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Thinking, Fast and Slow Paperback – April 2, 2013

4.6 out of 5 stars 46,339 ratings

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*Major New York Times Bestseller
*More than 2.6 million copies sold
*One of
The New York Times Book Review's ten best books of the year
*Selected by
The Wall Street Journal as one of the best nonfiction books of the year
*Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient
*Daniel Kahneman's work with Amos Tversky is the subject of Michael Lewis's best-selling
The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

In his mega bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, world-famous psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, 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. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation―each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems 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. Topping bestseller lists for almost ten years,
Thinking, Fast and Slow is a contemporary classic, an essential book that has changed the lives of millions of readers.

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From the Publisher

Praise for Thinking, Fast and Slow

Thinking Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman

Thinking Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman

Thinking Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman

Editorial Reviews

Review

“It is an astonishingly rich book: lucid, profound, full of intellectual surprises and self-help value. It is consistently entertaining . . . So impressive is its vision of flawed human reason that the New York Times columnist David Brooks recently declared that Kahneman and Tversky's work ‘will be remembered hundreds of years from now,' and that it is ‘a crucial pivot point in the way we see ourselves.'”
Jim Holt, The New York Times Book Review

“There have been many good books on human rationality and irrationality, but only one masterpiece. That masterpiece is Daniel Kahneman's
Thinking, Fast and Slow . . . This is one of the greatest and most engaging collections of insights into the human mind I have read.”
William Easterly, Financial Times

“I will never think about thinking quite the same. [
Thinking, Fast and Slow] is a monumental achievement.”
Roger Lowenstein, Bloomberg/Businessweek

“Brilliant . . . It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of Daniel Kahneman's contribution to the understanding of the way we think and choose. He stands among the giants, a weaver of the threads of Charles Darwin, Adam Smith and Sigmund Freud. Arguably the most important psychologist in history, Kahneman has reshaped cognitive psychology, the analysis of rationality and reason, the understanding of risk and the study of happiness and well-being.”
Janice Gross Stein, The Globe and Mail

"Everyone should read
Thinking, Fast and Slow.”
Jesse Singal, Boston Globe

“[
Thinking, Fast and Slow] is wonderful. To anyone with the slightest interest in the workings of his own mind, it is so rich and fascinating that any summary would seem absurd.”
Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair

“Profound . . . As Copernicus removed the Earth from the centre of the universe and Darwin knocked humans off their biological perch, Mr. Kahneman has shown that we are not the paragons of reason we assume ourselves to be.”
The Economist

“[A] tour de force of psychological insight, research explication and compelling narrative that brings together in one volume the high points of Mr. Kahneman's notable contributions, over five decades, to the study of human judgment, decision-making and choice . . . Thanks to the elegance and force of his ideas, and the robustness of the evidence he offers for them, he has helped us to a new understanding of our divided minds―and our whole selves.”
Christoper F. Chabris, The Wall Street Journal

“A major intellectual event . . . The work of Kahneman and Tversky was a crucial pivot point in the way we see ourselves.”
David Brooks, The New York Times

“For anyone interested in economics, cognitive science, psychology, and, in short, human behavior, this is the book of the year. Before Malcolm Gladwell and
Freakonomics, there was Daniel Kahneman, who invented the field of behavior economics, won a Nobel . . . and now explains how we think and make choices. Here's an easy choice: read this.”
The Daily Beast

“Daniel Kahneman is one of the most original and interesting thinkers of our time. There may be no other person on the planet who better understands how and why we make the choices we make. In this absolutely amazing book, he shares a lifetime's worth of wisdom presented in a manner that is simple and engaging, but nonetheless stunningly profound. This book is a must read for anyone with a curious mind.”
Steven D. Levitt, William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago; co-author of Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics

Thinking, Fast and Slow is a masterpiece―a brilliant and engaging intellectual saga by one of the greatest psychologists and deepest thinkers of our time. Kahneman should be parking a Pulitzer next to his Nobel Prize.”
Daniel Gilbert, Harvard University Professor of Psychology, author of Stumbling on Happiness, host of the award-winning PBS television series "This Emotional Life"

“This is a landmark book in social thought, in the same league as
The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith and The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud.
Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan

“Daniel Kahneman is among the most influential psychologists in history and certainly the most important psychologist alive today. He has a gift for uncovering remarkable features of the human mind, many of which have become textbook classics and part of the conventional wisdom. His work has reshaped social psychology, cognitive science, the study of reason and of happiness, and behavioral economics, a field that he and his collaborator Amos Tversky helped to launch. The appearance of
Thinking, Fast and Slow is a major event.”
Steven Pinker, Harvard College Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of How the Mind Works and The Better Angels of our Nature

