On January 1st, I woke up hangover-free and mostly recovered from a brief illness. I had a nagging thought. For several weeks since Charlie Munger died, I had a desire to find my copy of Poor Charlie’s Almanack. It had been packed away in a box some years ago during our move to Texas. When I found it, I also accidentally committed to spending several hours with it that day. It was The Psychology of Human Misjudgment that I was really excited about. Munger had, for decades, done his own study of the various ways that humans consistently make wrong-headed decisions. If this sounds like the field of behavioral economics, it’s because it kinda is — except that he seems to have developed it independently from folksy wisdom rather than quantitative research. Later on, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky would provide the foundational research that formed the basis of the field. Munger’s approach grouped human misjudgments into 25 tendencies, which he chronicles with his witty style and plenty of examples. In discussing the Authority-Misinfluence Tendency (#22), he writes:
Other versions of confused instructions from authority figures are tragic. In World War II, a new pilot for a general, who sat beside him in the copilot’s seat, was so anxious to please his boss that he misinterpreted some minor shift in the general’s position as a direction to do some foolish thing. The pilot crashed the plane and became a paraplegic.
Well, naturally, cases like this one get the attention of careful thinkers like Boss Buffett, who always acts like an overquiet mouse around his pilots.
While I decided to fish out my paper book to read it, the full, revised, Psychology of Human Misjudgment is available online. I found it a delightful way to start my year.