Goodreads Mobile | see what your friends are reading

Feb 20, 2012

Folboteur rated it:

In the last few years I have had two books that took me FOREVER to get through. The first was Daniel Dennett's "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" and the second is Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow." What caused this? What do they have in common? Both books explain, in minute detail, simple concepts with immensely far-reaching implications, and both have been... after the slog... the most intellectually rewarding reading of my adult life.

Where to begin... I have a numb More...

0 comments like (7 people liked it)

Feb 22, 2012

Jonny99 rated it:

The eminent Professor Kahneman gives us the grand tour through behavioral economics and the full breadth of research into human thinking. The results are not encouraging. In general, humans shape a simulacrum of the world and respond to that rather than objective reality and this world model teams with logical holes, blind spots, emotional over-investment and shaky intuitions. These concepts are covered more accessibly but less fully in Daniel Ariely's recent books (Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions More...

0 comments like

Feb 20, 2012

Hundeschlitten rated it:

There are some interesting ideas here, but why do so many of these left-brain science types insist on writing their own books? Like a lot of generalized overviews written by some expert in his or her field, Daniel Kahneman's survey of the current ideas surrounding behavioral economics was a real chore to slog through at times.

The book is broken into five sections and, at least to me, things really didn't start getting interesting until section three. In the first two sections, there a More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Feb 07, 2012

Jud rated it:

I've long wondered about the "rational man" of economic theory and have wondered if there was some kind of drug I could take that would enable me to be that person. And what did it mean that I--fully aware of my emotion-based spending (or, more likely, not spending) decisions--seemed, as a Prius owner, to be much more rational than the majority of American car buyers with their acceptance of insanely low mpg's?

Having read this book, I now believe that the rational man of ec More...

0 comments like

Feb 04, 2012

Justin rated it:

This book is a five based on substance, but a three because it was so damn tough to read (no narrative arc, often felt like an annotated bibliography of psych studies). The author's purpose is to give you the knowledge and vocabulary to speak intelligently and accurately about the power of your subconscious in hopes that you can avoid the biases that comes standard. To do this, the author breaks your brain into two "systems" that he uses as a metaphor throughout the book. Your subco More...

0 comments like

Feb 02, 2012

Serge rated it:

Written by a psychologist who won a Nobel Prize in Economics for showing how ridiculous it is that economists model humans as rational agents, this book is a treasure trove of insights on how we act like we do and why.

Elections results can be predicted with 70% accuracy by asking uninformed strangers to judge "leadership qualities" on the sole basis of the candidates' headshots. Everybody knows the World is not predictable, but act as if it was. We're quick to attribute to sk More...

0 comments like

Jan 25, 2012

Ilya rated it:

How do people make decisions? Neoclassical economics assumes that they do it rationally. However, making a rational decision puts a strain on one's mind, like mental multiplication. For the most part, people rely on intuitive heuristics. These heuristics have a number of characteristic biases, which this book describes in great detail. People tend to overreact to small risks, especially those emanating from unpopular entities such as chemical corporations or nuclear power plants. People tend to More...

0 comments like

Jan 22, 2012

Karl rated it:

The mind is a hilariously muddled compromise between incompatible modes of thought in this fascinating treatise by a giant in the field of decision research. Nobel-winning psychologist Kahneman (Attention and Effort) posits a brain governed by two clashing decision-making processes. The largely unconscious System 1, he contends, makes intuitive snap judgments based on emotion, memory, and hard-wired rules of thumb; the painfully conscious System 2 laboriously checks the facts and does the math, More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 18, 2012

Harry rated it:

This is a hard book. Not because the author is hard to read; on the contrary, he is clear, lucid and compelling. He uses a multitude of examples and cases to illustrate the points he makes. The difficulty is rather in us, the readers. Kahneman's thesis, abundantly supported, is that all of us operate on two levels. Anyone who is at all familiar with psychology and research into the brain knows about our "lizard brain." Kahneman shows how this part of our makeup operates at a leve More...

0 comments like (7 people liked it)

Jan 10, 2012

Kenn rated it:

After not learning much from Stumbling on Happiness, I expected this to be the same, but it actually had some very good points I hadn't seen before. The example that comes to mind is this: if you ask some people to evaluate a single lecture, and ask others to guess how well that lecturer will be doing in five years, the answers they give are identical. This illustrates matching of levels across different scales and ignorance of regression to the mean. There are several other important heurist More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 31, 2011

Richard marked it as to-read

Okay, yeah, this has to go on the to-be-read shelf. And the over-stuffed cognition shelf. Hey, at least I was reading Kahneman before he won that Nobel Prize, before he got really popular. But I have to admit I never actually finished his Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases — it was due back at the library when I was only halfway through. That is a slow, engrossing grind of an academic tome, though.