About the Author

Daniel Kahneman was the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Princeton University and a former professor of public affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He received the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his pioneering work with Amos Tversky on decision-making. He is the author of the international bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow. He died in 2024.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 2, 2013
  • Edition ‏ : ‎ First Edition
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 512 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0374533555
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0374533557
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 15.2 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.51 x 1.46 x 8.23 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 out of 5 stars 46,339 ratings

About the author

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Daniel Kahneman
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Daniel Kahneman (Hebrew: דניאל כהנמן‎, born March 5, 1934) is an Israeli-American psychologist notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, as well as behavioral economics, for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (shared with Vernon L. Smith). His empirical findings challenge the assumption of human rationality prevailing in modern economic theory. With Amos Tversky and others, Kahneman established a cognitive basis for common human errors that arise from heuristics and biases (Kahneman & Tversky, 1973; Kahneman, Slovic & Tversky, 1982; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974), and developed prospect theory (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979).

In 2011, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers. In the same year, his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, which summarizes much of his research, was published and became a best seller. He is professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. Kahneman is a founding partner of TGG Group, a business and philanthropy consulting company. He is married to Royal Society Fellow Anne Treisman.

In 2015 The Economist listed him as the seventh most influential economist in the world.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by see page for author [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Customers find the book insightful, particularly praising its philosophical sections and how it builds a basis for self-reflection. Moreover, the content is easy to read, and customers consider it well worth the investment. Additionally, the book effectively explains cognitive biases and helps readers recognize their own biases. However, the pacing receives mixed feedback - while some find it a quick read, others note it's not light reading. The book's length is also mixed, with some appreciating its content while others find it somewhat repetitive.

1,765 customers mention "Insight"1,623 positive142 negative

Customers find the book insightful, appreciating its thorough research and philosophical approach, with one customer noting it provides checkpoints for understanding.

"...and important idea, so pregnant with both psychological and philosophical implications, that it could have used a fuller treatment, and again, there..." Read more

"...it shows so distinctly the observed-in-experiments, evidence-based foundations for psychology and psychology's claim to understanding human behavior...." Read more

"...But it's also responsible for remarkably well-tuned intuitions, fast information-processing, "muscle memory," pattern-matching, intensity matching,..." Read more

"...The basis thesis of the book is simple. In judging the world around us, we use two mental systems: Fast and Slow...." Read more

107 customers mention "Value for money"107 positive0 negative

Customers find the book to be a great investment of both time and money, with one customer noting it's worth all 500+ pages.

"...He writes in an unassuming, humble, curious way that made each anecdote or cited study a joy to read...." Read more

"...It requires an investment of your time but it so well worth it. A tremendous Kindle value don't hesitate to get this book...." Read more

"...Less is more. Easy, fast and less work...." Read more

"...Yet, it is well worth the effort...." Read more

81 customers mention "Cognitive biases"70 positive11 negative

Customers appreciate how the book explains decision-making biases and helps readers recognize them, with one customer noting it includes a classic paper on the topic.

"...coherence, associative memory, availability cascades, baseline predictions, base rates, broad framing, broken-leg rule, causal base rates, causal..." Read more

"...System 1 is impulsive, and provides heuristic and intuitive guesses and reactions to stimuli without prompting. It can't be turned off...." Read more

"...of the book is especially engaging—packed with memorable experiments, biases, and insights that are instantly applicable...." Read more

"...I feel more aware of cognitive biases as well as potential errors in my judgment and reasoning that I know I not only have made in the past, but..." Read more

68 customers mention "Author quality"58 positive10 negative

Customers praise the author's academic credentials and direct presentation style, with one customer noting his pedagogical approach and another highlighting his humility in giving credit.

"...of this book - it is well-written, engaging, and its academic author reasonably restrained in the tendencies of his tribe to blathering in..." Read more

"...Choices, and Part V. Two Selves. Positives: 1. Award-winning research. A masterpiece of behavioral economics knowledge...." Read more

"...been labored over and nicely hits all the high notes -- it's worthy of the Nobel Prize, which the author was awarded in 2002...." Read more

"...The author can clearly produce quality academia, two of his articles are appended, but he did not succeed in bridging the gap between academia and '..." Read more

467 customers mention "Readability"239 positive228 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the book's readability, with some finding it fast-paced and engaging, while others note it's not a quick read and can be tough to follow.

