American psyche: Michael Lewis on the triumph of irrational thinking

Trump's frequent use of violent imagery takes advantage of what is known as the "availability" heuristic. People make decisions based on memories. But more vivid information -- the name of a celebrity, for example, as opposed to that of another person -- is easier to recall, giving it greater weight in decision-making. When Trump speaks of gruesome Isis executions or murders committed by undocumented immigrants, he is providing voters with more memorable information than dry facts and figures.

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After Clinton's defeat, Lewis says that her supporters, too, behaved in ways that reflect the flaws in human reason set out by Danny and Amos. In their shock, these political partisans initially reacted by wishing they could "undo" the result, obsessing about whether the result would have been different if, say, FBI chief James Comey had not revealed new potential evidence in the FBI's investigation into Clinton's emails. As time passed, the very same people began to change their story, taking the view that Trump's victory was inevitable. Lewis says research shows that certainty of this kind will only grow.

"More and more, you are going to be sitting down to dinner with people who saw it coming," he says. "That's just baloney. The truth is that the world is a far more uncertain place than anyone wants to admit, and anything could have happened. It was not ordained that Trump was going to win."

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One of the reasons that Lewis finds Trump so worrisome is that he appears so resistant to criticism. "He seems to think his own impulses are ingenious, even when they are fraudulent, idiotic or stupid. He tells himself a story that ‘I won, I am a success,' " says Lewis. "He really is as fallible as the stupidest American citizen."

Trump, in other words, is one of us -- and that's a problem.