Great summary of psychological research, extremely well presented
Bewertet mit 5 Sternen
In this book, Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahnemann sums up more than fifty years of psychological research into a book that is enormously readable. He explains human thinking with all its astonishing possibilities and its even more astonishing short-comings.
Reading the book is both enormously enjoyable and scary at the same time. Kahnemann writes with the great calm and the fine humor that is achieved by a lifetime of observing and thinking about human nature. He describes the various pitfalls of our thinking, some astonishing, others outright frightening. As an example, the chances of a criminal being pardoned by professional judges depends mostly on how long it is since they have last eaten!
But first, he starts out to explain two systems, the fast and the slow, that make up our thinking apparatus. Working fundamentally different, both systems serve a different purpose. Where System I is extremely fast at pattern recognition and associations, System II is slow and deals with conscious thought and judgments. Unnoticed by our conscious thinking, System I permanently feeds System II with the results of its pattern matching, however flawed it is.
Knowing about the flaws in our thinking is an important first step towards better decisions. Kahnemann continues to present various techniques of how to deal with the limitations our mind has, like avoiding priming and anchoring.
This book should be mandatory for everybody dealing with knowledge and decision processes. It helps me addressing the fallacies and shortcomings of human thinking and decision making.