Danny wanted to understand Gigerenzer better, perhaps even reach out to him. “I was always more sympathetic than Amos to the critics,” said Danny. “I tend to almost automatically take the other side.” He wrote to Amos to say that he thought the man might be in the grip of some mind-warping emotion. Perhaps they should sit down together and see if they might lead him to reason. “Even if it were true you should not say it,” Amos shot back, “and I doubt that it is true. An alternative hypothesis to which I lean is that he is much less emotional than you think, and that he is acting like a lawyer trying to score points to impress the uninformed jury, with little concern for the truth. . . . This does not make me like him more but it makes his behavior easier to understand.”
Danny agreed to help Amos “as a friend,” but it wasn’t long before Amos, once again, was making him miserable. They wrote, and rewrote, drafts of a response to Gigerenzer but at the same time wrote and rewrote the dispute between each other. Danny’s language was always too soft for Amos, and Amos’s language too harsh for Danny. Danny was always the appeaser, Amos the bully. They could agree on seemingly nothing. “I am so desperately unhappy at the idea of revisiting the GG postscript that I am almost ready to have a chance device (or a set of three judges) decide between our two versions,” Danny wrote to Amos. “I don’t feel like arguing about it, and what you write feels alien to me.” Four days later, after Amos had pressed on, Danny added, “On a day on which they announce the discovery of 40 billion new galaxies we argue about six words in a postscript. . . . It is remarkable how ineffective the number of galaxies is as an argument for giving up in the debate between ‘repeat’ and ‘reiterate.’” And then: “Email is the medium of choice at this stage. Every conversation leaves me upset for a long time, which I cannot afford.” To which Amos replied, “I do not get your sensitivity metric. In general, you are the most open minded and least defensive person I know. At the same time, you can get really upset because I rewrote a paragraph you like, or because you chose to interpret a totally harmless comment in an unintended negative way.”
One night in New York, while staying in an apartment with Amos, Danny had a dream. “And in this dream the doctor tells me I have six months to live,” he recalled. “And I said, ‘This is wonderful because no one would expect me to spend the last six months of my life working on this garbage.’ The next morning I told Amos.” Amos looked at Danny and said, “Other people might be impressed but I am not.” Even if you had only six months to live I’d expect you to finish this with me. Not long after that exchange, Danny read a list of the new members of the National Academy of Sciences, to which Amos had belonged for nearly a decade. Once again, Danny’s name wasn’t on the list. Once again, the differences between them were there for all to see. “I asked him, why haven’t you put me forward?” said Danny. “But I knew why.” Had their situations been reversed, Amos would never have wanted to be given anything on the strength of his friendship with Danny. At bottom, Amos saw Danny’s need as weakness. “I said, ‘That’s not how friends behave,’” said Danny.
And with that Danny left. Walked out. Never mind Gerd Gigerenzer, or the collaboration. He told Amos that they were no longer even friends. “I sort of divorced him,” said Danny.
Three days later Amos called Danny. He’d just received some news. A growth that doctors had discovered in his eye had just been diagnosed as malignant melanoma. The doctors had scanned his body and found it riddled with cancer. They were now giving him, at best, six months to live. Danny was the second person he’d called with the news. Hearing that, something inside Danny gave. “He was saying, ‘We’re friends, whatever you think we are.’”
* * *
* After the article appeared, in the October 1983 issue of Psychological Review, the best-selling author and computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter sent Amos his own vignettes. Example: Fido barks and chases cars. Which is Fido more likely to be: (1) a cocker spaniel or (2) an entity in the universe?
Coda
BORA-BORA
Consider the following scenario.
Jason K. is a fourteen-year-old homeless boy who lives in a large American city. He is shy and withdrawn but extremely resourceful. His father was murdered when he was young; his mother is an addict. Jason takes care of himself, sleeping sometimes on the sofas at friends’ apartments but mostly on the streets. He manages to stay in school until the ninth grade. He often goes hungry. One day in 2010 he accepts an offer from a local gang to sell drugs, and drops out of school. A few weeks later, the night before his fifteenth birthday, he is shot and killed. He was unarmed when he died.
We are seeking ways to “undo” Jason K.’s death. Rank the following in order of their likelihood.
1) Jason’s father was not murdered.
2) Jason carried a gun and was able to protect himself.
3) The U.S. federal government made it easier for homeless kids to obtain the free breakfast and lunch to which they are entitled. Jason never went hungry, and remained in school.
4) A lawyer steeped in the writings of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman took a federal government job in 2009. Drawing upon Kahneman and Tversky’s work, he pushed for changes in the rules, so that homeless kids no longer needed to enroll in the school meal program. Instead they automatically received free breakfast and lunch. Jason never went hungry, and remained in school.
If you found #4 more probable than #3, you violated perhaps the simplest and most fundamental law of probability. But you’re also onto something. The lawyer’s name is Cass Sunstein.
Among its other consequences, the work that Amos and Danny did together awakened economists and policy makers to the importance of psychology. “I became a believer,” said Nobel Prize–winning economist Peter Diamond of Danny and Amos’s work. “It’s all true. This stuff is not just lab stuff. It’s capturing reality, and it’s important to economists. And I spent years thinking of how to use it—and failing.” By the early 1990s a lot of people thought it was a good idea to bring together psychologists and economists, to allow them to get to know each other better. But as it turned out, they didn’t particularly want to know each other better. Economists were brash and self-assured. Psychologists were nuanced and doubtful. “Psychologists as a rule will only interrupt a presentation for clarification,” says psychologist Dan Gilbert. “Economists will interrupt to show how smart they are.” “In economics it is completely normal to be rude,” says economist George Loewenstein. “We tried to create a psychology and economics seminar at Yale. We had our first meeting. The psychologists came out completely bruised. We never had a second meeting.” In the early 1990s, Amos’s former student Steven Sloman invited an equal number of economists and psychologists to a conference in France. “And I swear to God I spent three-quarters of my time telling the economists to shut up,” said Sloman. “The problem,” says Harvard social psychologist Amy Cuddy, “is that psychologists think economists are immoral and economists think psychologists are stupid.”