One Sentence Summary
- Thinking Fast and Slow explains how two systems in your brain are constantly fighting over control of your behavior and actions.
Best Quotes
"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."
"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."
"A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth."
"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."
"Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance."
"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."
Key Takeaways
- System 1 = The instant, unconscious, automatic, emotional, intuitive thinking
It’s the system you use when someone sketchy enters the train and you instinctively turn towards the door and what makes you eat the entire bag of chips in front of the TV when you just wanted to have a small bowl. System 1 is a remnant from our past, and it’s crucial to our survival
- System 2 = The slower, conscious, rational, reasoning, deliberate thinking
It helps you exert self-control and deliberately focus your attention. This system is at work when you are meeting someone and trying to spot them in a huge crowd of people, as it helps you recall how they look and filter out all these other people
About Daniel Kahnemann
- Daniel Kahneman (born March 5, 1934) is an Israeli-American psychologist notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, as well as behavioral economics, for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
- His empirical findings challenge the assumption of human rationality prevailing in modern economic theory.
