Thinking, Fast and Slow

Major New York Times bestseller. Winner of the National Academy of Sciences Best Book Award in Selected by the New York Times Book Review as one .
Table of contents

And the funny thing is without system 1, we'd won't survive a day in the life. Not to mention we wouldn't act human. System 2 on the other hand is more introspective, rational and is capable of being aware of the cognitive biases created by System 1. If my understanding is correct then, we can replicate system 2 by a machine or artificial intelligence. But that machine will not have the same extent of morality that we have In later chapters of the book, he describes another variation of duality in the human mind.

An Experiencing Self and a Remembering Self. With countless examples both experimental and anecdotal he vividly paints a picture of how humans have this notion of "I am my remembering self, and strangely my experiencing self is a stranger to me. This ties in to the cognitive bias of "focusing Illusion" Focalism and how we tend to overestimate a certain aspect of life. To put the icing on the cake he finalizes the book by analyzing how we appreciate, value and judge the quality of our lives with all these biases combined.

And it's amazing how irrational we are in doing so. Not only have I realized from this book that I should stop worrying about societal standards because they are mostly based on irrational biases but that I should spend a significant amount of my time and effort to into creating a value structure ideally suited for myself. Now, only if I had bit more memory and cpu speed on System View all 4 comments. Oct 31, Megan Baxter rated it liked it. Thinking, Fast and Slow is just okay. It's being marketed as a book on psychology and economic psychology, in particular for the layperson.

I'm not sure if other laypeople agree, but this wasn't really for me. And it's not that the prose is too technical okay, sometimes it is but rather that Kahneman is stuck somewhere between academic technicalities and clear expressive prose. The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the recent changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement.

You Thinking, Fast and Slow is just okay. You can read why I came to this decision here. In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook View all 13 comments. This book had me laughing and smiling, more than many a book described in its blurb as side-splittingly funny or something similar because I recognised the cognitive disillusions described in this book as my own and in any case I am the kind of person who if they fall into a good mood wonders if it's due to the pint and the pie that was eaten earlier.

In my case the preacher wasn't talking to the choir, but I had been to the church before and enjoyed the services. It doesn't set out to be a new b This book had me laughing and smiling, more than many a book described in its blurb as side-splittingly funny or something similar because I recognised the cognitive disillusions described in this book as my own and in any case I am the kind of person who if they fall into a good mood wonders if it's due to the pint and the pie that was eaten earlier.

It doesn't set out to be a new book full of new discoveries. It's a comfortable round up of research, investigations and thought, polished off with a couple of Kahneman's early articles as appendices. If you've read The Halo Effect By now I'm quite comfortable accepting that I am not rational and that other people aren't either and that statistical thinking is alien to probably to almost everybody and Kahneman's book happily confirms my opinion.

And few things make us as happy as having our own biases confirmed to us. There are however a couple of problems. Firstly there are some people who apparently are wedded to the notion that people are entirely rational. They either will not read this book, read and reject it or indeed read it, accept it's findings but mentally note them as curious aberrations that don't affect their belief - this is discussed in the book. More seriously society is organised on the tacit assumption that we are not only capable of being rational but will put the effort into doing so when required.

Unfortunately studies demonstrating the effect of meals on Judges reviewing parole cases like the state pawn broker in Down and out in Paris and London they are more lenient after lunch and harsher beforehand and once they get hungry again or voter behaviour which turns out to be influenced by where the polling booth is located. This makes me wonder. My polling station used to be in the Adult Education Centre, now that's been closed down, if the polling centre was moved to the police station would my voting habits transform into those of a Fishin', Huntin' and Floggin' Tory who froths at the mouth hearing the words 'illegal immigrants'?

THINKING, FAST AND SLOW

Maybe I need a snack. Of course this happens to us all the time as it is. One of my favourite of Kahneman's examples comes from when he was working with Israeli flight instructors. They were convinced that shouting and swearing at trainee pilots was the best method of improving their performance - experience proved it - when a pilot under performed they swore at him and on the next attempt the trainee would do better. Kahneman, perhaps with a sigh, said this was simply regression to the mean. After poor performance what ever they did would be followed by improved performance, swearing and shouting have no magic power.

