Summary & Analysis of Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

By . IRB Media

Summary & Analysis of Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. PLEASE NOTE: This is a summary of the book and NOT the original book.

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman - A 30-minute Summary

Inside this Instaread Summary:

• Overview of the entire book

• Introduction to the important people in the book

• Summary and analysis of all the chapters in the book

• Key Takeaways of the book

• A Reader's Perspective

Preview of this summary:

Introduction

In this book Daniel Kahneman hopes to identify and understand errors of judgment and choice. He wants to provide a richer and more accurate vocabulary to discuss these errors. He worked with his colleague, Amos Tversky, doing research on intuitive statistics. The two of them had already concluded in an earlier seminar that their own intuitions were lacking. Their subjective judgments were biased, they were too willing to believe research findings based on inadequate evidence, and they collected too few observations in their own research. The goal of their study was to find out whether other researchers had this problem as well.

Kahneman and Tversky found that participants in their studies ignored the relevant statistical facts and relied exclusively on resemblance. They used resemblance as a heuristic (rule of thumb) to simplify things when making a difficult judgment. Relying on this heuristic caused predictable biases (systematic errors) in their predictions. The research partners learned that people tend to determine the importance of issues by how easy they are retrieved from their memory. This is brought about in large part by the extent of coverage of the issues in the media.

Kahneman presents a view of how the mind works, drawing on recent developments in cognitive and social psychology. He explains the differences between fast (intuitive) thinking and slow (deliberate) thinking. People have a limitation in their minds: an excessive confidence in what they think they know...

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Dec 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781683782452

. IRB Media

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Book preview

Book Overview

Daniel Kahneman, author of the book Thinking, Fast and Slow, sets out to create a new vocabulary of words and definitions to describe mental errors. He hopes that readers will recognize these errors in others and in themselves and learn how to correct them.

System 1 is described as a fictional character representing the intuitive process of the brain and System 2 is described as a fictional character representing the deliberate thinking process of the brain. The two systems have different roles but work together to assess our world and guide us in our decision-making.

Kahneman makes the case that too often we suffer mental fallacies because we are too quick to accept the information that the automatic System 1 provides for us without first carefully analyzing it with our System 2 process. He claims that the brain in its attempt to be efficient takes shortcuts which cause us to have errors in judgment. This shows that our brains are inherently lazy.

The intuitive side of our brain attempts to create a story or narrative of our lives from the information it receives. This information is limited to our own experience so we do not always have the whole picture.  This results in errors of substitution, stereotyping, WYSIATI (what you see is all there is), causal explanations, base-rate neglect, the halo effect, the framing effect, the anchoring effect, narrative fallacy, illusion of validity, illusion of skill, and overconfidence in what we think we know. Kahneman defines these terms in an attempt to give people a new way of talking about mental fallacies.

Kahneman compares those who live in the land of theory with those who act in the real world. Basically, he is comparing the way economists look at people as opposed to how psychologists look at people. Those in the land of economic theory he calls the Econs, while those who act in the real world are the Humans. Econs are always logical and rational while Humans cannot help but be illogical and irrational because their thinking is flawed. They ignore statistical information and lead their lives based on causal connections and explanations. Theoretically, Econs tend to see things as black or white with no choice in-between. In reality, Humans are not Econs and see a range of options before them.

Lastly, Kahneman compares the experiencing self and the remembering self.  The experiencing self does the living while the remembering self keeps score and makes choices. The experiencing-self answers the question, How are things right now? The remembering-self answers the question, How was it, on the whole? Our