Thinking, Fast and Slow (Unabridged) [Audio Download]

This is a marvellous book. I'd hesitate to go quite so far as Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness, who is quoted on the dust cover as saying, 'In the same league as The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith and The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud'. Well, maybe not quite in that league, but only because this work is the continuation of many strands of thought in psychology rather than an epoch-changing , intellectual bombshell. The ideas in this book are already, however, changing the ways in which all of us think about the way that we think (if that makes sense) and many of those strands of thought (sorry) were in any case started by Kahneman himself with his earlier collaborator, Amos Tversky, who died in 1996. Kahneman writes, selflessly and touchingly, about his fourteen years working with Tversky: `Our collaboration was the focus of our lives, and the work we did together during those years was the best either of us ever did.' Maybe Taleb is right, and in fifty years' time Kahneman and Tversky will be even more famous than they are now, and people will be asking, `Sigmund Who?' It could happen.

There are two kinds of thinking, says Kahneman, slow thinking (like doing hard mental arithmetic) and fast thinking, which happens so quickly that we don't even notice. Slow thinking takes a lot of brain energy. Our pupils dilate, revealing the increased energy that is required for such difficult mental tasks. Because our available mental energy is limited, when we are working on such `slow-thinking' mental tasks, we will be unable to take on other mental tasks and may fail even to perceive apparently obvious things: there is a strict limit to how much attention our brain can deliver at any one time.

As a result, we make most of our decisions the easy way, as in, `This seemed to work before, let's try this route again'- what psychologists call `heuristics' and what we tend to call `rules of thumb'. Our brains, not surprisingly, follow the `law of least effort'. If there is a quick route to a solution, we will take it. We hardly even notice that we have taken the quick route: our brains have the capacity to challenge any such `quick' solution but, in general - guess what? - we let it go. The problem, says Kahneman, is that our `quick thinking' is subject to a disturbingly large number of `systematic biases and errors.' Kahneman goes on to investigate an alarming number of these systematic errors and biases, of which only one is the `anchoring' effect: our decisions are affected, for example, by a number of which we have recently been made aware. `If you are asked whether Ghandi was more than 114 year old when he died you will end up with a much higher estimate of his age at death than you would if the anchoring question referred to death at 35.' In the same way, your idea of how much you should pay for a house is influenced by the asking price - even if you want to believe that it wasn't.

Our decisions can also be 'primed' by what has recently come to our attention. This leads to some relatively obvious effects - we are more likely to vote for legislation in favour of school funding if the polling station is in a school; and some far stranger effects - students exposed to a number of words related to old age walk more slowly after the exposure than groups exposed to other words. They do not report that they were aware that the words had a common theme (old age) and they are not concious of the change to their behaviour (walking more slowly).

'Substitution' causes us to answer an easier question ('How do I feel about this') rather than a harder question (What do I think about this?). 'Availability' causes us to overestimate the effect of more dramatic events, because they are more 'front of mind'. The list goes on . . .

The book offers a wealth of other compelling examples of the ways in which our `fast thinking' is prone to error, all clearly suggested by the results from a number of elegant experiments. If you don't agree with Kahneman's conclusions, devise your own experiments and test the results: this is science, not metaphysics.

Thinking Fast and Slow may (perhaps) be less famous than The Wealth of Nations or The Interpretation of Dreams in fifty years' time, but it's a lot more readable than the former and a lot more scientific than the latter. And it will change your life - or at least how you feel about the reliability and robustness of our decision-making.

I dont normally write reviews but felt I should with this book.

Im probably your average reader - an interest in psychology and to some degree, self help/improvement publications.

I have done a fair bit of academic reading, so understand the difference between an academic style of writing and a book for 'the masses'. This is where I think the book falls down. Some chapters of the book really are extremely well worded and presented to the reader - concepts are clear and not unnecessarily complicated. Other chapters lapse into a pseudo-academic style which I found tedious and tiresome. I don't really need all the statistical data and complicated information behind the proposals Kahneman makes - I want him to package it up into a readable format which dose not require me to read it three times to 'get' what he means. It really is as though someone else wrote parts of the book, as its style does seem to change significantly in places.

So, some sections are quite brilliant and inspirational, worthy of 6 starts from me....but other chapters mar the reading experience, making it quite a chore. A mixed bag........

Daniel Kahneman has produced an excellent book. He continues to build and expand on the famous paper he and Amos Tversky published in 1974 ("Judging Under Uncertainty", a copy of which is usefully appended to this book) and has since spawned innumerable books on the theme (eg Wray Herbert's "On Second Thought"), and even related themes like Nassim Taleb's "Black Swan". "Thinking Fast and Slow" is not a textbook; it is intended for the layman who wants to have a clear and deep understanding of man's cognitive functions. Most of Kahneman's studies will amaze readers not familiar with this subject. For example, when tested, it is still remarkable that the clinical judgments of trained professionals are less accurate than statistical predictions based on a few scores or ratings. Hence counsellors who interviewed students were less accurate in their predictions on the students' performance than statistical predictions using only a few denominators such as High School grades and aptitude test results. The reason Kahneman, a psychologist, was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics was that his (and Tversky's) thesis was applied by economists to understand why economic and financial predictions so often go wildly wrong when they were (or so it was believed) so carefully and rationally made.

This review also hopes to point readers to a book I read as a student in 1967. It's called "Straight and Crooked Thinking" by R H Thouless. That book has so many similar points and Thouless was a teaching psychologist from Cambridge University in the UK. Although Thouless' book concerns flaws in the use of language and logic in thinking, it also discusses the effect of hidden bias and prejudice. Straight and Crooked Thinking has just been published in the 5th edition by R H Thouless' grandson, C R Thouless. The first was published in 1930. Kahneman's book will likely be as long lived.