All the reviews have been glowing. Kahneman is golden, of course — he' More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 22, 2011

Monica rated it:

Daniel Kahneman may have won his Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, but his work was psychological in nature as it challenged the rational model of judgment and decision-making. He's considered one of the most important psychologists alive today, and this book doesn't disappoint with its breakthrough approach to understanding the "machinery of the mind." This is a good book to read along with another book, Emotional Intelligence 2.0.

Kahneman introduces two mental systems, one More...

0 comments like (9 people liked it)

Dec 22, 2011

Max rated it:

Along with Poor Economics, this was my number one book of the year. It was extremely well-written and interesting throughout. I appreciated the combination of personal anecdotes and descriptions of the academic work that he performed; I thought this lent itself to better retention of the material. I also liked that comprehension and retention were obvious priorities, a fact that was made evident by the short "Speaking of..." sections at the end of every chapter. This also solidifie More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Dec 14, 2011

Rod rated it:

This is a book about how the mind works. It posits two mental states, System 1 and System 2. System 1is the state whereby we evaluate and decide instinctively, without recourse to lengthy analysis. In fact, without any analysis at all. The author uses the word ‘automatically’ here. System 2 requires a great deal of effort, taking the logic of a given situation forward step by step.

The author asserts that we use System 1 much more than system 2, partly because it gets results much more More...

1 comment like (3 people liked it)

Dec 11, 2011

Socraticgadfly rated it:

An excellent summary of what's the latest thinking and findings in the worlds of behavioral economics, behavioral psychology and related areas.

Kahnemann shows that, and more importantly, how and why, we don't always know what will make us happy, how long it will make us happy or how much it will make us happy.

Other than showing how we don't know ourselves very well, he also shows how we don't act rationally around money and financial issues. The primary reason for this is los More...

0 comments like

Nov 18, 2011

Nat added it

My favorite passage: "When I asked my large undergraduate class in some indignation, 'Do you realize that you have violated an elementary logical rule?' someone in the back row shouted, 'So what?'" (p.158).

Most relevant for me were the many examples of the striking differences in between subjects and within subjects experiments. So, for example, when subjects were asked to judge the value of the following sets of dinnerware presented together, they judged set A as more valu More...

2 comments like (5 people liked it)

Feb 14, 2012

Carol rated it:

This thick, dense book is packed with mind-bending discoveries about the many hidden flaws in human perceptions, & how they shape our decision-making. Kahneman writes well, & his lengthy summaries of how & why studies were done certainly bolster his conclusions; still, I itched to trim his text by about 20%, so that any interested civilian could read it without nodding off. His finding (which I first encountered in a 10/11 NYT Magazine excerpt) that we believe the story our brain supplies as a p More...

0 comments like

Jan 20, 2012

John rated it:

An unrelentingly tedious book that can be summed up as follows. We are irrationally prone to jump to conclusions based on rule-of-thumb shortcuts to actual reasoning, and in reliance on bad evidence, even though we have the capacity to think our way to better conclusions. But we're lazy, so we don't. We don't understand statistics, and if we did, we'd be more cautious in our judgments, and less prone to think highly of our own skill at judging probabilities and outcomes. Life not only is uncerta More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 04, 2011

John rated it:

This book would be great if it were only a compilation for the general public of a career of thinking about our psychological foibles, specifically the tendencies toward certain mistakes (or biases) that inhabit our judgment, by an absolute titan of the subject, as if capping off his long career with a summary of what he had learned (though to think of the quality of careers in how they end is itself a most terrible bias). Instead, what makes this book truly marvelous is that it is conceived of More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 31, 2012

Jennifer rated it:

A fascinating look at how we think and make decisions broken into two systems: System 1 is fast thinking-driven more on instinct and emotion while System 2 is slower more analytical thinking involving a longer process. This book got heavy at times making it somewhat of a slow read, but enjoyable nonetheless. Some favorite quotes:

"Helen was happy in the month of March" if she spent most of her time engaged in activities that she would rather continue than stop, little time i More...

