Genius Alone Doesn’t Advance Big Ideas
World-Changing Thought Depends on the Social Context, Too
Where do big new ideas come from—the kind that break the mold and change how we see the world? As a sociologist, this has long been an interest of mine. So I was excited to read Michael Lewis’ new book The Undoing Project, which tells the story of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, the Israeli psychologists whose work on decision-making helped convince economists—and everyone else—that people aren’t nearly as rational as economic theory would predict. Kahneman and Tversky’s research on the cognitive errors to which we’re all prone was so …