"...Econs and Humans, between associative memory that thinks fast using simplified relationships (he calls it System 1) and analytical mental processes..." Read more

"...of his tribe to blathering in abstractions - it is a bit disappointing at the very end, when the author proves unable to synthesize all his material..." Read more

"...it's also responsible for remarkably well-tuned intuitions, fast information-processing, "muscle memory," pattern-matching, intensity matching, face..." Read more

"...My disappointment in this book was that its very title, betrays what was a good start on what may be the most important discovery about how and why..." Read more

84 customers mention "Repetition rate"6 positive78 negative

Customers find the book somewhat repetitive and boring, with many pages covering similar themes.

"...are sometimes drawn out much more than needed, and there is a fair bit of repetition...." Read more

"In short, this book is a ponderous and meandering non-scientific reflection on some mildly interesting idiosyncrasies of humans' passive..." Read more

"...This book spends far too much time stumbling through countless behavioral economic anecdotes without allocating any time trying to capture the..." Read more

"...But it’s not. Its fairly predictable: the human brain has two systems: one that thinks fast, and when things get difficult, a second system takes..." Read more

Super Important Cognitive Science
5 out of 5 stars
Super Important Cognitive Science
The surprising limits of rationality in everyday thinking and how we might remedy some of these evolutionarily built-in brain bugs. How we routinely make everyday decisions on the basis of lazy, first-memory-that-jumps-to-mind instances (Availability heuristic), rather than rational assessment. And then use reason later if necessary to construct rational explanations for our decisions. The importance of, "what you see is all there is" (WYSIATI) as a concept in human psychology. Sunk costs. Loss aversion. Framing effects. Anchors. Priming. Cognitive illusions and fallacies. And all kinds of super important stuff.
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Top reviews from the United States

  • Reviewed in the United States on August 31, 2015
    Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
    This is an invaluable book that every person who considers him/herself educated should read - even study. Indeed, it is a scandal that mastering the material in this book isn't considered an essential component of a high school education.

    The author was awarded the Nobel in Economics for his work on what he calls decision theory, or the study of the actual workings of the typical human mind in the evaluation of choices, and the book itself presents the findings of many decades of psychological studies that expose the endemic fallacious thinking that we are all prone to, more or less. The lives of all of us could be improved by lessons learned from this book, not just individually, through self-education, but also on the large scale, if the large scale decision makers in this society in and out of government could be educated as well. In fact, it is largely because these large scale decision makers are no better than the rest of us in their ability to think straight and plan well, that society is as screwed up as it is, and that essentially all of its institutions are diseased and corrupt. The lesson there, however, is that decision making needs to be returned to the individual - that the powers that be need to be deprived of their powers to mess up the lives of the rest of us.

    Despite the many virtues of this book - it is well-written, engaging, and its academic author reasonably restrained in the tendencies of his tribe to blathering in abstractions - it is a bit disappointing at the very end, when the author proves unable to synthesize all his material into a comprehensive theory of the thinking, and deciding mind - or at least into a set of carefully formulated principles that provide a succinct summary of the principles of human thinking, both typical and ideal.

    Kahneman uses throughout a construct that implies that we are of two minds: System 1 is the fast-thinking, intuitive, mind, prone to jumping to conclusions; while System 2 is the slow-thinking analytical mind, that is brought into play, if at all, only to critique and validate the conclusions that we have jumped to. System 2, we are told, is lazy, and if often just rubber-stamps the snap judgements of System 1, or if pressed, rationalize them, instead of digging critically as well as constructively into the complex underpinnings of the material and sorting them out as best it can.

    Instead of working this construct up into a comprehensive model of mind, K merely uses it as a loose schema for representing the kinds of thinking thought to underlie the results derived from the many psychological experiments that he here reports on. This neglect raises the question at many points as to just how well the experimenters have really understood the thinking that underlies the behavior of their subjects. But this, I am sorry to say, is a weakness of virtually all psychological experimentation, which is still just beginning to come to grips with the complexity and varieties of cognitive style of the human mind.

    What Kahneman does do, however, is to provide convenient labels for many characteristic types of fallacious thinking, although again, the exact role of System 1 and System 2, and their interaction, is inadequately explicated. Instead, towards the end of the book, another, somehow related, but nominally independent theme is developed: the disturbing divergence between the experiencing self and the remembering self. This is in itself such an interesting and important idea, so pregnant with both psychological and philosophical implications, that it could have used a fuller treatment, and again, there is no coherent integration of this theme with the System1/System2 construct.

