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Thinking, Fast and Slow [Kindle Edition]

Daniel Kahneman
4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (540 customer reviews)

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Book Description

Major New York Times bestseller
Winner of the National Academy of Sciences Best Book Award in 2012
Selected by the New York Times Book Review as one of the best books of 2011
A Globe and Mail Best Books of the Year 2011 Title
One of The Economist’s 2011 Books of the Year
One of The Wall Street Journal's Best Nonfiction Books of the Year 2011

In the international bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, the renowned psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, 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. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems 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. Winner of the National Academy of Sciences Best Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2011, Thinking, Fast and Slow is destined to be a classic.

 




Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best Books of the Month, November 2011: Drawing on decades of research in psychology that resulted in a Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, Daniel Kahneman takes readers on an exploration of what influences thought example by example, sometimes with unlikely word pairs like "vomit and banana." System 1 and System 2, the fast and slow types of thinking, become characters that illustrate the psychology behind things we think we understand but really don't, such as intuition. Kahneman's transparent and careful treatment of his subject has the potential to change how we think, not just about thinking, but about how we live our lives. Thinking, Fast and Slow gives deep--and sometimes frightening--insight about what goes on inside our heads: the psychological basis for reactions, judgments, recognition, choices, conclusions, and much more.  --JoVon Sotak

Review

A New York Times Book Review Best Book
A Globe and Mail Best Book

“I will never think about thinking quite the same. [Thinking, Fast and Slow] is a monumental achievement.”
—Roger Lowenstein, Bloomberg/Businessweek

“Profound . . . As Copernicus removed the Earth from the centre of the universe and Darwin knocked humans off their biological perch, Mr. Kahneman has shown that we are not the paragons of reason we assume ourselves to be.”
The Economist
 
“[Kahneman’s] disarmingly simple experiments have profoundly changed the way that we think about thinking . . . We like to see ourselves as a Promethean species, uniquely endowed with the gift of reason. But Mr. Kahneman’s simple experiments reveal a very different mind, stuffed full of habits that, in most situations, lead us astray.”
—Jonah Lehrer, The Wall Street Journal
 
“[A] tour de force of psychological insight, research explication and compelling narrative that brings together in one volume the high points of Mr. Kahneman's notable contributions, over five decades, to the study of human judgment, decision-making and choice . . . Thanks to the elegance and force of his ideas, and the robustness of the evidence he offers for them, he has helped us to a new understanding of our divided minds—and our whole selves.”
—Christoper F. Chabris, The Wall Street Journal
 
“The ramifications of Kahenman’s work are wide, extending into education, business, marketing, politics . . . and even happiness research. Call his field “psychonomics,” the hidden reasoning behind our choices. Thinking, Fast and Slow is essential reading for anyone with a mind.”
—Kyle Smith, The New York Post
 
“A major intellectual event . . . The work of Kahneman and Tversky was a crucial pivot point in the way we see ourselves.”
—David Brooks, The New York Times; Author of The Social Animal
 
“Kahneman provides a detailed, yet accessible, description of the psychological mechanisms involved in making decisions.”
—Jacek Debiec, Nature
 
“With Kahneman’s expert help, readers may understand this mix of psychology and economics better than most accountants, therapists, or elected representatives. VERDICT: A stellar accomplishment, a book for everyone who likes to think and wants to do it better.”
Library Journal

“Kahneman’s extraordinary contribution to humanity’s cerebral growth [has] reached the mainstream—in the best way possible.”
The Atlantic
 
Thinking, Fast and Slow is a magisterial work, stunning in its ambition, infused with knowledge, laced with wisdom, informed by modesty and deeply humane. If you can read only one book this year, read this one.”
The Globe and Mail
 
“[In Thinking, Fast and Slow] 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 spotting--and correcting--our biased misunderstandings of the world.”
Publishers' Weekly (starred review)

“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

“The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. . . . Gripping. Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.”
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow deals with the very nature of thought, and it just may be the most important book I’ve read in many years. . .”
Los Angeles Review of Books


“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 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 by an intellectual giant; it is readable, wise, and deep. Buy it fast. Read it slowly and repeatedly. It will change the way you think, on the job, about the world, and in your own life.”
—Richard Thaler, University of Chicago Professor of Economics and co-author of Nudge

“This is a landmark book in social thought, in the same league as The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith and The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud.
—Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan

“Daniel Kahneman is among the most influential psychologists in history and certainly the most important psychologist alive today. He has a gift for uncovering remarkable features of the human mind, many of which have become textbook classics and part of the conventional wisdom. His work has reshaped social psychology, cognitive science, the study of reason and of happiness, and behavioral economics, a field that he and his collaborator Amos Tversky helped to launch. The appearance of Thinking, Fast and Slow is a major event.”
—Steven Pinker, Harvard College Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of How the Mind Works and The Better Angels of our Nature

