The Undoing Project review – ‘psychology’s Lennon and McCartney’

Michael Lewis tells the compelling story of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, whose behaviourist theories led to his own bestseller Moneyball

All love stories involve the science of decision making - for better or worse, richer or poorer. No romance has been as alive to the fallibility of that process as the one described in this book. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman were both the grandsons of eastern European rabbis. Chance and fate brought them together in Tel Aviv in the 1960s. Their subsequent deep friendship and intellectual collaboration - a bromance that invented "behavioural economics" and established cognitive rules for human irrationality - has arguably done as much to define our world as, say, the intertwining between Francis Crick and James Watson.

One of the Israeli duo's observations was that "no one ever made a decision because of a number - they needed a story". Kahneman and Tversky argued and proved that in the main humans decided things emotionally, not rationally - the trick was to recognise those habits, and not confuse one for the other. Practising what they preached, their scientific papers were rigorous with fact and research but laced with memorable parable and anecdote. They never made the mistake of thinking that the behaviour they described - of subconscious biases and illogical choices that skewed markets and misunderstood risk - did not also apply to themselves.

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