What is the author's tone in the nonfiction book, The Undoing Project?

One of the central challenges facing Lewis when writing this book was the need to translate complex, jargon-filled academic studies into language that can be understood by a mainstream readership. This problem is exacerbated by the content of the studies explored which tend to be about all the errors that regularly occur in human thinking. As a result of this, there is a real risk of the topic coming across as inscrutable, condescending, or perhaps as implying that people are stupid. Lewis seeks to lessen this possibility by highlighting times when he himself feels that the academic language used by Danny, Amos, and the other psychological researchers cited throughout the book, is unnecessarily dense and full of jargon. This most often happens when Lewis cites the title of a psychological study: “the titles he and Danny put on their papers were inscrutable” (182); “If the title was incomprehensible, it was at least in part because Hoffman expected anyone who read it to know what he was talking about” (169-170); “The new paper’s title was once again more mystifying than helpful” (188). Lewis adopts a jovial tone in an attempt to reassure the reader that if they are having a hard time understanding some of the language, they are not alone.

Lewis’s intention with this book is to bring the work of Danny and Amos to a wider audience who would otherwise struggle to access it due to the complex, dense, academic language in which the original research is written and the tone of Lewis’s own writing reflects this purpose. He takes any available opportunity to reassure the reader that complicated ideas may initially seem difficult to understand, but that it is possible to follow what is being said without being a professional researcher. For example, when introducing one of Amos and Danny’s core ideas, Lewis writes jokingly: “And when people calculate the odds in any life situation, they are often making judgements about similarity – or (strange new word!) representativeness” (183). Overall the effect of the tone is to make the work of Danny and Amos more accessible to a wider readership.