Thinking Fast & Slow-Daniel Kahneman

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THINKING FAST AND SLOW

DANIEL KAHNEMAN

We like to believe that humans are rational beings. We believe our minds are machines which accurately analyse a situation in light of given facts and the available knowledge, before arriving at conclusions and future course of action. Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize winner in economics and a psychologist by profession informs us that nothing is further from truth.

In this forceful book he tells us about the science of decision making, especially in uncertain situations. He draws on the latest developments in evolutionary and cognitive psychology and mainly on the extensive work he and his late colleague Amos Tversky did in this field for decades. In the initial pages he introduces us to the two systems, the Fast & the Slow, as he calls them, that drive human decision-making apparatus. It is with a jaw-dropping wonder that one reads about how most of our choices in daily life are the work of Fast system that relies on our intuitions, impressions, moods and emotions while arriving at a decision. The Slow system which is deliberate & analytical is lazy and is called only when the former is incapable in a situation. Though we allow ourselves to be guided by impressions & feelings in our daily lives, most of our judgments and actions are appropriate. Were it not so, our minds would not have evolved this way. But mind, dependent upon intuitions does err and Kahneman shows us how and when. In the second section he discusses various systematic biases that our judgement system suffers from. He employs simple examples (from actual studies conducted in psychology and cognition) to illustrate some unbelievable errors that have crept in the working of human mind in its long, multi-millennia-old journey of evolution. Though the concepts he discusses are difficult, his treatment and simple enunciation makes them completely comprehensible.

In the last section of the book Kahneman talks about memory and human experience. With wonderful relish and amazement bordering on disbelief one reads how mind forms an image of its past experiences and how different it is from the actual experiences. These concepts have a huge bearing on our feelings of happiness and construction of self-image. Kahneman conceptualises two selves (these are functional segregation of human mind and not brain’s anatomically discrete areas), the ‘experiencing self’ and the ‘remembering self’. He convincingly shows that remembering self assimilates only selective information from the whole experience while experiencing self perceives the complete experience. Kahneman calls this Peak-End rule. The remembering self remembers only the peaks of joys and miseries, and the end of an experience. And from this patchy memory we weave our life story.

This book is a masterpiece, an epitome of science writing for layman. In a simple, elegant and concise prose Daniel Kahneman lays bare the wonders of the most intriguing attribute of our species, the human mind. And one gapes at this clear picture with a sense of bewildered contentment.

Jan 2016