The social science of human errors

but taught him how to inject the meat with formaldehyde to arrest the decay.

Soutine was introduced to Modigliani in 1915 and Modigliani encouraged his dealer Zborowski to support his new friend.

Barnaby Wright, curator of the Soutine exhibition says the friendship “was absolutely vital at a time when Soutine needed a friend. Few people believed in him when he arrived in Paris. And, famously, on his death-bed Modigliani apparently told Zborowski: ‘Don’t worry, in Soutine I am leaving you a man of genius.”’

The exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery focuses on the portraits that Soutine painted of young men working in the hotel and restaurant trade. It is the first time these Chaim Soutine works have been the focus of an exhibition and the first major exhibition in this country devoted to the artist for 35 years. Wright suggests why he was so attracted to these subjects. “Perhaps because he identified with them as many of them were like he was, immigrants trying to make their way in French culture.

“I think they were a painterly challenge for him, both for their characters and the colours of their uniforms but also in that basic challenge of portraiture to find and respond to the individual, to resist painting them simply as generic types.”

While the show is smaller than the Tate exhibition with 21 works, each painting is absolutely magnificent, Soutine’s use of colour and texture creates images of young people who look old before their time, suggesting to some extent the premature ageing that hard work brings.

Some look nervous while others “manspread” their legs, confidently filling the canvas. Soutine’s work was very influential on the work of the next generation of Jewish artists working in London. Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach all cite Soutine as a key influence.

One of these paintings lifted Soutine from the poverty in which he had lived for the first decade of his time in Paris. In 1923, the American collector Albert C. Barnes saw one of Soutine’s paintings of a pastry cook and wanted to see more by the artist. He bought some 50 works on the spot, thus creating an overnight reputation for the artist. With his new-found wealth, Soutine was able to stay in the hotels and eat in the restaurants where he found new models for his paintings.

Unfortunately, Soutine’s style attracted a fair amount of xenophobia, as Wright explains. “People in France were very quick to identify Soutine as a Jewish outsider and, to his supporters, that was a very exciting thing to be, someone who could really embrace the French tradition but shake it up with an outsider’s perspective, not just run along familiar lines.

To his detractors it was impossible to assimilate his work within a French tradition. If people wanted to criticise Soutine they criticised precisely on the grounds that he was a foreigner and his art was ugly and monstrous.”

I ask both curators if they think the two artists influenced each other. Fraquelli mentions that, before Soutine began his paintings, “Modigliani was already painting young people such as the Young Peasant included in the exhibition and Soutine may have been influenced by those pictures when later he began painting his portraits of cooks and hotel workers. But Soutine was painting landscapes down in the South of France and Modigliani, for a brief moment, painted landscapes, too, though we only know of four.”

So, in that case, there is the possibility that Modigliani was influenced by Soutine. Wright adds that “on first sight, their work is very different. Soutine is very expressive, Modigliani more monumental and stylised, but both artists show deep engagement with their sitters and their willingness to distort the figure, in Modigliani’s case elongating and stretching the face inspired perhaps by African sculpture and Soutine getting obsessed with one feature such as an ear and focusing on that.”

‘Modigliani’ opens at Tate Modern on 23 November and continues until 2 April 2018

‘Soutine’s Portraits: Cooks, Waiters & Bellboys’ continues at the Courtauld Gallery until 21 January 2018

GIVE AN instant response to this. The combined cost of a bat and ball is £1.10. The bat costs £1 more than the ball. So how much does the ball cost?

Probably, like most people, you thought the answer was 10p. But a moment’s reflection and you realise that can’t be right. If the ball costs 10p and the bat costs a pound more than the ball, then the bat would cost £1.10 and the total cost would be £1.20. The right answer, as will have dawned on you, is that the bat costs £1.05 and the ball costs 5p.

So why does almost everyone make such a basic error? Daniel Kahneman has the answer.

Of all the academics I’ve covered in this column, Kahneman is unquestionably the most influential. There is not a social science unaffected by the research he conducted with fellow Israeli psychologist Amos Tversky. Tversky died in 1996 and the story of their unlikely friendship is the subject of The Undoing Project, a cracking read by Michael Lewis. The two men had little in common. Kahneman is conciliatory and a gloomy pessimist, Tversky was an intellectual pugilist and a bouncy optimist. As Lewis puts it, “Danny was always sure he was wrong. Amos was always sure he was right.” Fused together, however, these contrasting characters produced something magical.

A short column cannot begin to do justice to their many fascinating findings. But much of their work examined how humans deal with risk and uncertainty. They showed how rubbish we are with numbers, and how our judgments and decisions reveal evidence of systematic and predictable error. Before T&K’s studies, the dominant view in economics was that most individuals behaved more-or-less rationally. Post T&K, that position has become untenable. They were the founding fathers of what’s known as Behavioural Economics — the study of how humans actually behave, rather than how economists assumed they behaved. In 2002, Kahneman was the first psychologist to be awarded a Nobel Prize in economics (not Tversky, because the prize cannot be awarded posthumously).

Kahneman’s career triumphs were against the odds. Although born in Tel Aviv, his family was in Paris when it was occupied by the Nazis. Danny spent his childhood years in hiding; a minor act of kindness once shown to him by a Nazi was one reason he became hooked on psychology. In 1948, his surviving family (his father had died of untreated diabetes) returned to what was about to become Israel.

Kahneman’s most productive years came in the 1970s after he began to collaborate with the more mathematically-inclined Tversky. The genius of T&K was that they identified puzzles that others missed, spotted possible solutions and then devised the most inventive means to test them. They deconstructed some of our emotions — such as regret, or the fear of regret — which seem to play a pivotal role in some of our decisions. They hypothesised that people were most regretful when they didn’t get something they could easily have imagined getting. So how to test that? Well, one test involved asking people to imagine they’d bought an expensive lottery fair ticket in the hope of winning a big prize. They found that if they told people the winning ticket was number 107359, a person with ticket 107358 expressed far more unhappiness at missing out than someone with number 618379.

But back to that bat and ball. Kahneman believes that, broadly speaking, the brain has two systems. The fast system is instinctive and emotional, the slow system more calculating and logical. The fast system is usually reliable but it does make mistakes. The slow system is more accurate but has the disadvantage of requiring more attention and brain-power. When it comes to human behaviour, the fast/ slow distinction has enormous explanatory and predictive power. The fast system is in play when we quickly, and incorrectly, give the answer, 10p.

Kahneman (more than Tversky) was interested in the practical applications of understanding the human mind, and their findings have been embraced by academics, politicians, policy-makers and business. Companies and politicians, for example, now routinely think about “nudges”, subtle ways of shaping choices so that people select one option rather than another. T&K are the parents of nudge.

If you’re interested to read more about Kahneman check out not only The Undoing Project but Kahneman’s own best-seller, Thinking, Fast and Slow (both Penguin). Both works are brilliant. And consider that a shove, rather than a nudge.

They explain why we’re rubbish with numbers

David Edmonds co-runs www.philosophybites.com