The Undoing Project

Every major shift in thinking begins with a simple, unsettling question. The journey starts in an unlikely place: the world of professional basketball. An NBA executive realizes that decisions about which players to recruit are often based on intuition, hunches, and bias rather than data. The realization becomes a metaphor for all human decision-making — we trust our instincts far more than evidence deserves. This case of misjudged talent exposes a universal truth: people don’t know how little they know. Through the lens of sports, a deeper insight emerges — intuition feels accurate because it’s fast, emotional, and self-assured. But the very confidence that makes it compelling often makes it wrong. The world doesn’t suffer from lack of information; it suffers from the illusions of certainty. We see patterns in randomness, make predictions from limited data, and call it “expertise.” This realization marks the first crack in the myth of rational decision-making — and the doorway to the work that will redefine psychology itself.