Thinking, Fast and Slow

Hard cover. Very good quality. Finished reading first two chapters. The book essentially talks about how the mind works. This is helpful in identifying our biases and actively countering them. So definitely a read for those who are interested in understanding how does our brain impact our actions.

An amazing ready that will surely leave you knowing much more thank what you thought you knew. More important, helps you better understand how to map your circle of competence.

Not very good quality , but the content of the book is a good read

Love it

Book is dented, there are tearings on its spine.

The paper is so thin and poor in quality, everytime I turn a page, I'm afraid I may end up tearing it.

This book has been referenced so many times in my recent reads that I had to re-read it. Clearly Kahneman is a deserved Nobel prize winner and he shows us exactly why. It takes courage to question rational decision making theory but Kahneman does it by getting the reader involved in the research itself. Quite a clever way to present his groundbreaking research on the role of 2 systems in processing information, the questioning of human beings in always being rational and finally diving into the complicated subject of well-being through experiences v memories. A must read for anyone interested in the field of economics, this book also underlies the importance of psychology in economics and makes one wonder why we don’t introduce the area of behavioral science in our early teachings of economics. This is however a difficult read and Kahneman could have made the book a lot shorter and still driven the same points home just as effectively. PS: he does give deserved credit throughout the book to his colleague - Amos Tversky.

The book lacks the engaging factor.Through history, writers excelled in presenting their info in an entertaining manner so that the reader could absorb and process the new info while enjoying the journey. This book looked like a mathematical piece quite uninteresting and unexpected from a Noble prize winner. Disappointed, I had to put it down after reading the first chapter. Regretted the money paid.

