Think slow… decide fast

“About eight years ago, I was in Tehran at a small conference on neurophilosophy, where several eminent researchers of human cognition were invited. Among them was Ann Treisman, a leading American attention specialist. One day, when the conference participants were sitting in a cafe, someone out of ignorance asked Ann: “Tell me, what does your husband do?” “Spending the Nobel Prize,” Ann replied to the astonishment of the questioner. It was about Daniel Kahneman, who was writing this book at the time.

Kahneman’s Nobel Prize is an unprecedented thing for psychology. Yes, and it was awarded for merits in the field of economics, since Kahneman’s works go beyond the limits of psychological knowledge proper and answer the question of why and how we make mistakes when making choices and making decisions, including economic ones, including at the state level. . And by and large, the book Think Slowly… Decide Fast is a detailed and accessible development of the ideas that sounded in the Nobel lecture and grew out of the research that Kahneman began more than 40 years ago with Amos Tversky. In this award-winning book, the author not only summarizes the results of research, but also gives practical advice on when we can fully trust ourselves, and when it is better to think, stop and double-check our conclusions. “Think slow… Decide fast” is a prime example of how cognitive research is permeating everything from business contracts to personal relationships.

The basis of this voluminous book (it contains 38 chapters, and the appendix contains two papers that thundered in their time, written by Kahneman in collaboration with Tversky) is based on the idea that our knowledge is a product of the interaction of two independent systems. System 1 is fast, intuitive, making instant, often hasty decisions based on emotions and past experience. System 2 is extremely slow, scrupulous, rational, not making decisions without checking all available facts. Our main problem is that while System 2 is “swinging”, we have time to make a decision on the basis of a more efficient, automatically triggered System 1, which makes mistakes no less often than it makes the right decisions. And we do not always take the trouble to clarify its conclusions with the help of System 2, because this requires effort from us. Why, if the sign “No more than 10 packs in one hand” is displayed in the store, do we buy more than we intended? Why do we rush to the other end of the city for a blouse 200 rubles cheaper if it costs 400 rubles in the nearest department store, but we don’t even think about going somewhere if it costs 4400 near the house? Why are they convinced that movie stars get divorced more often than ordinary people? Find answers to these and many other questions in the book.