Thinking, Fast and Slow review
Mood: okay
Posted on 2012-02-07 21:54:00
Tags: reviews books
Words: 167

Thinking, Fast and SlowThinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book (yet another behavioral psychology one!) focuses on how we think by characterizing two "systems". System 1 is the automatic system that we can't really control - it is very sure of itself, it generates "intuition", and it is subject to all sorts of biases (overweights low probability events, is more sensitive to changes than states, sometimes substitutes easier questions for harder ones, etc.). System 2 is what we think of as our rational brain - it does tricky math problems and is what we use when we try hard to pay attention to something, but is also very lazy and tries to avoid being engaged.

The book starts off a bit slowly but is a great tour of how System 1 and System 2 interact and the biases they lead to (such as anchoring effects, narrow framing, excessive coherence, and loss aversion). I enjoyed it!

(paper book, available for borrowing)


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2 comments

Comment from brittongregory:
2012-02-08T11:04:29+00:00

Excessive coherence? That's a new one by me.

Comment from gregstoll:
2012-02-08T11:11:41+00:00

I think that one is the idea that something is either "good" or "bad" with no shades of gray. The example they gave was if you asked people to list the benefits and risks of particular technologies, and then convinced them that the benefits were greater than they had thought, it had the separate effect of convincing them that the risks were less than they thought, even if you didn't say anything at all about the risks!

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