Book | The Undoing Project Project - 3. Amos Tversky (maybe.. ENTJ)

Book review, The Undoing Project (Saenggakae gwanhan saenggak project) - 

Humans cannot help but be vulnerable to the halo effect. Especially since the rise of the knowledge industry, this bias has accelerated and become almost a universal way of perceiving things. Humans are extremely vulnerable to anxiety. We feel a psychological dread about what we cannot predict or do not know. In the age of the wild, you only had to consider the outward appearance for your own survival, but in the era after the rise of the knowledge industry, we also have to consider not just the outside but the inner attitude and knowledge of others. In such a context, the halo effect is put to extremely useful work in social and economic life.

Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics. The achievement that earned him the prize is in the field of judgment and decision-making. More specifically, it is the "prospect theory." Prospect theory is joint research that grew out of Amos Tversky's earlier ideas — research such as transitivity experiments and the features of similarity used to explore how people make decisions. Sadly, by the time the prize was awarded, Tversky had already passed away. In the end, only Kahneman received the Nobel. And in people's minds the name "Nobel laureate in Economics, Daniel Kahneman" was firmly engraved. This can be seen as an example of the anchoring effect.

When people explain rational decision-making, they often quote the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and his book 'Thinking, Fast and Slow.' In the process, Tversky's contribution often gets overlooked. In this way, with Kahneman's Nobel award, his work as a whole came to be evaluated more positively, and his name has come to serve as the reference point in economics and decision theory.

1. The background behind the publication of 'The Undoing Project' 
2. About Daniel, the author of 'Thinking, Fast and Slow'
?  3. About Amos, the co-researcher on 'prospect theory' 
4. Their joint research, between cool detachment and burning passion  
5. That person — even after he leaves me

 
First

Amos Tversky(Amos Tversky, March 16, 1937 - June 2, 1996) was a cognitive and mathematical psychologist. Most of his early work was on the foundations of measurement. Daniel Kahneman's early work with him focused on the psychology of prediction and probability judgment. Later, they collaborated to develop prospect theory, with the aim of explaining the irrational economic choices of human beings, and which is considered one of the major works of behavioral economics. (Text - Wikipedia, image - Aladin)
 
 
 
To his Israeli acquaintances, Amos Tversky was, without question, the most extraordinary person they had ever met, and the very embodiment of an Israeli.
 

Childhood 

His parents, who fled Russia in the early 1920s to escape antisemitism, were among the pioneers who helped build the Zionist nation. His mother, Genia Tversky, with her exceptional capacity to lead society and her political acumen, became a member of Israel's first parliament, and went on to serve four more terms. Genia Tversky carried out her public office while sacrificing her personal life, and she did not agonize much over that choice. She was often away from home; while Amos was young, she stayed in Europe for two years helping the U.S. army liberate concentration camps and resettle survivors. And after returning home, she spent more time at the Knesset in Jerusalem than she did at home.
He had an older sister, but she was thirteen years older than Amos, so Amos grew up almost as an only child. The one who raised Amos was mostly his father, Yosef Tversky. As a veterinarian, his father spent much of his time taking care of livestock (Israelis at the time could not afford to keep pets). Yosef, the son of a rabbi, despised religion, loved Russian literature, and took great pleasure in the wit of his fellow human beings. He had originally worked in medicine but quit, because — as Amos would explain to his friends — he believed "animals feel greater pain than people, but complain about it far less." Yosef Tversky was a serious man. But when he talked about life and work, he made his son double over with laughter, with anecdotes and with the mysteries of existence. When Amos started his doctoral dissertation, he wrote, "I dedicate this dissertation to my father, who taught me to live with curiosity."
Amos liked to say that amusing things actually happen to people who know how to weave events into an amusing story. Amos himself had a knack for adding a startlingly original twist to the way he told a story.
To people who knew Amos very well, Amos's stories were just an excuse to enjoy Amos. "People who knew Amos couldn't talk about anything else. Whenever we got together, it was Amos, Amos, Amos all the way down — we couldn't manage to talk about anything else."
 