Thinking, Fast and Slow audiobook Heuristic

To demonstrate he had the instructors throw balls of paper over their shoulder's into a waste paper bin and tracked the results on a handy black board showing that performance varied up and down irrespective of swearing. Still I wonder if returning to work the instructors developed an enlightened instruction method or if they rapidly regressed to the mean and shouted and swore again.

I used to think that politicians answered a different question to the one given by the interviewer in an attempt to be evasive. Post Kahneman I wonder if this is just the natural tendency of the brain to substitute an easier question for a harder one. View all 18 comments. Are humans perfectly rational? And we almost consciously allow this to happen. All in all, this book is a tour de force of Behavioral Psychology. Explaining how our mind comes to conclusions and makes decisions, Kahneman explains that our intuition and decision making part of brain has two personalities.

These personalities, he says, are not two different or distinct systems but to understand them better, we will have to assign personalities not only to understand them better but also to be able to relate to them on a personal level. The two systems are called system 1 and system 2, for the sake of convenience. System 1 is vigilant, impulsive, judgmental, easily manipulated, highly emotional.

Both these systems are susceptible to a number of biases, system 1 more than system 2. I thought Kahneman would build up this narrative systematically but he goes on to give us a tour of his years of research, experiments and surveys exploring every nook of our conscious human mind. He focuses on a diverse set of heuristics and biases that influence our judgments in everyday life.

With some brilliant experiments and survey reports, he convincingly elaborates the effects that these biases have on our decisions. Never forgetting to highlight the fallacies of our consciousness, he touches on a number of other important breakthroughs in the world of psychology. This is a very simple case of visual illusion where we see two lines of same size appearing to be of varying lengths.

Even after knowing that they are equal and the illusion is created by the fins attached to them, our system 1 still impulsively signals that one of them is longer then the other. Through this simple illustration, he moves on to introduce Cognitive Illusions, which are more fascinating, and are drastically more effective.

Kahneman contends that it is extremely difficult to overcome heuristic biases. Still, we are inherently prone to fall for dazzling rhetoric and dashing figures, we believe in myths and incidents that are as improbable as they are ludicrous, because this is the way we see things. But this is not undesirable altogether, some of the intuitive abilities are an evolutionary blessing that help us understand emotions and make correct decision in split seconds. Neither does the author deems it expedient to overcome these biases, but only to recognize them and put our system 2 to work before making crucial judgments.

Except some of my nerdy goodread friends who then leave an equally baffling Proustian comment, which of course, takes quite a while to be properly understood. So I will mention a summary of some critical biases, ideas and psychological phenomenon that I found interesting. They are just the tip of iceberg and not by any means exhaustive and just comprise a small part of what this book is all about. You wore an expression of disgust and a very bad image came to your mind, your body too reacted in disgust and for short time you might not want to eat bananas.

All of this was automatic and beyond your control. We associate seemingly some unrelated images and with some imagination, form an image. A very interesting clip in which Simon Singh shows associative machine at work: Exposure to a word causes immediate changes in the ease with which many related words can be evoked. The opposite would happen if you had just seen WASH. Similarly, exposure to an idea or event can also have similar temporary effect on our behavior.

¡Se realizo el apartado de tu libro con éxito!

So we admire and rather look for cognitive ease. Things that are less complex have a positive effect on our behavior. Similarly, smiling and laughing can also ease our mind system 1 and make us feel confident and in control. Anything that is easy to understand read or see is likely to have a more positive effect on us as compared to anything that we have a hard time understanding or visualizing.

We are more likely to choose the thing we are more familiar with. The more the exposure is, the more we will be inclined towards it. Things that recur with greater frequency are considered normal, no matter how horrendous they are. Two people killed in a terrorist attack in a western country are more likely to be mourned then a hundreds of children killed in Gaza by a missile strike. Simply due to the fact that children in Gaze get bombed all the time, while a terrorist attack that kills innocents is sort of rarity in Europe and America.

