Thinking, Fast and Slow: The Perfect Overview of How the Brain Works from a Nobel Laureate

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011)

Harry Truman once said: “Being a president is like riding a tiger. A man has to keep on riding or he is swallowed.”

Actually, Truman’s insight holds for the rest of us too. Living even ordinary lives can be like riding a tiger. But the lesson from Daniel Kahneman’s masterpiece, Thinking, Fast and Slow, is different. Truman says presidents have to rise to the frantic challenge of riding a tiger. But Kahneman tells us we need to get off the tiger and control our own pace.

Kahneman, a psychologist who won the 2002 Nobel Prize for economics, has died at the age of 90. His influence spans not only the social sciences (economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science, and more) but also business and the arts. Where the pioneers of psychology and economics often fell back on their wits, he did the hard work of experimentation and data analysis.

Kahneman worked with his friend and colleague Amos Tversky for decades before Tversky died in 1996. Undoubtedly, the two would have shared the Nobel Prize had Tversky lived long enough.

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman describes two minds or “systems” that govern how we operate in the world.

In System 1, based on our more primitive brain, we are constantly reacting to the world—even when we don’t know what happens. We evolved to have fast-twitch responses to events in the world. Until modern times, people faced constant danger when they ventured out to hunt or explore frontiers beyond their home base. To respond before they suffered a calamity—like getting eaten by a tiger—they reacted instantly. Humans responded by fight, flight, or freeze. This is a crisis approach to life. It’s useful when trying to survive in a wild and dangerous world. But it’s less helpful in modern times, when we overreact to even minor “crises” in our lives. Too often, we overreact to the words of actions of a family member, coworker, peer, or another driver. Hello, road rage.

Which brings us to System 2, the slower, more deliberative mode of thinking. Even though we are reactive creatures, we also have the capacity to slow down and carefully consider situations and problems. When someone cuts us off in traffic, we can overreact by nonking, shouting, or making a rude gesture. Or we can make an effort to pause, let the “crisis” pass, and decide how our better self should respond. Usually, we can just let a crisis pass. Then, if it makes sense, we can think through what just happened. If there’s an actual problem to be solved, we can break it down and decide what makes sense to do. We can collaborate with others.

Thinking, Fast and Slow builds on this foundation. But the heart of the book is a detailed discussion of the biases that we humans have. And oh boy, are we ever biased—and not just for people like us and against outsiders. We have “availability bias” (the tendency to rely on readily available information), “confirmation bias” (seeking information that confirms existing beliefs), “anchoring bias” (relying too much on what we learn early), and “loss aversion” (the tendency to prefer avoiding losses over making equal or greater gains).

That’s just for starters. Kahneman’s book shows that in every aspect of our lives, we fall back on primitive ways of understanding and action. So how do we deal with it? Acknowledge the power of System 1 and then nurture and develop System 2.

This book requires that you settle in for some concentrated reading—System 2 reading, if you will. But for anyone who wants to understand how humans really think and act, you can’t do any better.

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