Daniel Kahneman’s famous Thinking, Fast and Slow is just as charming, revelatory and engrossing as you’ve heard.
A product of over three decades of pioneering research into the psychology of decision making, Thinking, Fast and Slow is an extraordinary look behind the curtain of the human mind. Kahneman explains principles of psychology, economics and experimental science with lucidity, wit and humor, making this masterpiece of science communication not only fascinating but so fun to read.
The book is organized into five parts, each covering a different aspect of cognitive psychology. Each part manages to both offer insight into a unique subsection of the topic of human thought and to build on the previous parts to add to a rich and complex picture of how our minds work.
Part 1, “Two Systems,” builds the basis for the rest of the book by establishing the concept of two systems of mental processing that reside in our brain, a fast, intuitive and involuntary System 1 and a slow, deliberate, logical System 2. It builds a profile of each of these systems, casting System 1 as a highly efficient and effortless frontline processor of the world and System 2 as a lazy supervisor that gets involved only when necessity dictates. And it explains the ways that the intuitive shortcuts of System 1, when (as is often the case) overlooked by System 2, can lead to pitfalls in our thinking.
Kahneman explains in his introduction that his goal is to “improve the ability to identify and understand errors of judgment and choice, in others and eventually in ourselves, by providing a richer and more precise language to discuss them.” He begins this process of diagnostic vocabulary building in Part 1, introducing concepts like associative activation and coherence, priming, cognitive ease, quality insensitivity, intensity matching the substitution of easy questions for harder ones.
With this foundational understanding of the two agents at play in our minds, Kahneman moves on to Part 2, “Heuristics and Biases” - about how and why humans are terrible intuitive statisticians. Concepts introduced here that I found especially interesting were the law of small numbers, anchors, the availability and representativeness heuristic, base-rate neglect, the conjunction fallacy and regression to the mean. I came away with a dramatically heightened awareness of the fallibility of our statistical intuitions, and as a math nerd myself found the explanations to be both enlightening and mildly disturbing.
But if I wanted to really be disturbed, I needed to look no further than Part 3, “Overconfidence.” Focused on our intuitive tendency to exaggerate our confidence in the predictability of the world and therefore of our own skills, Part 3 was perhaps the most eye-opening to me. I was rocked by the implications of narrative fallacies, outcome bias and hindsight bias, and on the bold suggestions that “a major industry [stock trading] appears to be built largely on an illusion of skill” and that in many cases simple algorithms can outperform the intuition of human “experts.”
Part 4, “Choices,” took a journey into another field I love - economics. In describing the differences between the field of economics’ conventional expected utility theory and the alternative - prospect theory - that he and partner Amos Tversky proposed, Kahneman challenges the economic principle of human rationality with almost frightening precision and elegance. In learning about reference dependence, diminishing sensitivity, loss aversion, the endowment effect, denominator neglect, preference reversals and framing, I was intrigued by Kahneman’s systematic exploration of human tendencies that point in the opposite direction of rationality.
If Part 4 felt a little clinical, Part 5, “Two Selves,” was deeply personal. In a deeply thought-provoking exploration of the difference between our experiencing and remembering selves, Kahneman raises curious questions of experienced well-being versus our evaluation of our lives, and which really matter. The peak-end rule, duration neglect, and the focusing illusion were some fascinating phenomena for which I gained some diagnostic vocabulary in this final part.
Overall, Thinking, Fast and Slow is a wonderful look at my favorite thing in the universe - the human mind. Its exposure of the shortcomings of our intuition, confidence, and decision making, rather than dampening my appreciation for this marvelous thing, helped me appreciate it all the more. Kahneman’s inclusion of real thought experiments and tests from his research, as well as his sharing of countless observations from the real world, showed me just how much there is to understand about my mind - and how satisfying it is to get to know it better.
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