If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 will find a related question that is easier and will answer it. For instance when asked How happy are you with your life these days? In everyday life, we use this to avoid making decisions and expressions based on factual background and therefore make an impulsive and sometimes irrational comment to a difficult question. What you see is there is: We take pride in our intuitive abilities which leads us to believe that we know the whole truth, no matter how fallible our sources are, and not withstanding the fact that there is always another side of the picture.

When we hear a story or an incident, we tend to accept it as a fact without considering any view dissenting or contradicting it. But it is again the mischief of System 1 that leads us to believe a narrative impulsively and without further inquisition as to its authenticity. It is also another example of our intuitive tendency to see things in a narrow frame.

Call it a gift of evolution or survival instinct, but we are naturally loss averse in most of our decisions. We are more likely to abandon a huge profit if there is some probability of an equally huge loss. We do want to have more, but not at the cost of putting our own at stake, we relish our possessions more than our desire to have more. Overconfidence and Hindsight bias: A general limitation of our mind is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past states of knowledge, or beliefs that have changed. Once you adopt a new view of the world or any part of it , you immediately lose much of your ability to recall what you used to believe before your mind changed.

We see people everyday saying that what just happened was what they always thought would happen and they, in their overconfidence, start believing that they always knew in hindsight that such an event was probable. This theory attempts to explain the way people choose between probabilistic alternatives that involve risk, where the probabilities of outcomes are known. Kahneman illustrates it through this graph This theory is one of his most important in the field of behavioral economics. Owing to its complexity, I can not summarize it here. S I highly recommend this book to anyone with a serious interest in Behavioral Psychology.

View all 22 comments. Dec 11, Jan Rice rated it it was amazing Shelves: Wrestled this one down to the ground. It's got so much in it; I've got all I can for now. I'm leaving it out in the living room for now, though--for refreshers. The author's aim is to prove to us that we are not rational beings to the extent we think we are, that evolution has seen to that. And that being the case, the book outlines what we need to know so as not to mess up decisions like we have been doing--like we all do. And he's made it accessible.

He pulls you in. You will get your sha Whew! You will get your share of "Aha! You can read it at whatever level you want. You can skim over the more complicated parts and go for the pithy conclusions.


  • Thinking, Fast and Slow.
  • Brain Gain: Rethinking U.S. Immigration Policy (Brookings FOCUS Book).
  • Advances in Botanical Research: 50.
  • ?
  • .
  • Godfrey Plays: 1: Vol 1 (Contemporary Dramatists).

Or if you are really into the science and scholarship, there are footnotes in the back--stealth footnotes without the little numbers on the book's pages, so as not to intimidate the general audience. All based on science. It's true whether you like it or not. And it is applicable to your life. You can't go over it, you can't go under it, so go through it--with this book.


  • Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 37!
  • Navigation menu.
  • Disponibilidad en librerías!

If we all used our brains just a little more, what couldn't we accomplish! News for August 9, Daniel Kahneman is one of the sixteen Medal of Freedom recipients for this year -- http: View all 19 comments. Aug 31, David rated it it was amazing Shelves: This is an excellent book about how we think, written by a Nobel-prize-winning economist.

Kahneman explains how two "systems" in the mind make decisions. We generally make decisions quickly with the System 1, often because System 2 is simply--lazy. It takes effort to think things out rationally, and our rational minds are not always up to the job. This book is a long, comprehen This is an excellent book about how we think, written by a Nobel-prize-winning economist. This book is a long, comprehensive explanation of why we make decisions the way we do.

Both systems are necessary, but both are subject to fallacies. Kahneman explains many of these fallacies. Most people do not really understand probability, so we are not good at judging relative levels of risk. Our decisions are strongly colored by how we frame questions in our minds. Simply re-framing a question can easily cause people--even professionals like doctors--to reverse decisions. We need to understand these framing issues, to avoid bad decisions.

Elements of causality and Bayesian probability are described in some detail. One of the most interesting aspects of the ways we think, is the concept of availability.