0 comments like

Feb 05, 2012

Jim rated it:

Kahneman's basic idea seems pretty clearly correct. The work is important but this book is terrible.

This would best be described as a popularized version of his work. He gives you 'tests' and then tells you with misplaced certainty what your results were. Then he goes on to tell you how your results confirm his theory. And if your results differ, he ignores you.

Due to the considerable repetitiveness of the examples, being ignored becomes irritating at best.

There are More...

0 comments like

Nov 06, 2011

Angie rated it:

Having been a fan of Daniel Kahneman since I read a paper of his in 1987, I had high hopes for this book. Fortunately, I enjoyed this book as much as I had hoped.

I had heard of many of the the studies Kahnemen discusses but this book is unusual in being extremely comprehensive and putting them all into an overall context that is very coherent and credible. It is a wonderful summary of the work Kahneman himself and the others in decision-making and behavioral economics have done o More...

0 comments like

Nov 17, 2011

Fabian rated it:

Fascinating book about the different ways we think. Kahneman describes two ways of thinking. He labels them, System 1 (fast thinking) and system 2 (slow thinking). He explains the difference between both systems and gives examples. System 1 is faster to respond, more emotional, argumentive, and intuitive. System 2 is more logical, slower to react, orderly, and stubborn. Its interesting to read the book and think about the people around you and compare their characteristics to to one of the syste More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 14, 2012

Ben rated it:

A pretty interesting and enjoyable book. I found the first part to be the strongest by far as it traces the way priming can affect our responses and in general how our immediate thinking response system works. The latter parts are interesting, but in that kind of contrived economics way where all the experiments feel somewhat divorced from regular life that it's hard to make what to take from them. For example, much of the experiments illustrate how we will be risky when faced with a high likeli More...

0 comments like

Jan 07, 2012

Tom rated it:

The human mind (it will happily tell you) is the pinnacle achievement of the entire universe. Everyone agrees. One might argue that the universe itself could be a tad grander than the inner workings of a single part of a single one of its incalculable number of inhabitants, but let's not split hairs. Let's set that argument aside for another day and, instead, take a more objective look at this fabulous instrument. What we will find, as documented so wonderfully and thoroughly in Daniel Kahneman' More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 02, 2012

Simon rated it:

In "Thinking, fast and slow", Daniel Kahneman takes us on a tour through his work over the last half a century. Good thing is, the Economics Nobel prize winner has been a dominant figure in cognitive psychology - which makes the book an introduction to that field as well as behavioral economics, which his research helped to found.

Kahneman's emphasis throughout his career has been on the errors humans tend to make in reasoning and judgment, and this book is no exception. One More...

0 comments like

Feb 07, 2012

Greg rated it:

This book (yet another behavioral psychology one!) focuses on how we think by characterizing two "systems". System 1 is the automatic system that we can't really control - it is very sure of itself, it generates "intuition", and it is subject to all sorts of biases (overweights low probability events, is more sensitive to changes than states, sometimes substitutes easier questions for harder ones, etc.). System 2 is what we think of as our rational brain - it does tricky mat More...

0 comments like

Jan 08, 2012

Michael rated it:

Kahneman is extremely thorough in explaining the details of his experiments and the nuances it highlights in our decision making process. His thoroughness is so much so that I would say it borders on exhaustive. It was difficult for me to complete this book because I was torn between two selves, how appropriate. I was so bored by the litany of conclusions drawn from behavioral psychology experiments. On the other hand, I was amazed that each new conclusion brought new interesting insights. More...

0 comments like

Dec 26, 2011

Shadow rated it:

I read this book as I read stories. That means I read as fast as I could then noticed that I needed to slow down and think. Not only did I not understand most of the chapters I felt as if I let myself down. Even though I did not attain knowledge of Daniel Kahneman's caliber I did gain a sense of wisdom. When I actually knew what he was writing about, his thoughts and research came through to me. I learned a bit about the world, myself, and humans in general. I learned that arguments aren't More...

0 comments like

Feb 01, 2012

Milele rated it:

Kahneman sets out in this book to raise our level of "watercooler talk" about decision-making. He believes that it's harder for people to see and deal with their own biases and anchors and make more rational decisions, than it is for bystanders to identify issues. It makes it even easier for bystanders if, as he provides here, there's a standard vocabulary for identifying decision-making phenomena.

Many of the phenomenon he outlines I've read about before. I've rea More...

1 comment like