Title: Thinking Fast and Slow

Author: Daniel Kahneman

Category: Expository – Psychology

Status: In Progress

 

What is the book about as a whole?

The book is about the way in which we think involving two different systems, the first one grounded on instinct and highly emotional but with a fast response and the other one slower but more rational and logical.

 

What is being said in detail, and how?

In the introduction Kahneman is very straightforward saying that aim of this book is to help the proverbial water fountain talk in every office be at least best informed about how we actually think. It was surprising to me to realize how much we assume about the way we think we think and how actually we do it. In the introduction he also acknowledge the importance influence of his college Amos Tversky in his research.

 

In the first chapter we are introduced to the two main characters of the story, ‘System 1’ being the faster way of thinking, is highly emotional and there is practically no effort in putting it on practice. On the other hand ‘System 2’ requires a higher effort to be made and also it is the conscious reasoning behind the decisions we think we do. The he talks about laziness and effort that our mind get into. System 2 seems to be lazier than system 1 that is why the later often takes the lead.   Our mind also can be viewed as an associative machine that unite concepts and ideas in our mind. We do associations without even noticing them for example associating Banana and Vomit. Well, that is not a particularly good one but you might get an idea of how your mind can make those associations deliberatively. This is really interesting because later we will find out that those associations made by System 1 prompt out then as operations of System 1. 

 

Another topic that Kahneman talks are some bias that might make us feel familiarity to persons that we might not even know. The problem is that if something sounds to our ear as familiar high are the chances that System 1 process it as true also. Next Kahneman also talks about patterns and how as human being we love them. We see them everywhere and we tend to be bias by them. From seeing this patterns is that our sense of normality arises and we get used to something’s over others. Another interesting topic is that we often jump to conclusions with partial information. We often become victims of not examining the context and the possible bias that we might have incurred on and we adventure conclusions.  How do we judge others given the natural propensity we have to examine situations is also a theme of this book.

 

Heuristics is another topic explored by the author here, here what happens is that you are confronted with a difficult question but instead of dealing with it you answer an easier question that goes back to the memory that your system one holds. Then you answer that question instead and you get an easy and fast answer (an heuristic answer) to your problem. But this is not a reliable one since not based in the actual situation that you are confronting.

 

 

What are the author’s questions and problems?

The author is interested in the processes that are involved in us making decisions and generally behaving as humans do. He is particularly interested in the relationship between logical processes and intuitive processes and how they relate and interact. In brief he is interested in knowing how our mind works.

 

What of it?

I really liked the book since it has given me so much insights to understand how the mind works but most of all to know how our own mind operates. It is super interesting that we often fool ourselves and believe things that are grounded more on our feelings than our logic, although we claim they are. This book is really interesting if you want to know how our mind works confronted with common problems from dating someone to buying something in the supermarket.  

 

 

What books are connected with it? 

Gödel, Escher, Bach 

 

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