THINKING, FAST AND SLOW de DANIEL KAHNEMAN en Gandhi

Often, when subjected to a difficult question, we answer immediately. But really, we do not answer the question at hand--we have made a subtle switch to a simpler question, without even realizing it. Kahneman describes this quick switch to an available answer, in quite a bit of detail. Another interesting aspect is what he calls "hedonic" theory. Our memories of pleasant and unpleasant experiences are very much colored by their peak intensities and their ends--but definitely not by their durations.

In other words, a short, very unpleasant experience is remembered as being much worse than an very long duration, unpleasant experience.

See a Problem?

Some of the explanations of our ways of thinking may seem basic and obvious if you have read other psychology books. But then you realize--Kahneman and his colleague Amos Tversky discovered these aspects of psychology, by conducting a wide variety of clever experiments. Very well written, and understandable to the non-specialist, I highly recommend this book to anybody interested in psychology. Apr 29, Laura rated it really liked it Recommended to Laura by: Dyson was a particularly apt pick because Kahneman helped design the Israeli military screening and training systems back when the country was young, and Dyson at 20 years old cranked statistics for the British Bombing Command in its youth.

Dyson was part of a small group that figured out the bombers were wrong about what mattered to surviving night time raids over Germany; a thing only about a quarter of the crews did over a tour. Dyson figured out the Royal Airforce's theories about who lived and died were wrong. Everyone at Bomber Command, from the commander in chief to the flying crews, continued to believe in the illusion. The crews continued to die, experienced and inexperienced alike, until Germany was overrun and the war finally ended. Why did the British military resist the changes?

Because it was deeply inconsistent the heroic story of the RAF they believed in. But not the myth that Kahneman dethroned. Kahneman got the Nobel Prize for Economics for showing that the Rational Man of Economics model of human decision making was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of human decision making. We are not evolved to be rational wealth maximizers, and we systematically value and fear some things that should not be valued so highly or feared so much if we really were the Homo Economicus the Austrian School seems to think we should be.

Which is personally deeply satisfying, because I never bought it and deeply unsettling because of how many decisions are made based on that vision. But Kahneman has a theory. He theorizes that humans have two largely separate decision-making systems: System One the fast and System Two the slow. System One let us survive monster attacks and have meaningful relationships with each other. System Two let us get to the moon.

Both systems have values built into them and any system of decision-making that edits them out is doomed to undercut itself. Some specifics that struck me: Once triggered, they cascade concepts. Make someone walk slow, they think about old age. Seeing a picture of cash makes us more independent, more selfish, and less likely to pick up something someone else has dropped. Seeing a locker makes us more likely to vote for school bonds.

Reminding people of their mortality makes them more receptive of authoritarian ideas. We find emotional coherence pleasing and lack of coherence frustrating. However, far fewer things are correlated than we believe. Our system one is pattern seeking. Our system 2 is lazy; happy to endorse system 1 beliefs without doing the hard math. System 1 is radically insensitive to both the quality and quantity of information that gives rise to impressions and intuitions. Much of the time, the coherent story we put together is close enough to reality to support reasonable action.

Like in our comparative risk assessments. We panic about shark attacks and fail to fear riptides; freak out about novel and unusual risks and opportunities and undervalue the pervasive ones. Answering an Easier Question It can be a good way to make decisions. Unless the easier question is not a good substitute.

I have an uneasy awareness that I do this. The Law of Small Numbers. The counties with the highest level of kidney cancer are rural, sparsely populated, and located in traditionally Republican states. Lack of access to health care? The System 1 mind immediately comes up with a story to explain the difference. But if you base your decision on either story, the outcomes will be bad.

We seize on the first value offered, no matter how obviously absurd it is. If you want to push someone in a direction, get them to accept your anchor. Regression to the Mean. A teacher who praises a randomly good performance may shape behavior, but likely will simply be disappointed as statistics asserts itself and a bad performance follows. A teacher who criticizes a bad performance may incentivize, but likely will simply have a false sense of causation when statistics asserts itself and a good performance happens.

Because we tend to be nice to other people when they please us and nasty when they do not, we are statistically punished for being nice and rewarded for being nasty. The Illusion of Understanding The sense-making machinery of System 1 makes us see the world as more tidy, simple, predictable, and coherent than it really is. The illusion that one has understood the past feeds the further illusion that one can control the future.

