Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his seminal work in psychology that challenged the rational model of judgment and decision making, is one of our most important thinkers. His ideas have had a profound and widely regarded impact on many fields—including economics, medicine, and politics—but until now, he has never brought together his many years of research and thinking in one book.

In the highly anticipated Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. Kahneman exposes the extraordinary capabilities—and also the faults and biases—of fast thinking, and reveals the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and behavior. The impact of loss aversion and overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the challenges of properly framing risks at work and at home, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning the next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems work together to shape our judgments 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. Thinking, Fast and Slow will transform the way you think about thinking.

Table of Contents

Part I. Two Systems
1. The Characters of the Story
2. Attention and Effort
3. The Lazy Controller
4. The Associative Machine
5. Cognitive Ease
6. Norms, Surprises, and Causes
7. A Machine for Jumping to Conclusions
8. How Judgments Happen
9. Answering an Easier Question

Part II. Heuristics and Biases
10. The Law of Small Numbers
11. Anchors
12. The Science of Availability
13. Availability, Emotion, and Risk
14. Tom W’s Specialty
15. Linda: Less is More
16. Causes Trump Statistics
17. Regression to the Mean
18. Taming Intuitive Predictions

Part III. Overconfidence
19. The Illusion of Understanding
20. The Illusion of Validity
21. Intuitions Vs. Formulas
22. Expert Intuition: When Can We Trust It?
23. The Outside View
24. The Engine of Capitalism

Part IV. Choices
25. Bernoulli’s Errors
26. Prospect Theory
27. The Endowment Effect
28. Bad Events
29. The Fourfold Pattern
30. Rare Events
31. Risk Policies
32. Keeping Score
33. Reversals
34. Frames and Reality

Part V. Two Selves
35. Two Selves
36. Life as a Story
37. Experienced Well-Being
38. Thinking About Life

Appendix A: Judgment Under Uncertainty
Appendix B: Choices, Values, and Frames