Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman

Oct 2011 · Sold by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

About this ebook

*Major New York Times Bestseller
*More than 2.6 million copies sold
*One of The New York Times Book Review's ten best books of the year
*Selected by The Wall Street Journal as one of the best nonfiction books of the year
*Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient
*Daniel Kahneman's work with Amos Tversky is the subject of Michael Lewis's best-selling The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

In his mega bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, world-famous psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think.

System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions.

Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Topping bestseller lists for almost ten years, Thinking, Fast and Slow is a contemporary classic, an essential book that has changed the lives of millions of readers.

Ratings and reviews

What I thought about this book is just exactly how the title is. You think both fast and slow but Daniel Kahneman makes you more aware of the reason why you are reading it fast or slow. He gives numerous examples of everyday life situations and reasons why we make the choices we make. Sometimes I can understand fully the complex choices we make in life and then other times I have to take longer to get the point he is getting across. He definitely spent a lot of research on studying the human mind and the way it works. I recommend this book if you are interested in psychology and human behavior.

This is probably the most impactful book I've ever read, for the way it changed how I see the world around me. This is supposed to be about an author that writes about his ideas and research, but the way it is told, the fact that he writes about himself doing the same mistakes he writes about, makes all seem so visible and close that you will start to see those behaviours around you, and you will start understanding the real reason why you and others behave and make decisions the way you do.

This book helps understand how we make decisions. :) The intuition is a crucial part of our decision making process. We train it unconsciously by collecting facts and building associations. The big problem in this process is that the intuition doesn't care about statistics and is prone to jump to conclusions based on limited available information. Our conscious part of the brain is supposed to verify and approve or reject such conclusions, however this is a laborious process which requires much energy.

About the author

Daniel Kahneman was the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Princeton University and a former professor of public affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He received the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his pioneering work with Amos Tversky on decision-making. He is the author of the international bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow. He died in 2024