These illusions are comforting. They reduce the anxiety that we would experience if we allowed ourselves to fully acknowledge the uncertainties of existence. We all have a need for the reassuring message that actions have appropriate consequences, and that success will reward wisdom and courage. Formulas are often much more predictive than learned intuition. Have them write a history of the disaster.

We value losses more than gains. He closes by stressing he does not mean to say that people are irrational. A rational person can believe in ghosts, so long as all her other beliefs are consistent with the existence of ghosts. Rationality is logical coherence — reasonable or not.

Econs are rational by this definition, but there is overwhelming evidence that Humans cannot be. Reasonable people cannot be rational by that definition, but they should not be branded as irrational for that reason. Irrational is a strong word, which connotes impulsivity, emotionality, and a stubborn resistance to reasoned argument. I often cringe when my work with Amos is credited with demonstrating that human choices are irrational, when in fact our research only showed that Humans are not well described by the rational-agent model. View all 10 comments. Jun 21, Nicholas Sparks rated it it was amazing Shelves: It's a fascinating study of the mind, how people make decisions, and how the decision-making process can be improved.

Jan 20, Jeff Raymond marked it as unfinished-reads Shelves: My issue with this book, which is one I've tossed aside after 60 pages, is not so much that it's poorly done or that it's hard to understand - in fact, the exact opposite is true. The issue is that this book is simply more in depth about psychology and psychological processes than I truly have a short-term interest in. This is more the type of book you keep near your desk or bedside, read a 12 page chapter or so, and digest. This may be a book I need to own and do that with as opposed to tear thr My issue with this book, which is one I've tossed aside after 60 pages, is not so much that it's poorly done or that it's hard to understand - in fact, the exact opposite is true.

What I learned from “Thinking Fast and Slow”

This may be a book I need to own and do that with as opposed to tear through it after borrowing it from the library and then hating myself as a slog through it. View all 7 comments. Reading "Thinking, Fast, and Slow", I had already pre- judged it before I started reading Once in awhile I use basic common sense - logic I understand this is an intellectual -giant- of - a -book about "How we think" Thinki Reading "Thinking, Fast, and Slow", Thinking 'deeply' about how we think I understand the author is brilliant --but I found myself skimming pages-- However, what I understood - I enjoyed.

Kahneman has a great talent at being a slow, rational, logical, and reflective thinker. However, fast thanking, intuitive thinking, is more influential in what experience tells us he saysbeing contrary to the belief that we are very rational-decision making people. A few things in the book Yet I still 'believe it's incomplete That their are other ways in speaking about the way our minds work - that is not found in this big book.

System 1 is the intuitive, quick, thinking System 2 is the slowest rational logical and reflective thinking We tend to be lazy thinkers. A running theme in the book is that although the brain does contain a statistical algorithm, it is not accurate. The brain does not understand basic normal distribution. Our brain often jumps to conclusions. Our brain knows how to answer easy questions, like "what did you have for breakfast"? Often stereotypes will override statistics. He talks about predictions. For example, if a child gets great grades in the lower grades of school We often tend to over estimate our ability to predict the future.

When it comes to intuition versus formulas Often the formula does win. We also are incline to expect regularity much more in our lives and really exist. You won't find any data in this book about "The Power of Now" thinking, or discussion about "You are not your Mind", Chakras, or myths about healing I look forward to my book club discussion- 25 people will be attending this month- many bright people I'm sure to gain value and more insights.

Jan 20, Marcel rated it it was amazing Shelves: Excellent book that should be of interest to those interested in Julian Jaynes's ideas on consciousness. This book could probably have been titled Thinking Non-Consciously and Consciously. View all 6 comments.

Quick thinking and multitasking increases error rate. For the mind to comprehend something; it must be relative. Focusing on what we want is very important. What we assume as making a logical decision may just be misjudgment under influence. Oct 21, Hadrian rated it really liked it Shelves: Automatic processing, which is described as System 1, which is easy, non-attentive, intuitive thinking, and controlled processing, or System 2 - the 'attentive', reasoned, detail-oriented part of the mind.

