Thinking, Fast and Slow

Quick thinking, slow thinking is a book by Daniel Kahneman ( born 1934 in Tel Aviv), which summarizes his often carried out jointly with Amos Tversky research from several decades. The central thesis is the distinction between two types of thinking: The fast, instinctive and emotional system 1 and the slower things by thinking and logical system 2 The book describes cognitive distortions of both types of thinking, starting with Kahneman's own investigations to loss aversion. The original English edition ( Thinking, Fast and Slow ) was published on 25 June 2011, the German translation in May 2012.

Two systems

In the first part of the book Kahneman describes the two different ways in which the brain thinks:

• System 1: Quick, automatic, always active, emotionally, stereo typisierend, unconsciously
• System 2: Slow, hard, rarely active, logical, calculating, consciously

Kahneman describes a series of experiments that highlight the differences between the two thought processes, and shows how both systems often come to different conclusions.

Heuristics and cognitive biases

The second part provides explanations as to why it is difficult for people to think statistically correct. To this end, Kahneman uses the theory of heuristics. Examples of heuristics of system 1 are the anchor heuristic, replacing a difficult question with a simpler and the representativeness heuristic.

Self-esteem

Among the most important, according to Kahneman cognitive biases include the tendency to have excessive trust in their own knowledge, and other forms of excessive optimism, such as the planning fallacy.

Decisions

This section turns to Kahneman his development of the Prospect Theory. He writes about the trend isolated to look at problems and how to choose the " framing " can influence decisions massive.

Two selves

Kahneman looks at the difference between two different points of view on wellbeing: The well-being of the " is reminiscent selves " that indicate people in retrospect, after about a painful medical procedure, and that actually experienced well-being of the " experiencing selves ". If subjects asked to inform their perceived pain during a procedure at short intervals, then corresponds to the pain experience the " whole " of all these sensations of pain, so to speak, the area under the graph of well-being over time. The two measures differ from each other - for the retrospective evaluation, it is about almost irrelevant how long did the procedure. A person experiences about a perceived as constant pain, so at double the duration of the pain experience would be correspondingly twice as large, the remembered pain, however, may differ only slightly.