Book Club
First rule of book club ....
In this section we will be reviewing all things books, focusing on the burgeoning wellbeing genre.
This quarter we have reviewed 'Thinking Fast and Slow' by Daniel Kahneman
If you have an interest in the human mind and the systems that control our decision making, then it’s likely that you'll enjoy ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’.
'Thinking Fast and Slow' is written by Daniel Kahneman who is a novel laureate in Economics, with a background in Psychology. The book distills a lifetime of work on the engine of human thinking, and attempts to explain the inner workings of the mind when it comes to making every day decisions, and completing tasks of varying degrees of difficulty.
The main premise of the book is to disprove the long held belief that humans are inherently rational when it comes to decision making. In doing so, the author references a number of well-known experiments that he and a number of his colleagues have performed since the 1970s that demonstrate ‘cognitive biases’ that most (if not all) of us share, which distort our judgement of the world.
The book begins by discussing the two systems that we rely upon when it comes to making decisions. System 1 is our fast, automatic, intuitive and largely unconscious mode of thinking. System 2 on the other hand is our slow, deliberate, analytical and consciously effortful mode of reasoning about the world. When little conscious effort is required to complete a task or make a decision, such as being able to detect hostility in a voice or effortlessly complete the phrase ‘bread and…….’ this is when system 1 is active. It is system 2 that kicks into action when more effortful thinking is required, for example when completing a puzzle or parking a car in a narrow space.
More generally, system 1 operates automatically and uses association and metaphors to produce a quick and basic draft of reality, which system 2 then uses to produce explicit beliefs and make reasoned choices. The book describes both of these systems as if they were actual people, each with their own personality traits and Kahneman cleverly uses these fictitious systems to help explain the quirks of the mind. Given the above descriptions, you may think that of these two systems its system 2 that’s the more important, but this isn’t quite the case. Even though system 2 is more useful when it comes to completing complex tasks, it takes energy and effort to engage it and it can sometimes become lazy, and instead chooses to fall back on the basic assumptions that are automatically made by system 1. As the book demonstrates, this tendency can lead to errors in our judgement and irrational decisions. Throughout the book, Kahneman shows how the two systems that drive the way we think and the way that these systems interact can have a profound impact on our everyday lives; from the impact of overconfidence in corporate strategies, to the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, and the effect of cognitive biases on everything from investing in the stock market to planning our next holiday – each of these can only be understood by knowing how these two systems shape our judgements 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.