Thoughtful, applicable, insightful, entertaining. I enjoyed dissecting the numerous thought experiments and studies for merit that I could apply to my everyday thinking. System 1 and System 2 form the backbone of this book. System 1 is impulsive, and provides heuristic and intuitive guesses and reactions to stimuli without prompting. It can't be turned off. Why You See Is All There Is (WYSIATI). But it's also responsible for remarkably well-tuned intuitions, fast information-processing, "muscle memory," pattern-matching, intensity matching, face & situation recognition, and much of what makes human minds human. Author Daniel Kahneman points out situations in which System 1 is scientifically poor, including statistics (like the difference between 0.01% and 0.001%), random events, weighting time & duration in retrospect. System 2 is more calculated, requires devoted effort and concentration in rationalizing & making decisions. It assigns value to past events, keeps score, questions bias, and carries out more intensive, deliberate calculations involving more data. It's like fetching data from main memory, rather than relying on the cache. Kahneman's prose is rich with examples and experimental case studies, from visceral phenomena like pleasure vs. pain tolerance, and the tendency to derive general from specific, rather than the specific from the general (statistic).... to logic fallacies like optimism in planning, misjudging statistics, underestimating sampling, and sunk costs. He gives simple, easy-to-remember names to a lot of the phenomena he observed in studies, like the peak-end rule that describes how humans tend to judge pain or pleasure of a past event based on an average of how it ended and the peak of the experience, neglecting duration. He also provides solutions and checks & balances that can help us reduce bias, where possible. For example, to mitigate the planning fallacy, he writes: 1.) Identify an appropriate reference class. 2.) Obtain the statistics of the reference class. Use the statistics to generate a baseline prediction. 3.) Use specific information about the case to adjust the baseline prediction, if there are particular reasons to expect the optimistic bias to be more of less pronounced in this project than in others of the same type. The author's life experiences, from serving as an evaluator in the Israeli defense forces to publishing papers as a professor, inform many of the studies and give them a human element and interest to which I could easily relate. I also appreciate his emotion, adding exclamation points to the observations that surprised him, or proved him wrong. He writes in an unassuming, humble, curious way that made each anecdote or cited study a joy to read. Finally, I thought he -- and his editors -- divided the book brilliantly. Chapters are short, usually 8~16 pages, and they always concentrate on some nugget or fallacy that could be later referenced by a single term, like "anchoring," "regression to the mean," "the fourfold pattern," or "the halo effect." He builds up knowledge brick by brick, experiment by experiment, that after a few nights of reading, you begin to recognize fallacies and patterns in everyday life by the terms Kahneman has assigned to them. My favorite part of each chapter is the end: a short section of quotations that describe and use key terms from the chapter, in an everyday, relatable way. There are too many topics and quotes to list them all. Some of my favorites: "The best we can do is a compromise: learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high. The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people's mistakes than our own." "Self-control requires attention and effort." "His System 1 constructed a story, and his System 2 believed it. It happens to all of us." "They didn't want more information that might spoil their story. WYSIATI." "We often compute much more than we want or need. I call this excess computation the mental shotgun. It is impossible to aim at a single point with a shotgun because it shoots pellets that scatter, and it seems almost equally difficult for System 1 not to do more than System 2 charges it to do." "Money-primed people become more independent than they would be without the associative trigger." "He was asked whether he thought the company was financially sound, but he couldn't forget that he likes their product." "Our aim in the negotiation is to get them anchored on this number." "Let's make it clear that if that is their proposal, the negotiations are over. We do not want to start there." "When the evidence is weak, one should stick with the base rates." "They added a cheap gift to the expensive product, and made the whole deal less attractive. Less is more in this case." "System 1 can deal with stories in which the elements are causally linked, but it is weak in statistical reasoning." "The experiment shows that individuals feel relieved of responsibility when they know that others have heard the same request for help." "We can't assume that they will really learn anything from mere statistics. Let's show them one or two representative individual cases to influence their System 1." "But those with the most knowledge are often less reliable. The reason is that the person who acquires more knowledge develops an enhanced illusion of her skill and becomes unrealistically overconfident." "The question is not whether these experts are well trained. It is whether their world is predictable." "The research suggests a surprising conclusion: to maximize predictive accuracy, final decisions should be left to formulas, especially in low-validity environments." "In this view, people often (but not always) take on risky projects because they are overly optimistic about the odds they face." "A well-run organization will reward planners for precise execution and penalize them for failing to anticipate difficulties, and for failing to allow for difficulties that they could not have anticipated --the unknown unknowns." "She is the victim of a planning fallacy. She's assuming a best-case scenario, but there are too many different ways for the plan to fail, and she cannot foresee them all." "He weighs losses about twice as much as gains, which is normal." "Think like a trader! You win a few, you lose a few." "Decision makers tend to prefer the sure thing over the gamble (they are risk averse) when the outcomes are good. They tend to reject the sure thing and accept the gamble (they are risk seeking) when both outcomes are negative." "We are hanging on to that stock just to avoid closing our mental account at a loss. It's the disposition effect." "The salesperson showed me the most expensive car seat and said it was the safest, and I could not bring myself to buy the cheaper model. It felt like a taboo tradeoff." "Did he really have an opportunity to learn? How quick and how clear was the feedback he received on his judgments?" "We want pain to be brief and pleasure to last. But our memory, a function of System 1, has evolved to represent the most intense moment of an episode of pain or pleasure (the peak) and the feelings when the episode was at its end. A memory that neglects duration will not serve our preference for long pleasure and short pains." There are many, many more. Read the book for yourself and enjoy the wisdom!

Même si l'expression est un cliché, disons-le sans hésitation : ce livre est un must. D'abord, songez au prestige que vous vous attirerez en glissant, au hasard d'une conversation, que vous êtes en train de lire un ouvrage signé d'un prix Nobel d'économie ! Mais surtout, cet ouvrage constitue une plongée des plus passionnantes dans les arcanes de l'esprit humain, sous la conduite d'un guide qui, en plus de sa profonde érudition et de son expertise, n'oublie jamais d'être accessible, pratique, voire drôle ! Plus d'une fois, au détour d'une page, vous vous surprendrez à penser : « Bien sûr, c'est cela ! », tant les démonstrations de Daniel Kahneman font écho à notre expérience quotidienne, aux mécanismes psychiques avec lesquels nous nous débattons dans notre for intérieur. Au fil des chapitres, l'auteur passe en revue les merveilles et les nombreux travers de la pensée intuitive, cette « star masquée » qui, sans que nous le réalisions, prend bien souvent le dessus sur notre esprit rationnel : hyper-sensibilité à l'environnement extérieur et à une kyrielle de biais (effet de halo, excès de confiance, etc.), tendance à poser ses conclusions d'emblée et à chercher ensuite les raisons qui les justifient, oubli des principes statistiques les plus élémentaires... Sans être inaccessible, le chapitre sur la théorie des perspectives - le domaine qui a valu à l'auteur son prix Nobel - est plus pointu et s'adresse aux lecteurs soucieux d'entrer dans le détail d'une théorie à la pointe des réflexions actuelles sur la prise de décision. Fort de ses plus de 500 pages, ce livre est un ouvrage de référence, à lire et à méditer en prenant son temps, car un contenu d'une telle richesse ne se digère pas en quelques heures.

