Thinking, fast and slow
BOOK NOTE
Author: Daniel Kahneman
Read: June 19, 2022
I picked up this international best seller because I was curious to learn more about our intuitive thinking, where our limitations lie with our intuition—can it ever be wrong (because we’re always hearing things like “trust your intuition,” “your intuition is always right” in pop psychology, but is it always right? And if not, how can we hone it so it’s right, more often than not?
But of course, I learned a lot more.
In Thinking, Fast and Slow by psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, Kahneman explores the way we think and make decisions, and presents two systems of our thinking.
System 1 is our default thinking. It´s fast, intuitive, and operates automatically.
System 2 is slow, deliberate, and requires effort.
Kahneman argues that we often rely on our System 1 thinking, even when it is not appropriate for the situation, leading to cognitive biases and errors in our judgment. He dives into a range of biases, including the availability heuristic (see below), the representativeness heuristic (our mental shortcuts based on our knowledge of a stereotype), and the anchoring effect (our cognitive bias based on the first piece of information we receive), and discusses how they can influence our decision-making.
Taking a further look at the concept of “availability heuristic,” which means that we create and take mental shortcuts to make judgments or decisions of how likely something will happen based on how easily we can retrieve something from our memory.
One of the examples Kahneman provides is from a martial study where spouses were asked, “How large was your personal contribution to keeping the place tidy, in percentages?” Curious if the self estimated contributions would add up to 100%, the studies found that the self-assessed contributions added up to more than 100% because of availability bias in play. In can be explained here that both spouses made their estimation based on the ease of remembering their own individual contributions compared to their spouse’s.
System 2 on the other hand, refers to our slower more effortful and deliberate way of thinking that allow us to solve problems, reason logically, and make complex decisions. It’s our conscious mind that requires attention and effort.
But System 2, like System 1, can be influenced by biases, too. For example, you may be familiar with confirmation bias (the tendency to favor information that confirms our pre-existing beliefs) - this occurs in System 2 way of thinking. Moreover, we can also be influenced by framing effects (the way information is presented can impact decision-making).
Overall, "Thinking, Fast and Slow" was a fascinating read examining how we think, make our decisions and how how our cognitive bias affect our decision-making abilities.
And knowing what I know now how we tend to have high confidence in unfounded intuition, I am training myself to recognize when my intuitive decision is based on hopeful, wishful and romanticized thinking influenced by cognitive biases that creates an illusion of validity.
READ IT OR NOT: A definite read.
