Thinking, Fast and Slow [Hardcover]
- Author by Kahneman, Daniel
Editorial Reviews
From Publisher
Daniel Kahneman, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his seminal work in psychology that challenged the rational model of judgment and decision making, is one of our most important thinkers. His ideas have had a profound and widely regarded impact on many fields--including economics, medicine, and politics--but until now, he has never brought together his many years of research and thinking in one book.
In the highly anticipated "Thinking, Fast and Slow," Kahneman takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. Kahneman exposes the extraordinary capabilities--and also the faults and biases--of fast thinking, and reveals the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and behavior. The impact of loss aversion and overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the challenges of properly framing risks at work and at home, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning the next vacation--each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems work together to shape our judgments and decisions.
Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives--and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. "Thinking, Fast and Slow" will transform the way you think about thinking.
Reviews
- From Booklist
- Decision making tends to be intuitive rather than logical. Kahneman has dedicated his academic research to understanding why that is so. This work distills his and colleagues' findings about how we make up our minds and how much we can trust intuition. Clinical experiments on psychology's traditional guinea pigscollege studentsabound and collectively batter confidence in System 1, as Kahneman calls intuition. All sorts of biases, sporting tags like the halo effect (i.e., unwarranted attribution of positive qualities to a thing or person one likes), bedevil accurate appraisal of reality. According to Kahneman, intuitive feelings often override System 2, or thinking that requires effort, such as simple arithmetic. Exemplifying his points in arenas as diverse as selecting military officers, speculating in stocks, hiring employees, and starting up businesses, Kahneman accords some reliability to intuitive choice, as long as the decision maker is aware of cognitive illusions (the study of which brought Kahneman the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics). Kahneman's insights will most benefit those in leadership positions yet they will also help the average reader to become a better car buyer.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)
- From Publishers Weekly
- The mind is a hilariously muddled compromise between incompatible modes of thought in this fascinating treatise by a giant in the field of decision research. Nobel-winning psychologist Kahneman (Attention and Effort) posits a brain governed by two clashing decision-making processes. The largely unconscious System 1, he contends, makes intuitive snap judgments based on emotion, memory, and hard-wired rules of thumb; the painfully conscious System 2 laboriously checks the facts and does the math, but is so "lazy" and distractible that it usually defers to System 1. Kahneman uses this scheme to frame a scintillating discussion of his findings in cognitive psychology and behavioral economics, and of the ingenious experiments that tease out the irrational, self-contradictory logics that underlie our choices. We learn why we mistake statistical noise for coherent patterns; why the stock-picking of well-paid investment advisers and the prognostications of pundits are worthless; why businessmen tend to be both absurdly overconfident and unwisely risk-averse; and why memory affects decision making in counterintuitive ways. Kahneman's primer adds to recent challenges to economic orthodoxies about rational actors and efficient markets; more than that, it's a lucid, marvelously readable guide to spottingand correctingour biased misunderstandings of the world. Photos. (Nov.) Copyright 2011 Reed Business Information.
Quote Reviews
"For anyone interested in economics, cognitive science, psychology, and, in short, human behavior, this is the book of the year. Before Malcolm Gladwell and "Freakonomics, "there was Daniel Kahneman who invented the field of behavior economics, won a Nobel...and now explains how we think and make choices. Here's an easy choice: read this." --"The Daily Beast"
"This book is one of the few that must be counted as mandatory reading for anyone interested in the Internet, even though it doesn't claim to be about that. Before computer networking got cheap and ubiquitous, the sheer inefficiency of communication dampened the effects of the quirks of human psychology on macro scale events. No more. We must now confront how we really are in order to make sense of our world and not screw it up. Daniel Kahneman has discovered a path to make it possible." --Jaron Lanier, author of "You Are Not a Gadget""Daniel Kahneman is one of the most original and interesting thinkers of our time. There may
- "Daniel Kahneman is one of the most original and interesting thinkers of our time. There may be no other person on the planet who better understands how and why we make the choices we make. In this absolutely amazing book, he shares a lifetime's worth of wisdom presented in a manner that is simple and engaging, but nonetheless stunningly profound. This book is a must read for anyone with a curious mind." --Steven D. Levitt, William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago; co-author of "Freakonomics "and "SuperFreakonomics."
""Thinking, Fast and Slow" is a masterpiece -- a brilliant and engaging intellectual saga by one of the greatest psychologists and deepest thinkers of our time. Kahneman should be parking a Pulitzer next to his Nobel Prize." --Daniel Gilbert, Harvard University Professor of Psychology, author of "Stumbling on Happiness," host of the award-winning PBS television series "This Emotional Life"
"This book is a tour de force
"This book is one of the few that must be counted as mandatory reading for anyone interested in the Internet, even though it doesn't claim to be about that. Before computer networking got cheap and ubiquitous, the sheer inefficiency of communication dampened the effects of the quirks of human psychology on macro scale events. No more. We must now confront how we really are in order to make sense of our world and not screw it up. Daniel Kahneman has discovered a path to make it possible." --Jaron Lanier, author of "You Are Not a Gadget""Daniel Kahneman is one of the most original and interesting thinkers of our time. There may be no other person on the planet who better understands how and why we make the choices we make. In this absolutely amazing book, he shares a lifetime's worth of wisdom presented in a manner that is simple and engaging, but nonetheless stunningly profound. This book is a must read for anyone with a curious mind." --Steven D. Levitt, William B. Ogden Distinguish
- "The mind is a hilariously muddled compromise between incompatible modes of thought in this fascinating treatise by a giant in the field of decision research. Nobel-winning psychologist Kahneman (Attention and Effort) posits a brain governed by two clashing decision-making processes. The largely unconscious System 1, he contends, makes intuitive snap judgments based on emotion, memory, and hard-wired rules of thumb; the painfully conscious System 2 laboriously checks the facts and does the math, but is so "lazy" and distractible that it usually defers to System 1. Kahneman uses this scheme to frame a scintillating discussion of his findings in cognitive psychology and behavioral economics, and of the ingenious experiments that tease out the irrational, self-contradictory logics that underlie our choices. We learn why we mistake statistical noise for coherent patterns; why the stock-picking of well-paid investment advisers and the prognostications of pundits are worthless; why businessm
