Daniel Kahneman's bestseller is set to blast every other blockbuster off the beach
Winning words: psychologist Daniel Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel Prize for Economics Photo: Getty Images
Why would you want to be up in front of a judge just after lunch rather than later in the afternoon? Why do highly intelligent women marry stupid men? Why would investors make more money taking a shower than trading shares? And why is the work of a balding, bespectacled 77-year-old Israeli flying out of our bookshops?
After a lifetime of research, Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist who won the 2002 Nobel Prize for Economics, thinks he has the answers to all these questions. He may seem an unlikely media star, but forget The Hunger Games or Fifty Shades of Grey, the paperback that the discerning reader will be parading on the beach this summer is set to be his Thinking, Fast and Slow, which unlocks secrets about the way we process information, and makes us think about the decisions we take as a result.
Despite the cascade of psychological and economic theories described in it, this compelling book has become a hit on both sides of the Atlantic. Having sold over a million copies, it’s been described as a “masterpiece” and a “landmark book in social thought”, while Kahneman himself has been called the “most important psychologist alive”.
In the spirit of such pop psychology tomes as The Tipping Point, Freakonomics and Nudge (beloved of David Cameron’s Tories), Kahneman lays out in Thinking his belief that we have two sorts of thought processes, which he calls System 1 and System 2.
System 1 (the “fast” thinking of the title) is intuitive, often unconscious, relying on past association of ideas. System 2 (the “slow”) is conscious, reasoning, full of effort and ultimately often lazy. While we identify with System 2 because we like to see ourselves as conscious, reasoning beings, Kahneman sees the freewheeling automatic System 1 as the “hero of the book”.
But the problem with using System 1 is that we often end up behaving irrationally – using information that comes to mind quickly to make associations and construct easy explanations. That explains, for example, why we think politicians have more affairs than lawyers (we tend to read about them more) or why we think that the reason clever women marry stupid men is because they hate competition (in fact, it is a simple mathematical inevitability).
Before the research by Kahneman and his colleague Amos Tversky (who died in 1996), most economists operated on the presumption that people make rational choices. For example, in classic economic theory, if you were to be offered a bet on a coin toss – heads you lose £100, tails you win £150, the theory would be that you’d take it. Yet in reality, studies show that people often don’t; we’d rather avoid losing something that we already possess than go for a bigger potential gain on the off chance.
Full story at The Telegraph
Before the research by Kahneman and his colleague Amos Tversky (who died in 1996), most economists operated on the presumption that people make rational choices. For example, in classic economic theory, if you were to be offered a bet on a coin toss – heads you lose £100, tails you win £150, the theory would be that you’d take it. Yet in reality, studies show that people often don’t; we’d rather avoid losing something that we already possess than go for a bigger potential gain on the off chance.
Full story at The Telegraph
