One reformer is Theo Epstein, the executive who has overseen the demise of mythical curses on both the Boston Red Sox and Chicago Cubs. Yet the reformist movement has had many more wins than losses. The adjustments have not always worked, and many of the old beliefs - say, the importance of fielding skill among catchers in baseball - contain wisdom. Team executives have realized that some of their long-held assumptions about what makes a great athlete or a winning strategy turn out to be wrong. One of the clearest places to see their work’s impact, although surely not the most important, is professional sports. “They need a story.” Or Tversky’s theory of socializing: Because stinginess and generosity are both contagious, and because behaving generously makes you happier, surround yourself with generous people. “No one ever made a decision because of a number,” Kahneman has said. The work is also full of practical little ideas. It has affected eating habits, cellphone use by drivers, retirement savings and many other areas. The work has also led to advances in medical diagnosis and patient behavior. It has helped to reorder economics by exposing the folly of economists’ belief in an unconsciously rational human mind. The research of Kahneman and Tversky has become some of the most influential social science of the past century. Another is “representativeness,” which leads people to see cause and effect - to see a “narrative” - where they should instead accept uncertainty or randomness. One such rule is the “halo effect,” in which thinking about one positive attribute of a person or thing causes observers to perceive other strengths that aren’t really there. Kahneman and Tversky used the word “heuristics” to describe the rules of thumb that often lead people astray. Their work revealed previously undiscovered patterns of human irrationality: the ways that our minds consistently fool us and the steps we can take, at least some of the time, to avoid being fooled.

The two names were Amos Tversky - the winner of that coin flip - and Daniel Kahneman. They flipped a coin to decide whose name would appear first on their initial paper and alternated thereafter. “We were sharing a mind,” one would say later. When it came time for the two professors to write up their papers, they would sit next to each other at a single typewriter. Those first conversations were filled with uproarious laughter and occasional shouting, in a jumble of Hebrew and English, which could sometimes be heard from the hallway. In the fall of 1969, behind the closed door of an otherwise empty seminar room at Hebrew University, two psychologists began a collaboration that would upend the understanding of human behavior.

THE UNDOING PROJECT A Friendship That Changed Our Minds By Michael Lewis 362 pp.

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