Data Religion’s Book of the Month is the Undoing Project by Michael Lewis. This latest project by Lewis follows the lives of behavioral psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. The Undoing Project, written in Lewis’ usual style, is full of a colorful host of characters and events that draws the readers into the history of two of Israel’s most prominent psychologists. From the Holocaust to the Yom Kippur War, the reader is thrown back in time, covering an array of world events through the eyes of Tversky and Kahneman. These world-renowned practitioners made history in their novel approaches to psychology and economics, while they invented a new discipline that the world had never known. They went against the grain and proved through a unique, and at times seemingly irrelevant, set of experiments that debunked traditional psychology that people acted rationally. After their cutting edge research, Tversky and Kahneman proved that biology played a major role in that people actually acted irrationally. Furthermore, based on how a problem was framed, people acted even more irrationally than usual.

This piece of literature gives a behind-the-scenes view of the unique relationship between two colleagues who appear to share more in common with each other than between their own respective spouses. Tversky and Kahneman had a complex relationship that even Lewis could not understand, but yet chronicles their relationship in great detail. Their mind’s intertwined together to make one where each of them did not know where one mind began and the other ended. This is no more prevalent than the approach the duo took in the authorship of their many published works. For example, they took turns to see whose name would make it on the next publication because they each contributed so much to the idea.

If one is looking for an academic exercise in behavioral psychology and/or statistics then this is “not” the book for you. However, if you are looking for a great story and a historical revelation of the makings of a field of psychology that changed the world then you will thoroughly enjoy Lewis’ latest work. No matter your motivation, the reader will walk away a better person by understanding the importance of overconfidence and bias in daily decision-making. Know your MATH!