Although the behaviorial economics economics is right now thrown doubt on because of either faked or dubious experimental records by a couple of scholars, this book impresses me with its coherent, convincing argument which reconciles with what I have been feeling about irraationality of human beings. However, that might be exactly what " System 1" of me tells me, though. This book teaches us how to exercise our "System 2" to put things in perspective so that we can enjoy more well-being as well as life satisfaction.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (5/5) „Thinking, Fast and Slow“ – Meilenstein der Psychologie und Ökonomie 📌 Kurzfazit Kahneman, Nobelpreisträger für Wirtschaft, fasst in diesem Werk jahrzehntelange Forschung zu kognitiven Verzerrungen, Entscheidungsfindung und Heuristiken zusammen. Er erklärt die Dynamik zwischen zwei Denksystemen – dem schnellen, intuitiven „System 1“ und dem langsamen, analytischen „System 2“. Das Buch ist ein Standardwerk für alle, die verstehen wollen, warum Menschen oft irrational entscheiden. 📚 Inhalt in Kürze System 1: schnell, automatisch, intuitiv System 2: langsam, reflektiert, kontrolliert Heuristiken und Biases: Verfügbarkeitsheuristik, Anker-Effekt, Verlustaversion, Overconfidence Anwendungen: Wirtschaft, Politik, Alltagsentscheidungen Erklärung, warum klassische ökonomische Modelle (Homo oeconomicus) nicht ausreichen 🔬 Wissenschaftliche Relevanz Stärken: Umfassende Darstellung der Arbeit von Kahneman & Tversky – Grundlage der Verhaltensökonomie. Beeinflusst Ökonomie, Psychologie, Politikwissenschaft, Medizin und Management. Viele Erkenntnisse empirisch mehrfach bestätigt. Schwächen: Kritik in den letzten Jahren an der Replizierbarkeit mancher sozialpsychologischer Studien. Sehr dicht und anspruchsvoll geschrieben – kein „leichter“ Ratgeber. 👉 Fazit Wissenschaft: Trotz Kritik an einzelnen Studien bleibt das Buch ein wissenschaftlicher Eckpfeiler, weil es ein Paradigma veränderte. 🌍 Kulturelle Relevanz Weltbestseller, über 10 Mio. verkaufte Exemplare. Hat das Denken über Rationalität, Politik, Wirtschaft und Finanzen verändert. Populär in Management- und Leadership-Literatur, aber auch in Journalismus und Politik zitiert. Hat Begriffe wie „System 1 & 2“ in den kulturellen Mainstream gebracht. 💭 Meine persönliche Meinung Positiv: Tiefgründig, brillant, lehrreich. Eines der wenigen Bücher, die wirklich das Denken verändern können. Kritisch: Stellenweise schwerfällig, fast akademisch – nicht jedermanns Lesestil. Für mich: Pflichtlektüre, wenn man menschliches Verhalten verstehen will – intellektuell fordernd, aber lohnend. 🎯 Fazit Thinking, Fast and Slow ist ein epochales Werk, das die Psychologie und Wirtschaft nachhaltig geprägt hat. Es erklärt, warum wir oft systematisch falsch entscheiden – und liefert ein Vokabular, um darüber nachzudenken. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ – 5 von 5 Sternen Weil: wissenschaftlich fundiert, kulturell prägend, intellektuell bereichernd.

Surprising, unsettling, enlightening. Thank goodness for authors like this, who open our minds, challenge our prejudices, and break down our preconceptions.