Michael Lewis writes in his 2016 book The Undoing:
* All the leading behaviorists were WASPs—a fact that didn’t go unnoticed by young people entering psychology in the 1950s. Looking back, a casual observer of the field at that time couldn’t help but wonder if there shouldn’t be two entirely unrelated disciplines: “WASP Psychology” and “Jewish Psychology.” The WASPs marched around in white lab coats carrying clipboards and thinking up new ways to torture rats and all the while avoided the great wet mess of human experience. The Jews embraced the mess—even the Jews who disdained Freud’s methods and longed for “objectivity” and wished to search for the kinds of truth that might be tested according to the rules of science.
Danny, for his part, longed for objectivity. The school of psychological thought that most charmed him was Gestalt psychology. Led by German Jews—its origins were in early twentieth-century Berlin—it sought to explore, scientifically, the mysteries of the human mind. The Gestalt psychologists had made careers uncovering interesting phenomena and demonstrating them with great flair: a light appeared brighter when it emerged from total darkness; the color gray looked green when it was surrounded by violet and yellow if surrounded by blue; if you said to a person, “Don’t step on that banana eel!,” he’d be sure that you had said not “eel” but “peel.” The Gestalists showed that there was no obvious relationship between any external stimulus and the sensation it created in people, as the mind intervened in many curious ways. Danny was especially struck by the way that the Gestalt psychologists, in their writings, put their readers through an experience, so that they might feel for themselves the mysterious inner workings of their own minds…
* If you went to a doctor in the seventeenth century, you were worse off for having gone. By the end of the nineteenth century, going to the doctor was a break-even proposition: You were as likely to come away from the visit better off as you were to be worse off. Amos argued that clinical psychology was like medicine in the seventeenth century, and he had lots of evidence to support his case.
* When B. F. Skinner discovered as a young man that he would never write the great American novel, he felt a despair that he claimed nearly drove him into psychotherapy. The legendary psychologist George Miller claimed that he gave up his literary ambition for psychology because he had nothing to write about. Who knows what mixed feelings William James experienced when he read his brother Henry’s first novel? “It would be interesting to ask how many psychologists come up short next to great writers who happen to be near them,” one prominent American psychologist has said. “It may be the fundamental driver.”
* Across North America, more people died every year as a result of preventable accidents in hospitals than died in car crashes—which was saying something. Bad things happened to patients, Redelmeier often pointed out, when they were moved without extreme care from one place in a hospital to another. Bad things happened when patients were treated by doctors and nurses who had forgotten to wash their hands. Bad things even happened to people when they pressed hospital elevator buttons. Redelmeier had actually co-written an article about that: “Elevator Buttons as Unrecognized Sources of Bacterial Colonization in Hospitals.” For one of his studies, he had swabbed 120 elevator buttons and 96 toilet seats at three big Toronto hospitals and produced evidence that the elevator buttons were far more likely to infect you with some disease.
But of all the bad things that happened to people in hospitals, the one that most preoccupied Redelmeier was clinical misjudgment.
* “Physicians deal with patients one at a time, whereas health policy makers deal with aggregates.”
But there was a conflict between the two roles. The safest treatment for any one patient, for instance, might be a course of antibiotics; but the larger society suffers when antibiotics are overprescribed and the bacteria they were meant to treat evolved into versions of themselves that were more dangerous and difficult to treat. A doctor who did his job properly really could not just consider the interests of the individual patient; he needed to consider the aggregate of patients with that illness.
