. “What especially embarrasses me is that after working so long as I did on trying to put this thing together I should have been as blind to its many flaws as I was,” he wrote to both Amos and Danny, before saying how he intended to entirely rewrite his paper and hoped very much to avoid any public controversy with them.
Not everyone knew enough to be afraid of Amos. An Oxford philosopher named L. Jonathan Cohen raised a small philosophy-sized ruckus with a series of attacks in books and journals. He found alien the idea that you might learn something about the human mind by putting questions to people. He argued that as man had created the concept of rationality he must, by definition, be rational. “Rational” was whatever most people did. Or, as Danny put it in a letter that he reluctantly sent in response to one of Cohen’s articles, “Any error that attracts a sufficient number of votes is not an error at all.” Cohen labored to demonstrate that the mistakes discovered by Amos and Danny either were not mistakes or were the result of “mathematical or scientific ignorance” in people, easily remedied by a bit of exposure to college professors. “We both make a living by teaching probability and statistics,” Stanford’s Persi Diaconis and David Freedman, of the University of California at Berkeley, wrote to the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, which had published one of Cohen’s attacks. “Over and over again we see students and colleagues (and ourselves) making certain kinds of mistakes. Even the same mistake may be repeated by the same person many times. Cohen is wrong in dismissing this as the result of ‘mathematical or scientific ignorance.’” But by then it was clear that no matter how often people trained in statistics affirmed the truth of Danny and Amos’s work, people who weren’t would insist that they knew better.
* * *
Upon their arrival in North America, Amos and Danny had published a flurry of papers together. Mostly it was stuff they’d had in the works when they’d left Israel. But in the early 1980s what they wrote together was not done in the same way as before. Amos wrote a piece on loss aversion under both their names, to which Danny added a few stray paragraphs. Danny wrote up on his own what Amos had called “The Undoing Project,” titled it “The Simulation Heuristic,” and published it with both their names on top, in a book that collected their articles, along with others by students and colleagues. (And then set out to explore the rules of the imagination not with Amos but with his younger colleague at the University of British Columbia, Dale Miller.) Amos wrote an article, addressed directly to economists, to repair technical flaws in prospect theory. “Advances in Prospect Theory,” it was called, and though Amos did much of the work on it with his graduate student Rich Gonzalez, it ran as a journal article by Danny and Amos. “Amos said that it had always been Kahneman and Tversky and that this had to be Kahneman and Tversky, and that it would be really strange to add a third person to it,” said Gonzalez.
Thus they maintained the illusion that they were still working together, much as before, even as the forces pulling them apart gathered strength. The growing crowd of common enemies failed to unite them. Danny was increasingly uneasy with the attitude Amos took toward their opponents. Amos was built to fight. Danny was built to survive. He shied from conflict. Now that their work was under attack, Danny adopted a new policy: to never review a paper that made him angry. It served as an excuse to ignore any act of hostility. Amos accused Danny of “identifying with the enemy,” and he wasn’t far off. Danny almost found it easier to imagine himself in his opponent’s shoes than in his own. In some strange way Danny contained within himself his own opponent. He didn’t need another.
Amos, to be Amos, needed opposition. Without it he had nothing to triumph over. And Amos, like his homeland, lived in a state of readiness for battle. “Amos didn’t have Danny’s feeling that we should all think together and work together,” said Walter Mischel, who had been the chair of Stanford’s Psychology Department when it hired Amos. “He thought, ‘Fuck You.’”
That sentiment must have been passing through Amos’s mind in the early 1980s even more often than it usually did. The critics publishing attacks on his work with Danny were the least of it. At conferences and in conversations, Amos heard over and over from economists and decision theorists that he and Danny had exaggerated human fallibility. Or that the kinks in the mind that they had observed were artificial. Or only present in the minds of college undergraduates. Or . . . something. A lot of people with whom Amos interacted had big investments in the idea that people were rational. Amos was perplexed by their inability to admit defeat in an argument he had plainly won. “Amos wanted to crush the opposition,” said Danny. “It just got under his skin more than it did mine. He wanted to find something to shut people up. Which of course you can never do.” Toward the end of 1980, or maybe it was early 1981, Amos came to Danny with a plan to write an article that would end the discussion. Their opponents might never admit defeat—intellectuals seldom did—but they might at least decide to change the subject. “Winning by embarrassment,” Amos called it.
Amos wanted to demonstrate the raw power of the mind’s rules of thumb to mislead. He and Danny had stumbled upon some bizarre phenomena back in Israel and never fully explored their implications. Now they did. As ever, they crafted careful vignettes, to reveal the inner workings of the minds of the people they asked to judge them. Amos’s favorite was about Linda.
Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.
Linda was designed to be the stereotype of a feminist. Danny and Amos asked: To what degree does Linda resemble the typical member of each of the following classes?
1) Linda is a teacher in elementary school.
2) Linda works in a bookstore and takes Yoga classes.
3) Linda is active in the feminist movement.
4) Linda is a psychiatric social worker.
5) Linda is a member of the League of Women voters.
6) Linda is a bank teller.
7) Linda is an insurance salesperson.
8) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.
Danny passed out the Linda vignette to students at the University of British Columbia. In this first experiment, two different groups of students were given four of the eight descriptions and asked to judge the odds that they were true. One of the groups had “Linda is a bank teller” on its list; the other got “Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.” Those were the only two descriptions that mattered, though of course the students didn’t know that. The group given “Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement” judged it more likely than the group assigned “Linda is a bank teller.”