 

Military years 

He didn't have what you'd call a robust physique. He was always small. But his joints rotated freely in every direction, and he moved with astonishing nimbleness. Even when he was talking, you got the feeling he was constantly performing some kind of motion. Even when climbing a mountain, he flew about almost like an animal returned to the wild. One of his favorite pranks — and he did this even while telling stories — was to climb up onto something high (a rock, a table, a tank) and then to fall face-first toward the ground. His body, completely horizontal with the ground, would keep falling until people screamed. Then, at the very last moment, he would right his body and land on his feet. He loved the feeling of falling, and he loved looking down at the world from above.
At the end of 1956, there was a tense incident in which, during a training exercise, an explosion went off and Amos rescued a comrade by taking the danger upon himself. The Israeli army never gave out commendations for bravery lightly. Amos went beyond becoming a platoon leader and received the Israeli army's highest commendation for valor. Moshe Dayan, who watched the whole thing from start to finish, commended Amos and said, "That was a really stupid and brave thing you did. If you do that again, you won't survive." Those who watched Amos felt that he feared being called unmanly more than he feared a brave act. "He was always full of fight. I think it was a way to make up for being thin, frail, and pale-looking." That's how Shamir remembered him. But at some point, even appearance ceased to matter. He pushed himself until brave action became habit.
 
 

The psychologist 

Anyone who came to know Amos noticed one thing: human beings exhibit supernatural talent only when they are doing what they want to do. 
Amos approached the intellectual life strategically, as if choosing where to drill, and after listening intently to two years of philosophy classes he declared that philosophy was a dried-up well. Amnon recalled that time this way: "I remember what he said. 'There's nothing for us to do in philosophy. Plato has solved too many of the problems already. We can't make any impact on this field. There are too many smart people, too few problems left, and even those problems have no answers.'" The mind-body problem was a good example. How are the various things that go on in our heads — beliefs, thoughts, and so on — connected to states of the body? What is the relationship between body and mind? This problem is at least as old as Descartes, but the answer was still nowhere in sight. At least within philosophy. The way Amos saw it, the trouble with philosophy was that it didn't follow the rules of science. Philosophers test their theories of human nature against just one sample — themselves. Psychology at least imitated science. Even if only in part, it always grounded itself on apparent data. A psychologist would test whatever theory he came up with against a sample drawn from a representative cross-section of humanity. His theory could be tested in someone else's hands as well, and what he found could be replicated later or proven false. When a psychologist happens upon some fact, he tries to make it into a firmly established fact.
To Amos's close Israeli acquaintances, there was nothing mysterious about Amos's interest in psychology. The questions of why people behave the way they do and why they think the way they think were always present, in the very air they breathed. As Avishai Margalit recalled.
 

"We never discussed art. We discussed people. 
It was an eternal puzzle. What is the engine that drives people?

Such questions came out of the Jewish quarter. Because Jews were small merchants. They always had to judge people. "Who is dangerous? Who is not dangerous? Who will pay back a debt and who will not?" People relied fundamentally on psychological judgment.
Amos was clear-thinking, logical, infinitely optimistic, with not the slightest patience for nonsense. How did such a man come to step into a field stained with unhappy souls and mysticism?
He once sat down with the Harvard professor of psychiatry Miles Shore for a conversation. When Shore asked him how he became a psychologist, he answered: "It is hard to know how the course of one's life is decided. The important choices are decided practically at random. Maybe trivial choices reveal more about us. What you major in, for instance, can come down to which teacher you happened to have in high school. Whom you marry can come down to who happens to be around you at the right moment in life. Trivial decisions, on the other hand, are highly systematic. The fact that I became a psychologist doesn't tell you much. The kind of psychologist I am can probably show inner traits more clearly."
So what kind of psychologist was he? Amos found very little of psychology interesting. After taking classes in child psychology, clinical psychology, and social psychology, he concluded that he could ignore most of the psychology he had chosen, with no problem at all. He thoroughly ignored the homework, too.

At the time, clinical psychology was a rising field everywhere, and students showed great interest in it; many of them wanted to become therapists, but Amos compared clinical psychology to medicine. In the seventeenth century, going to a doctor made you worse. Then by the late nineteenth century, going to a doctor came down to roughly fifty-fifty: as likely to make you better as worse. Amos argued that clinical psychology was like seventeenth-century medicine, and he had plenty of evidence to back up that argument.
 
