The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

player, the more likely you will think him to be an NBA player. They had a hunch that people, when they formed judgments,

Presented with two lines of equal length, the eye is tricked into seeing one as being longer than the other. Even after you prove to people, with a ruler, that the lines are identical, the illusion persists: They’ll insist that one line still looks longer than the other. If perception had the power to overwhelm reality in such a simple case, how mu

The failure of decision makers to grapple with the inner workings of their own minds, and their desire to indulge their gut feelings, made it “quite likely that the fate of entire societies may be sealed by a series of avoidable mistakes committed by their leaders.”

“No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.”

When they made decisions, people did not seek to maximize utility. They sought to minimize regret.

“Belief in the Law of Small Numbers” teased out the implications of a single mental error that people commonly made—even when those people were trained statisticians. People mistook even a very small part of a thing for the whole. Even statisticians tended to leap to conclusions from inconclusively small amounts of evidence. They did this, Amos and