It’s the intellectual bromance of the last century. Two psychologists — Danny, a Holocaust kid and adviser to the Israel Defence Forces, and Amos, a former child prodigy and paratrooper — meet at the end of the 1960s, and sparks immediately begin to fly. They spend countless hours locked in rooms together at Hebrew University and elsewhere, and eventually co-write a series of papers that will revolutionise the field, and lead to the surviving partner being awarded the Nobel prize in economics. Not, however, before this extraordinary partnership has itself fallen apart, like a love affair, in regret and mutual recrimination.
Our heroes are Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, celebrated for their identification of the ways in which our reasoning can go wrong because of cognitive biases. For instance, we tend to imagine things are more likely if they are more easily available to our memory, as with, say, recent terrorist attacks: this is called the ‘availability heuristic’, and there are many others.
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