Product Details


Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
395 of 414 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Back in 1994, Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, Director of the Institute of San Raffaele in Milan, Italy, wrote a charming little book about common cognitive distortions called Inevitable Illusions. It is probably the very first comprehensive summary of behavioral economics intended for general audience. In it, he predicted that the two psychologists behind behavioral economics - Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman - would win the Nobel prize. I didn't disagree with the sentiment, but wondered how in the world were they going to get it since these two were psychologists and there is no Nobel prize in psychology. I didn't think there was much chance of them winning the Nobel Prize in economics. I was wrong and Piattelli-Palmarini was right. Kahneman won the Nobel prize in Economic Sciences. (Tversky unfortunately prematurely passed away by this time.) Just as Steve Jobs who was not in the music industry revolutionized it, the non-economists Kahneman and Tversky have revolutionized economic thinking. I have known Kahneman's work for quite some time and was quite excited to see that he was coming out with a non-technical version of his research. My expectations for the book were high and I wasn't disappointed.

Since other reviewers have given an excellent summary of the book, I will be brief in my summary but review the book more broadly.

The basis thesis of the book is simple. In judging the world around us, we use two mental systems: Fast and Slow. The Fast system (System 1) is mostly unconscious and makes snap judgments based on our past experiences and emotions. When we use this system we are as likely to be wrong as right. The Slow system (System 2) is rational, conscious and slow. They work together to provide us a view of the world around us.

So what's the problem? They are incompatible, that's what.

System 1 is fast, but easily swayed by emotions and can be as easily be wrong as be right. You buy more cans of soup when the display says "Limit 12 per customer". We are on autopilot with this system. System 1 controls an amazing array of behavior. System 2 is conscious, rational and careful but painfully slow. It's distracted and hard to engage. These two systems together provide a backdrop for our cognitive biases and achievements.

This very well written book will enlighten and entertain the reader, especially if the reader is not exposed to the full range of research relating to behavioral economics.

This book serves an antidote to Malcolm Gladwell's Blink. Although Gladwell never says that snap judgments are infallible and cannot badly mislead us, many readers got a different message. As the Royal Statistical Society's Significance magazine put it "Although Gladwell's chronicle of cognition shows how quick thinking can lead us both astray and aright, for many readers Blink has become a hymn to the hunch." While Kahneman does show how "fast thinking" can lead to sound judgments, he also notes how they can lead us astray. This point is made much more clearly and deliberately in Kahneman's book

All my admiration for the brilliance and creativity of Kahneman (and Tversky) does not mean that I accept 100% of their thesis. Consider this oft-quoted study. Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. As a student, she was deeply concerned with the issues of discrimination and social justice, and she also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations. Which is more probable?
1. Linda is a bank teller.
2. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.
Eighty-five percent of test subjects chose the second option, that Linda was a bank teller and active in the feminist movement. Kahneman's interpretation is that this opinion is wrong because the probability of a (random) woman being a bank teller is greater that than person's being a bank teller AND a feminist. What Kahneman overlooks here is that what most people answered may not be the question that was asked. The respondents may not have been concerned with mathematical probabilities, but rather could be responding to the question in reverse: Is it more likely for a current activist to have been an activist in the past compared to others in the profession? A more formal and theoretically better argued rebuttal of some of Kahneman's hypotheses can be found in the works of Gerd Gigerenzer.

Kahneman notes that even top performers in business and sports tend to revert to the mean in the long run. As a result, he attributes success largely to luck. I'm not so convinced of this. There can be alternative explanations. People who achieve high degree of success are also exposed to a high degree of failure and the reversion to the mean may be attributable to this possible mirror effect. Spectacular success may go with spectacular failure and run-of-the-mill success may go with run-of-the-mill failure. Eventually everyone may revert the mean, but the ride can be very different. Chance may not account for that.

Another concern is that much of the work is done in artificial settings (read college students). While much of what we learnt can perhaps be extended to the real world, it is doubtful every generalization will work in practice. Some may find Kahneman's endorsement of "libertarian paternelism," not acceptable. More importantly, when applied to the real world it did not always found to work.

In spite to these comments this book is written carefully in a rather humble tone. I also appreciated Kahneman's generous and unreserved acknowledgement of Tversky's contributions and his conviction that, had he been alive, Tversky would have been the co-recipient of the Nobel Prize. My cautionary comments probably have more to do with the distortions that might arise by those who uncritically generalize the findings to contexts for which they may not applicable. As mentioned earlier, the wide misinterpretation of Gladwell's Blink comes to mind.

Nevertheless, Thinking Fast and Slow is a very valuable book by one of the most creative minds in psychology. Highly recommended. For a more complete and critical understanding, I also recommend the writings of the critics of behavioral economic models such as Gerd Gigerenzer.