 

Decision theory 

One day in his second year at Hebrew University, Amnon came across a paper called The Theory of Decision Making, written by Ward Edwards, a professor of psychology at Johns Hopkins. The paper began like this. "In addition to psychologists, many social scientists try to explain individual behavior. Economists and some psychologists have put forward many theories regarding individual decision-making and have run a few experiments. The kinds of decisions this body of theory deals with are: when faced with two situations A and B, people for the most part choose A (or B)."

"The economic theory of decision-making is, at this point, about how to predict what choice the child will make." Edwards then went on to point out a problem. Economic theory, market design, public policy, and many other things depend on theories of how people make decisions; but psychologists, who would seem more able than anyone else to test such theories and to lead the way in revealing how people actually make decisions, are not particularly interested in this subject.
Edwards did not place himself, or his own field of psychology, in opposition to economics. He merely proposed that psychologists step in and test the assertions and predictions economists were making.
Economists assert that 'people are rational.' What does that mean? It means, at the very least, that they understand what they want. A rational person should be able to logically order various choices according to his own preferences. For example, suppose you receive a menu with three hot drinks listed, and at that moment you prefer tea over hot chocolate and coffee over tea — then it is logically valid to choose coffee over hot chocolate. If you prefer B to A, and C to B, then you should prefer C to A. The technical term is 'transitivity.' If people cannot logically order their preferences, what kind of market could possibly function properly? 

One of the predictions of economists that Edwards thought psychologists could test was the prediction that human beings are transitive. Is that actually so? At a given moment, if you prefer tea to hot chocolate and coffee to tea, do you prefer coffee to hot chocolate? Edwards mentioned that around that time several people had been examining this question — among them the mathematician Kenneth May. In the leading economics journal <Econometrica>, May reported the results of testing how logical students were when posed with the question of choosing a spouse. 


Amos also wanted to explore how people make decisions. To do that, he needed people who were locked up somewhere and who, in their need, would respond to the small monetary rewards he offered. In the end Amos found his test subjects in the highest-security wing of Jackson State Prison near Ann Arbor and began his research.
The results of the research showed that the inmates of Jackson Prison who chose between gambles shared several traits with Kenneth May's students who chose between potential spouses. The students fell for the leading question that nudged them, after they had said B was preferable to A and C to B, into saying that A was preferable to C. And even after they had been asked beforehand whether there was any chance they would pick A over C and had answered there was no way that would happen, they still set C aside and chose A. Some thought Amos must have used a trick on the inmates, but he did not. The University of Michigan professor Rich Gonzalez said, "Amos didn't trick the inmates into violating transitivity. He used something more like the old saw about the frog in boiling water. Amos's idea was that if people don't notice small differences, they might end up violating transitivity."
Sure enough, people did not easily notice small differences. The prison inmates didn't, and neither did the Harvard students Amos additionally experimented on. As Amos wrote up the paper on this experiment, he showed that one could even predict, to some extent, the situations in which transitivity could be violated. But he did not push deeper. He did not draw the grand conclusion that the assumption that human beings are rational is inappropriate, and quickly wrapped up the paper. Ordinarily, when people make a choice over a multifaceted object, it is extremely difficult to make proper use of all the available information: it is not that people, having preferred B to A and C to B, then turned around and preferred A to C. Rather, it was simply that the differences were very hard to grasp. Amos did not think that the actual world, like the experiments he had designed, would push people into self-contradiction and lead them to opposing decisions. 



 

The principle of similarity 
The University of Michigan, then as now, had the largest psychology department in the world.
There were others besides Amos who studied decision-making, and among them Amos was drawn to Clyde Coombs. Coombs distinguished between decisions where more is better and more ambiguous decisions. For example, all things being equal, anyone would choose to receive more money rather than less, and less pain rather than more. What interested Coombs were ambiguous decisions. How do we decide things like where to live, whom to marry, what kind of place to live in? The food giant General Mills hired Coombs to develop a tool for measuring how customers thought about its products.

