Daniel Kahneman demonstrates forcefully in his new book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” how easy it is for humans to swerve away from rationality, how our hard-wired biases lead us time and again to make dumb (or, more politely) unreasonable choices.You may think less of many people after reading this work, among themstar CEOs, sportswriters, economists, professional investors, Malcolm Gladwell (whose “Blink” covered some of the same ground), and pretty much every ordinary Joe who has confronted a statistical problem harder than a coin flip.
In 2002, Kahneman shared a Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on decision theory (though he’s a psychologist). His papers on the subject, notably those co-written with Amos Tversky, his longtime collaborator, are among the most cited in the social sciences. (Tversky died in 1996 and was therefore ineligible for the Nobel.) Popularizers have mined Kahneman’s findings for years, but now he has come forward to present his life’s work to the public. He wants to help us mend our fuzzy thinking and change the way we talk about decision-making; he takes very seriously the language we use to Monday-morning quarterback ourselves: “There is a direct link from more precise gossip at the water-cooler to better decisions,” he writes.
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux) - ’Thinking, Fast and Slow’ by Daniel Kahneman
His book is partly an intellectual autobiography, with an affecting portrait of his collaboration with Tversky, and it’s enlivened with anecdotes drawn from his years in the Israeli army and advising the Israeli government. (Born in France in 1934, Kahneman and his family moved to Israel after World War II; now he’s an emeritus professor at Princeton.) But “Thinking, Fast and Slow” is mainly a methodical march — a bit too much of a march — through what psychologists know about how the brain analyzes situations and retrieves information.
When you see a sketch of two human eyes, abnormally wide open, it takes only a fraction of a second to realize you’re looking at fear. That all-but-automatic style of thinking helped us avoid predators in the past and today answers 2+2 in a flash, governs our driving on easy roads with little traffic, and connects stereotypes with their targets (meek people with a passion for order = librarians). It smooths our way through daily life. A second, more reflective, part of the brain can kick in — but doesn’t always — when deeper analysis is called for: It helps us solve an equation like 27 x 32 in our heads, fill out tax forms and bite our tongue when we’re inclined to tell off the boss. It can figure out that meek, orderly person are more likely to be factory workers than librarians, given the relative sizes of the populations.
Faced with a complex question (how much should an oil company pay for environmental damage it caused?), the automatic system will substitute a simpler question (how upset am I by a photograph of a bird drenched in oil?). On the other hand, the analytical mind has its own problems: It weakens when the physical body is tired, it’s lazy, and it, too, has problems with statistical thinking. Kahneman calls the two sides of the brain System 1 and System 2, though he stresses they aren’t anatomical places or pathways but metaphors to help us grasp the processes.
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