There are also some basic principles, such as heuristics 'shortcuts' of thinking, and biases. Yet this t admitted a bit of doubt when I first started this - the very concepts of Thinking, Fast and Slow, are evident to the student who has had Psych - there are two basic modes of thinking. Yet this bald litany of basic facts does not describe the whole contents of the book. The real meat of the book comes over the next 20 or so chapters, and details many real social and economic applications, with many helpful examples and citations, drawn from respected and well-tested sources.

This resourceful and detailed compilation of our best and worst behaviors in decision making is a fine book, and worth reading to those who are fascinated with our behaviors. Mar 08, Al rated it it was ok. Kahneman, a Nobel Prize winner, explores the general subject of how and why we frequently make irrational decisions. We've all seen articles over the years on various aspects of this phenomenon, but I venture to say that never before have the various aspects and permutations been explored in this depth and specificity.

Kahneman has spent much of his life researching the subject, and since the book includes both his research and that of others, it must stand as the definitive compendium Mr. Kahneman has spent much of his life researching the subject, and since the book includes both his research and that of others, it must stand as the definitive compendium on the subject. His credentials are indisputable, and he tries gamely to bring the subject to life, but -- mea culpa -- I just couldn't stay interested in the myriad of data and specific examples.

This section also offers advice on how some of the shortcomings of System 1 thinking can be avoided. Kahneman developed prospect theory, the basis for his Nobel prize, to account for experimental errors he noticed in Daniel Bernoulli 's traditional utility theory.

One example is that people are loss-averse: Another example is that the value people place on a change in probability e. This occurs despite the fact that under traditional utility theory all three changes give the same increase in utility. Consistent with loss-aversion, the order of the first and third of those is reversed when the event is presented as losing rather than winning something: After the book's publication, the Journal of Economic Literature published a thorough discussion of its take on prospect theory, [12] as well as an analysis of the four fundamental factors that it rests on.

The fifth part of the book describes recent evidence which introduces a distinction between two selves, the 'experiencing self' and 'remembering self'. Kahneman proposed an alternative measure that assessed pleasure or pain sampled from moment to moment, and then summed over time. Kahneman called this "experienced" well-being and attached it to a separate "self. He found that these two measures of happiness diverged. The author's significant discovery was that the remembering self does not care about the duration of a pleasant or unpleasant experience.

Instead, it retrospectively rates an experience by the peak or valley of the experience, and by the way it ends. The remembering self dominated the patient's ultimate conclusion. Kahneman first took up the study of well-being in the s. At the time most happiness research relied on polls about life satisfaction. Having arrived at the subject from previously studying unreliable memories, the author was doubtful of the question of life satisfaction as a good indicator of happiness. He designed a question that focused instead on the well-being on the experiencing self.

The author proposed that "Helen was happy in the month of March" if she spent most of her time engaged in activities that she would rather continue than stop, little time in situations that she wished to escape, and not too much time in a neutral state that wouldn't prefer continuing or stopping the activity either way. Kahneman suggests that focusing on a life event such as a marriage or a new car can provide a distorted illusion of its true value. Since the book's publication it has sold over 1.

The book was also reviewed in an annual magazine by The Association of Psychological Science. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Thinking, Fast and Slow Hardcover edition. The New York Times. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Retrieved 8 April Heuristics and Biases PDF. Archived from the original on A heuristic for judging frequency and probability" PDF. A heuristic for judging frequency and probability". Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman".

Retrieved 27 May Thinking, fast and slow. Archived from the original on November 17, The very best books of ". Explicit use of et al. The New York Review of Books. American Journal of Education. The American Journal of Psychology. The Journal of Risk and Insurance. The Wilson Quarterly The University of Toronto Law Journal. A Review of General Semantics. Thinking portal Psychology portal Books portal.

Retrieved from " https: Psychology books Books about creativity books in economics Prospect theory Heuristics Learning psychology Self Cognitive biases Cognition Choice modelling Decision-making Thought Thought experiments Risk analysis. Unfit url CS1 maint: Pages to import images to Wikidata All articles with unsourced statements Articles with unsourced statements from March Views Read Edit View history. This page was last edited on 14 August , at By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.