Thinking, Fast and Sluggish – By Daniel Kahneman – Book Evaluate
In 2002, Daniel Kahneman received the Nobel in economic science. What made this uncommon is that Kahneman is a psychologist. Specifically, he is one-half of a pair of psychologists who, beginning within the early Seventies, set out to dismantle an entity long pricey to financial theorists: that arch-rational resolution maker known as Homo economicus. The other half of the dismantling duo, Amos Tversky, died in 1996 on the age of 59. Had Tversky lived, he will surely have shared the Nobel with Kahneman, his longtime collaborator and pricey friend.
Human irrationality is Kahneman’s great theme. There are essentially three phases to his career. Within the first, he and Tversky did a sequence of ingenious experiments that revealed twenty or so “cognitive biases” — unconscious errors of reasoning that distort our judgment of the world. Typical of these is the “anchoring effect”: our tendency to be influenced by irrelevant numbers that we happen to be exposed to. (In one experiment, for instance, experienced German judges had been inclined to offer a shoplifter a longer sentence in the event that they had just rolled a pair of cube loaded to provide a high number.) In the second phase, Kahneman and Tversky showed that people making selections below unsure conditions do not behave in the way in which that economic models have traditionally assumed; they don’t “maximize utility.” The two then developed an alternative account of resolution making, one more trustworthy to human psychology, which they called “prospect theory.” (It was for this achievement that Kahneman was awarded the Nobel.) Within the third section of his career, mainly after the demise of Tversky, Kahneman has delved into “hedonic psychology”: the science of happiness, its nature and its causes. His findings in this space have proved disquieting — and never just because one of the key experiments involved a deliberately extended colonoscopy.
“thinking fast and slow audiobook summary, Quick and Sluggish” spans all three of those phases. It is an astonishingly rich book: lucid, profound, filled with mental surprises and self-help value. It’s constantly entertaining and ceaselessly touching, especially when Kahneman is recounting his collaboration with Tversky. (“The pleasure we found in working together made us exceptionally affected person; it’s much easier to attempt for perfection if you end up by no means bored.”) So impressive is its vision of flawed human reason that the New York Instances columnist David Brooks just lately declared that Kahneman and Tversky’s work “might be remembered hundreds of years from now,” and that it’s “a crucial pivot level in the way we see ourselves.” They’re, Brooks said, “like the Lewis and Clark of the mind.”
Now, this worries me a bit. A leitmotif of this book is overconfidence. All of us, and especially specialists, are prone to an exaggerated sense of how well we perceive the world — so Kahneman reminds us. Surely, he himself is alert to the perils of overconfidence. Despite all of the cognitive biases, fallacies and illusions that he and Tversky (along with other researchers) purport to have discovered in the previous couple of decades, he fights shy of the bold declare that humans are fundamentally irrational.
Or does he? “Most of us are healthy more often than not, and most of our judgments and actions are acceptable more often than not,” Kahneman writes in his introduction. But, just a couple of pages later, he observes that the work he did with Tversky “challenged” the concept, orthodox amongst social scientists within the Nineteen Seventies, that “people are generally rational.” The 2 psychologists discovered “systematic errors in the thinking of regular people”: errors arising not from the corrupting effects of emotion, however built into our advanced cognitive machinery. Though Kahneman attracts only modest coverage implications (e.g., contracts needs to be stated in clearer language), others — maybe overconfidently? — go a lot further. Brooks, for example, has argued that Kahneman and Tversky’s work illustrates “the bounds of social policy”; particularly, the folly of government action to combat joblessness and turn the economic system around.