The 30 Minute Expert Series - Thinking Fast and Slow in 30 Minutes: The Expert Guide to Daniel Kahnemans Critically Acclaimed Book

INTRODUCTION

At a Glance

This book is an extended review of Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Nobel Prize laureate Daniel Kahneman. This internationally best-selling book is the culmination of five decades spent becoming the leading psychologist in the world today, as many reviewers of his book have called Kahneman. An intellectual memoir plus so much more, this book is intended for a mainstream audience, with the aim to provide a vocabulary for talking about decision making and judgment.

This review begins with a brief presentation of the book and its author. Youll learn about the origins of Thinking, Fast and Slow, and youll come away with an initial impression of how critics and readers have responded to the book. Youll also learn about Daniel Kahnemans life and work.

Next comes a short digest of readers responses to the bookthe good and the not so good, from professional reviewers as well as from other interested readers.

The next two sections of the review offer a synopsis of Kahnemans book and a detailed discussion of its key concepts. Here youll find not just examples of the key concepts in practice but also ideas for applying them to your own life and experience. Finally, the main points of this review are briefly restated, and youll be well prepared to get your own copy of the complete book. Also included is a list of important terms used in Thinking, Fast and Slow, and recommendations for further reading about how humans think.

Understanding
Thinking, Fast and Slow

ABOUT THE BOOK

Daniel Kahneman wrote Thinking, Fast and Slow to bring the study of decision making into common language and to provide the general reader a vocabulary for diagnosing predictable errors in judgments.

Kahneman traces the origins of Thinking, Fast and Slow to his work with his friend, the late psychologist Amos Tversky (19371996), with whom he collaborated on work that led to Kahnemans 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. Kahneman and Tversky met in 1969 and soon discovered their shared interest in the relationship between intuition and statistics. In 1974, they jointly published a still widely cited article, Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, in the journal Science. That article demonstrated systematic errors caused by humans machinery of cognition, which contrasted with the then widely accepted notion that humans are rational beings whose emotions intrude on rational thinking. They went on to publish Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk in 1984 in American Psychologist, a study that became one of the foundations of behavioral economics.

Kahneman remains interested in refining human understanding of judgment and decision making. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, he looks more closely at the two systems that he claims underlie human thought: System 1, which is fast, intuitive, and automatic; and System 2, which is slow, deliberate, and effortful. Published in 2011 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Thinking, Fast and Slow has sold more than one million copies and has been praised by the Wall Street Journal ([a] tour de force of psychological insight), Bloomberg/Businessweek (a monumental achievement), and the Financial Times (a masterpiece ... one of the greatest and most engaging collections of insights into the human mind I have ever read). Thinking, Fast and Slow was selected as one of the best books of 2011 by the New York Times Book Review, the Globe and Mail, and the Economist. It was one of the Wall Street Journals Best Nonfiction Books of 2011 and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interests.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Daniel Kahneman is Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs Emeritus and Senior Scholar at Princeton Universitys Woodrow Wilson School. He is also the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Princeton, and Fellow of the Center for Rationality at Hebrew University. He has held teaching positions in psychology at the University of British Columbia and at the University of California, Berkeley.

Kahneman was born on March 5, 1934, in Tel Aviv and spent his childhood in Paris, including during the Nazi occupation. Following his fathers death in 1948, the family moved to the British Mandatory Palestine just prior to Israels independence. He received a BS in psychology and mathematics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1954. He then served in the Israeli Army and went on to obtain a PhD in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley.

In addition to the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, Kahneman has been awarded numerous prizes (e.g., the Talcott Parsons Prize, Thomas Schelling Award for intellectual contribution to public policy) and honorary degrees from many top centers of learning, including the University of Michigan, University of Rome, Universit de Paris, Harvard, University of East Anglia, Ben-Gurion University, The New School, and University of Pennsylvania. In 2011, Foreign Policy magazine included him on its list of top global thinkers.

Kahneman has also written Attention and Effort (Prentice Hall, 1973), has edited several volumes of essays, and has published hundreds of essays and articles in prestigious journals, including Harvard Business Review, Foreign Policy, American Economic Review, American Psychologist, and Stanford Law Review.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

The Upside

Thinking, Fast and Slow received glowing reviews in major international media outlets, including the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Globe and Mail, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Economist, the Atlantic, Publishers Weekly, and the Chronicle Review. Several reviewers declared it a landmark book: David Brooks called it a major intellectual event in the New York Times; William Easterly in the Financial Times called it a masterpiece and one of the greatest and most engaging collections of insights into the human mind I have read; and in the Globe and Mail, Janice Gross Stein wrote, It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of Daniel Kahnemans contribution to the understanding of the way we think and choose. He stands among the giants, a weaver of the threads of Charles Darwin, Adam Smith and Sigmund Freud.

Michael Lewis, in his lively Vanity Fair feature, called Kahneman the worlds most distinguished living psychologist. It turns out that Kahnemans ideas informed Lewiss book Moneyball (later made into a film, starring Brad Pitt), without Lewis even realizing it. In Moneyball, Lewis had written about the Oakland As assistant general manager Paul DePodesta, who had studied behavioral economics at Harvard and, under General Manager Billy Beane, applied Kahnemans concepts to revolutionize scouting in baseball. Lewis came to realize: When you wander into the work of Kahneman and Tversky far enough, you come to find their fingerprints in places you never imagined even existed.... It didnt take me long to figure out that, in a not so roundabout way, Kahneman and Tversky had made my baseball story possible.

On Goodreads.com, 93 percent of those who read the book liked it. Many of these readers found it richly rewarding and appreciated how Kahneman explains complex ideas in a way the lay reader can understand. Several noted that that his book has forever changed how they think about thinking.

The Downside

In the Huffington Post