Book Overview

In the international bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, the renowned 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.

10 Best Quotes

1. This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.

2. The gorilla study illustrates two important facts about our minds: we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.

3.  A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth

4. Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition

5. Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed.

6. Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it

7. Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.

8. The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.

9. The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little.

10. You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general.