Review: Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

An engaging must-read for decision makers and communicators in all walks of life. 

Reputed psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman published Thinking Fast and Slow in 2011 after decades of work and research in the field. His easy storytelling style enables him to make complex psychological phenomena seem straightforward, even obvious.

This book is essentially about how we make judgments and decisions, and how we often err without realising it. Fortunately, Kahneman also offers some strategies to counteract the effects of our uncooperative brains towards the end of the book.

Kahneman starts by introducing his cerebral protagonists, the quick thinking system 1 and lazy system 2. He goes on to methodically demonstrate how they work together to lull us into a false sense of confidence in our own cognitive prowess.

His writing is accessible and clear and he uses practical examples to lay bare often counterintuitive phenomena. His concern for clarity certainly makes sense given that we are more likely to accept information as true if it is easy to process (a phenomenon he discusses at length in the book).

My 10 main takeaways from Thinking Fast and Slow are:

1) Our brains are great at averages and poor at aggregating.

2) If information is easier to process, we are more likely to trust in its veracity (I’ll write more about this soon).

3) We don’t handle statistical information well, nor properly take statistical facts into account when making judgments.

4) We are predisposed to making the wrong decisions because our automatic brain (system 1) relies on associative shortcuts and our conscious brain (system 2) is too lazy to check our working.

5) How information is presented can massively influence our behaviour.

6) Losses cause us more pain than gains bring us pleasure but our loss aversion is often to our detriment when it comes to risk taking.

7) We’re usually over confident in our judgments.

8) We care more about what we remember than what we experience.

9) Extraordinary success or failure is likely to be followed by regression to the mean.

10) Invest in tracker portfolios rather than heavily managed ones (they tend to do better in the long term).

Why read this book?

Thinking Fast and Slow not only sets out the reasons why we make poor judgments but it also offers solutions (outside view, pre-mortem, reframing). It will help you approach important decisions more deliberately, with greater awareness of the potential pitfalls. It will help you identify your assumptions and mitigate their negative effects.

This book won’t teach you how to present information but it does give you foundations on which to build your understanding. Kahneman explains that the way information is presented affects its presumed truthfulness, an issue of extreme relevance for campaigning organizations and marketers alike.

Don’t let the fact that this is a long non-fiction book put you off. Each chapter took me under 30 minutes to read, the information is presented clearly and the phenomena described will make you think twice about the way you think.

Please let me know your thoughts if you read it (or have already read it).

If you’re interested in how the mind works (or doesn’t work so well sometimes), I would also recommend the podcast You Are Not So Smart by David McRaney.