44 pages • 1 hour read
Michael LewisThe Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 11 Summary: “The Rules of Undoing”
This chapter introduces Harvard psychiatrist Miles Shore and his attempts to better understand how fertile pairs worked. Shore was fascinated by the notion that two people, each with their own creative impulses and temperaments, could produce or accomplish extraordinary things together. After interviewing a number of different pairs, Shore was led to Danny and Amos. In his interview with them, he noticed something unique about their answers. As Lewis writes, “what set Danny and Amos apart from the nineteen other couples Shore interviewed for his book was their willingness to speak about the problems in their relationship” (294). One of the core problems they identified in their collaboration was the notion of credit. Danny often felt overshadowed by Amos, as if others only saw Amos’s contributions. Amos regarded the whole idea of credit as a petty problem largely created by others.
Throughout the rest of the chapter, Lewis details how Danny and Amos’s relationship started to unravel—ironically just as Danny was working on a theory he called “undoing.” This theory referred to people’s efforts to mentally “undo” an event by conjuring up alternate realities of the situation in their mind.
By now Danny was working at the University of British Columbia, while Amos was living and working at Stanford. Danny then traveled to the University of Michigan to explain of rules of undoing at a talk. Afterward, Clyde Coombs, one of the most established faculty members at the University of Michigan, asked Danny and Amos where their ideas came from, to which Amos replied: “Danny and I don’t talk about these things” (308). This moment, one where Amos could have symbolically stood by his friend and collaborator, spelled the beginning of the end for their professional collaboration. As Lewis explains, “Amos had been handed on a platter a chance to give Danny credit for what he had done, and Amos had declined to take it” (308). The chapter ends with Danny’s stonewalling of Amos, which created a palpable tension between the two friends.
Chapter 11 Analysis
In this chapter Lewis gives us the most intimate look at the collaboration between Danny and Amos, mostly by means of Miles Shore’s interview. As Danny and Amos reflected upon their relationship with Shore, it was clear that the collaboration meant a great deal to both of them. However, the collaboration also triggered Danny’s most deeply rooted insecurities, the same internal volatility that had plagued him since before he ever met Amos. When Amos was pondering Danny’s thoughts about the rules of undoing, he was genuinely interested in what Danny was trying to uncover and even suggested possible titles for the idea, such as “Possibility Theory” or “Shadow Theory.” Yet Danny did not wish to continue their collaboration as they had before, as “he’d anticipated his own envy and built it into a decision about Amos” (312).
The irony here is that Danny and Amos, who together had become two of the world’s greatest experts in decision making, could not find within themselves the optimal decision when it came to their own friendship, rendering their work abstract at best and hypocritical at worst. Amos had the choice to give Danny credit and acknowledgment, and he chose not to. Danny had the choice to directly articulate his frustrations to Amos and give his friend the benefit of the doubt, but he also chose not to. Thus, in this penultimate chapter Lewis sets up a bittersweet finale to one of the greatest intellectual collaborations of the 20th century.
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