The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

In the Introduction, Lewis references one of his own books, Moneyball, to establish the premise of The Undoing Project. Whereas Moneyball was focused on the Oakland Athletics’ success after switching from human intuition and gut feeling to hard data to sign the most effective baseball players, Lewis positions The Undoing Project as a book about two Israeli psychologists who sought to discover how people make decisions. Data can be analyzed and reanalyzed, but unless we make sense of our collective decision-making processes, the data alone won’t tell a complete story. Yet old habits persist, especially when the experts in the room are eager to maintain their expertise rather than hand over their judgments to an algorithm. As Lewis writes, “the enthusiasm for replacing old-school expertise with new-school data analysis was often shallow” (16). Thus, the work of Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky became the foundation of this book, which serves as a thematic follow-up to Moneyball.