Book Review: Thinking, Fast and Slow
It was a sweltering afternoon. Heeding the pleas of my two stranded friends, I grudgingly took them along for a carpool ride. Left with nothing but ourselves, the environment was ripe for chatter. One of my friends started to talk enthusiastically about his plans to invest; he expected to make a fortune from it, believing in nothing but his own sense of destiny and prospect.
I soon grew tired of his grand proclamations about companies I knew nothing about. In that mental drift, a sentence broke in from a distant, vague memory: "If you choose to delude yourself by accepting extreme predictions … you will do well to remain aware of your self-indulgence."
I suddenly became animated and passionate, with new inspiration for conversation. Intuition alone was not enough to beat the market consistently, I claimed. My friend's ambitions were shattered as I swiftly recalled quotes and studies, passages that invalidated the promises of many industries dedicated to being ahead of the curve. He still held on to some degree of hope (or was it obstinacy?), but was thoroughly sobered by my explanations and insight.
For my part, I mainly relished in the joy of the debate rather than really understanding what I said. What it did drive me to do, though, was to go back to the book where I got this knowledge from—the one that questioned the ability of humans and reasoning processes to perfectly grasp the world in the first place. That book was *Thinking, Fast and Slow*.
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For those who don't know, *Thinking, Fast and Slow* is Daniel Kahneman's attempt to pull back the curtain on how our minds actually operate. It gathers decades of work he conducted with Amos Tversky, work that overturned long-held assumptions about human rationality.
Together, they uncovered the two forces that guide our thinking: the fast, intuitive flashes that feel effortless and confident, and the slower, more deliberate reasoning that we imagine ourselves using far more often than we really do. Through elegant experiments, they revealed how easily our quick judgments slip into error—how we latch onto the first number we hear, trust vivid stories over statistics, draw sweeping conclusions from tiny samples, and mistake coherence for truth.
Their research exposed an entire catalogue of cognitive biases and illusions that shape our decisions without our noticing. Kahneman's book weaves these findings into a kind of map of the mind, showing why certainty is seductive, why intuition can mislead, and why our reasoning, though impressive, is far less reliable than we believe.
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The book's writing style was excruciatingly dry. When I read it the first time, I found it hard to keep going. Studies accumulated in my mind, and I didn't know what exactly the main takeaways were aside from a few particularly shocking findings I could tell others at parties.
When I read the book the second time, however, I felt far more lucid. I saw the essence rather than just the peaks. I saw how errors in logical reasoning impacted my decisions on a day-to-day basis.
Based on that famous three-question test given to college students testing rationality, I appeared to have a higher capacity for it than most—I got two out of the three intuition-deceiving questions correct. Yet I still noticed all the holes in my thinking, the perception of which only intensified as I went on.
Reading the book also changed my perspective on others and the forecasts and beliefs they appeared so confident in. I learned that nuance, though often less compelling than certainty, was in most cases the rational approach to a situation.
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As a whole, the value of the book lies not in the specifics of its concepts and studies but in its broader lesson. It drives us to question our thought processes to the limit, ensuring that we are able to make more rational decisions for the benefit of ourselves and of humanity.
There is an ongoing replication crisis going on in science; psychology is particularly vulnerable to such phenomena. Many studies that once appeared groundbreaking and revealing can be overturned upon peer review or replication attempts. Thus, to approach psychology, one must have a strong awareness of one's own subjectivity; it is from observing, discussing, and interpreting the processes of our own minds that we can begin to develop a better understanding of our cognition, with all of its similarities and differences.
Psychology should create a greater love and understanding for the human being in general, with a drive to rise beyond its limitations. *Thinking, Fast and Slow* is just one instance of this. It gave me and countless others the tools to question our own intuition, to understand and refine the way we make decisions.