The problem of measuring what cannot be observed fascinated Amos as much as it fascinated Coombs (Amos went so far as to teach himself the mathematics needed for it). But he also realized that to measure such preferences raised another problem. The claim that people choose by comparing an ideal in their head with an object in reality — to take that claim into research (unrealistic though it may be), one had to know how they arrive at such a judgment. Psychologists called this a 'similarity judgment.' For psychological jargon, it is an unusually broad term. When we evaluate how much an object resembles, or does not resemble, another object, what comes to mind? Because this process is so fundamental to what happens in human beings, we don't bother to think about it again.
The Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner says, "This is the very process we are constantly honing, the process that becomes the tool by which we understand and respond to a great deal of the world. Above all, it is a question of how you classify objects. And that's all there is to it. Whether to sleep with this person or not, whether to eat this or not, whether to give to this person or not, whether that one is a boy or a girl, whether that one is predator or prey. If you understand how this classifying process works, you'll also understand how we make sense of objects. It is the way our knowledge of the world becomes organized. It is like the thread that strings everything together inside our heads."
The leading theories about how psychology judges similarity have one thing in common — they are all based on physical distance. When we compare two objects — whether things, people, ideas, or feelings — we ask how close the two are. According to psychological theory, the way the two exist in our heads is similar to the way two points exist on a map, on a grid, or in some other physical space, with a certain relationship between them. Amos was puzzled by that. He read a paper by Eleanor Rosch, a psychologist at Berkeley. In the early 1960s, Rosch explored how people classify objects. What makes a table a table? What makes a particular color the color it is? According to the paper, Rosch had people compare colors and judge how similar they were to one another.
People's judgments were strange. For example, they would say that magenta is similar to red, but that red is not similar to magenta. They thought 103 was similar to 100, but that 100 was not similar to 105. They thought a toy train is very much like a real train, but a real train is not like a toy train. When people compared two — two people, two places, two numbers, two ideas — they didn't pay much attention to symmetry. Amos came to this thought, which no one had had before, simply by making the observation that all of the theories the intellectuals had concocted to explain people's similarity judgments must be nonsense. 

Amos had his own theory, which he called features of similarity. According to his argument, when people compare two objects to judge their similarity, they basically list features. These features are simply the salient ones in the object. Then they count the salient features that the two objects share. The greater that number, the more alike the two are; the smaller that number, the less alike. The number of salient features differs from object to object. For example, New York City had more such features than Tel Aviv. Amos built a mathematical model to explain what he intended.

The absence of features is itself one feature." Amos's paper had this example as well. "Similarity grows when shared features are added, and when distinctive features are removed." From Amos's theory explaining how we judge similarity, all sorts of interesting insights poured out. If, when comparing two objects, you mentally count the features that stand out in each, then it can be that one pair is judged at the same time more similar and less similar than another. The two might overlap a great deal and also fail to overlap a great deal. For instance, opposing emotions like love and hate, joy and sorrow, seriousness and silliness can suddenly look — or feel — as if they have a more fluid relationship with each other. These are not opposing emotions placed at fixed ends of a continuum in our heads. They feel similar in some features and different in others. On top of that, Amos's theory also gave a new way to look at what may be happening when we make seemingly irrational choices that violate transitivity.

The notion that, when we make a decision, we judge by comparing the similarity between the actual object and the ideal we want, is an interesting one. The concrete way of comparing is to count the salient features. And how prominent a feature appears can be manipulated by how it is brought to the foreground, so the perception of similarity between two objects can also be manipulated.

For example, if we want two people to feel that they resemble each other, we can place the two in a context that highlights what they share. Two American college students might think of each other as complete strangers in the United States, but if those two go on a study-abroad in their sophomore year to Togo and meet there… "My, you're both Americans!" — and they will come to see each other as remarkably similar people. 

By changing the context in which two are compared, you can suppress particular features and bring others to the surface. Amos said, "It is commonly thought that classification is determined by the similarity among various objects,"and he proposed the opposite view. "Similarity can change depending on how objects are classified. Thus similarity has two sides, a causal one and a derivative one. Similarity is the basis for classifying objects, but it is also influenced by the classification that has been applied."
Bananas and apples look more alike to us because we have agreed to call the two of them fruit. That is, once objects are grouped into the same category on some basis, they end up looking more alike to each other simply because they are in the same category. In this way, the mere act of classifying an object reinforces typicality.
 

Therefore, to undo typicality, undo the classification!