PS. After I published this review, I noticed an odd coincidence between Thinking Fast and Slow and Inevitable Illusions that I mentioned in my opening paragraph. Both books have white covers, with an image of a sharpened yellow pencil with an eraser top. How odd is that?
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1,918 of 2,122 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars Buy the real book, not the ebook November 20, 2011
Format:Kindle Edition
The kindle version of this excellent book is disappointing. Several features of the book are confusing in the ebook because the formatting is so poor. Tables with two columns run together because they are not boxed and the columns are only separated by one space. There are questions at the end of each chapter whose purpose is unclear until you see them in the real book, where they are set off in a box with a different type face. Most disappointing is the handling of the footnotes - they are relegated to the back of the book with no page number reference. There is few word phrase in the notes that corresponds to the place in the text to which the note refers, but it is up to the reader to scan the chapter to find the reference. The book reads like a mechanical translation of the physical book into a new format, with no effort taken to edit and format appropriately. So the reader loses. With the price of the ebook almost as much as the real book, you will be happier if you buy the real thing.
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606 of 678 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars This is how you think October 25, 2011
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Daniel Kahneman may have won his Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, but his work was psychological in nature as it challenged the rational model of judgment and decision-making. He's considered one of the most important psychologists alive today, and this book doesn't disappoint with its breakthrough approach to understanding the "machinery of the mind."

Kahneman introduces two mental systems, one that is fast and the other slow. Together they shape our impressions of the world around us and help us make choices. System 1 is largely unconscious and it makes snap judgments based upon our memory of similar events and our emotions. System 2 is painfully slow, and is the process by which we consciously check the facts and think carefully and rationally. Problem is, System 2 is easily distracted and hard to engage, and System 1 is wrong as often as it is right. System 1 is easily swayed by our emotions. Examples he cites include the fact that pro golfers are more accurate when putting for par than they are for birdie (regardless of distance), and people buy more cans of soup when there's a sign on the display that says "Limit 12 per customer."

There are lots of interesting anecdotes as well as layman's summaries of psychological research that will leave you feeling fascinated by the brain. The book has 38 chapters broken into five sections. I've listed some of the chapter titles for each section to give you a feel for what it's about:

PART ONE - TWO SYSTEMS
1. The Characters of the Story
2. Attention and Effort
3. The Lazy Controller
4. A Machine for Jumping to Conclusions
5. How Judgments Happen

PART TWO - HEURISTICS AND BIASES
6. The Law of Small Numbers
7. Availability, Emotion, and Risk
8. Tom W's Specialty
9. Linda: Less is More
10. Causes Trump Statistics
11. Taming Intuitive Predictions

PART THREE - OVERCONFIDENCE
12. The Illusion of Understanding
13. The Illusion of Vanity
14. Intuitions Vs. Formulas
15. Expert Intuition: When Can We Trust It?

PART FOUR - CHOICES
16. Prospect Theory
17. Bad Events
18. Risk Policies
19. Keeping Score

PART FIVE - TWO SELVES
20. Life as a Story
21. Experienced Well-Being
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars Slow thinkiing required
I found the book to be very interesting, but it did require a significant amount of slow thinking in order to grasp some of the concepts.
Published 1 day ago by randy1484
5.0 out of 5 stars read it
This is one of the most useful books a thinking person could read. The concept of `what you see is all there is' is worth the price of the book. Highly recommended.
Published 2 days ago by Mark Daverin
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant! A cookbook for world domination...almost
Well, what I really mean is it gives you insight and practical ramifications of the various cognitive biases we all have as humans. Read more
Published 2 days ago by Ginseng
5.0 out of 5 stars An extraordinary book
Daniel Kahneman has written a book bursting with counter-intuitive observations about human cognition. Read more
Published 3 days ago by Erich V. Vieth
5.0 out of 5 stars Reading slow
If you're the type of person who likes knowing things, I would recommend this book.

Not in that reading the book actually helps you learn anything new; it more helps you... Read more
Published 4 days ago by Eric Garside
4.0 out of 5 stars Good Read
Type size was too small for me to read comfortably.
So, I bought Kindle version--now it is a great read.
Published 4 days ago by Donald J Farmer
5.0 out of 5 stars A fine summary of a great psychologist's contributions
Kahneman and his colleague Tversky were leaders in the cognitive revolution in psychology. The book is a summary of their work.
Published 7 days ago by Fiction Nonreader
5.0 out of 5 stars Kahneman takes the prize for Thinking
It is a 5 .Daniel Kahneman earned a well deserved Nobel Prize for showing us new ways of thinking about thinking. Read more
Published 8 days ago by Rasco
5.0 out of 5 stars Book Review
I was not disappointed. Interesting, well written, very educational!
Highly recommend this book as it applies to every
aspect of life.
Published 9 days ago by Susan
5.0 out of 5 stars A challenge for everybody & a great inspiration
David Kahneman not only is a Nobel Prize Winner of 2002, he tells us a fascinating story of how reality rolls out in all of us.
Our FAST system and our SLOW system. Read more
Published 9 days ago by Hans-JĂĽrgen Wilke
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