    The idea here is that our present experience includes our most salient memories of previous experiences - for example the highlights of past vacations, or out of the ordinary episodes of our lives. Somewhat surprisingly, though, what we remember is a systematic distortion of the actual experience. Our memory collapse the duration of various aspects of our experience and highlights only the peak moment(s) and the final moments, perhaps with a nod toward the initial presentation of the experience. And this systematic distortion of the actual experience in all its fullness, can lead us to make irrational and detrimental choices in deciding whether to repeat the experience in the future. Thus, a bad ending to an otherwise wonderful experience can spoil the whole thing for us in memory, and cause us to avoid similar experiences in the future, even though by simply anticipating and improving the ending we might make the whole experience as wonderful as most of the original was. Likewise, subjects in experiments involving either long durations of pain, or much shorter episodes of pain with a higher peak, were consistently more averse to the latter rather than the former - or they overemphasized the way these presentations ended as a factor in judging them as a whole.

    These are important findings that go the heart of the question of how best to steer our course through life, but here is the only attempt at integration of this remembering vs experiencing self theme, and the System 1/ System 2 theme that I find in the final chapter, Conclusions:

    "The remembering self is a construction of System 2. However, the distinctive features of the way it evaluates episodes and lives are characteristics of our memory. Duration neglect and the peak-end rule originate in System 1 and do not necessarily conform to the values of System 2".

    There is more here, but it merely repeats the earlier analysis of the relevant experiments.

    No evidence is presented as to the respective roles of System 1 and System 2 with respect to the laying down of memory, to its decay, or with respect to a recently discovered phenomenon: memory reconsolidation. Nor is any account taken of what has been learned, much of it in recent decades, about the interactions between short, intermediate, and long term memory, or any of the radically different modalities of episodic (picture strip) and semantic (organized, abstracted) memory. Consequently, Kahneman's vague reference to the "characteristics of our memory" is essentially a ducking of the question of what the remembering self is. I think that at best, the finding of the replacement of the original experience by an abstract predicated on peak-end bias is an exaggeration, though there's no question that "duration neglect" is in operation, and a good thing too, unless K means by "duration neglect" not just the stretches of minimally changing experience (which have little memorial significance anyway, but even the consciousness of how long the edited out parts were (this distinction was never made in Chapter 35, where the theme of the remembering vs. the experiencing self is first taken up).

    Speaking for myself anyway, I have a much fuller memory of my most important experiences than Kahneman seems to indicate. Naturally the highlights are featured, but what I tend to remember are representative moments that I took conscious note of at the time, as though making a psychological photograph. I remember these moments also because I bring them up from time to time when I'm thinking about that experience. For example, I'm thinking now of a long distance race I did in 2014 (a very tough half-marathon, with almost 2000' of climbing). I remember: the beginning section as well as the ending section; each of the rest stations; certain moments of each of the major hill climbs; at least one moment from each of the descents; and a number of other happenings during the almost three hour event. For me in this race, the peak experience occurred right at the end, when I all but collapsed, yet managed to stagger to the finish line. That ending does naturally come first to mind as a representation of the entire event, but it is merely the culmination of a long and memorable experience with many moving parts, and if I want, my remembering self can still conjure up many other moments, as well as a clear sense of the duration of each of the sections of the course.

    Over many years most memories fade, and it's certainly reasonable to suppose that in extreme cases, where they are all but forgotten, only a single representative moment might be retained. However, if we can say anything for sure about memory it is this: we remember what we continue to think of and to use, and we do that precisely because this material has continuing importance to us. The recent research in memory reconsolidation tells us that when we do bring up memories only occasionally, we reinforce them, but we also edit and modify them to reflect our current perspectives, and sometimes we conflate them with other seemingly related knowledge that we've accrued. We are thus prone to distort our own original memories over time, in some cases significantly, but we may still retain much more of the original experience that just the peak and the end, and if we do reinterpret our memories in the light of more recent experience, that's not necessarily a bad thing. In any case, the memories that occur in the present may be said to be a joint project of the experiencing as well as the remembering self, which rather erodes the whole Two Selves concept that Kahneman first posited.

    I do not mean to criticize the valuable evidential material in the book, and in general I think that Kahneman, and the other researchers and thinkers whom he quotes, have drawn reasonable conclusions from the experiments they report on. But ultimately, the book, as well as the fields both of psychology and brain neurophysiology suffer both in coherence and meaningfulness because they aren't predicated on a more comprehensive theory of mind. It's the old story in science, first formulated by Karl Popper in his 1935 book, The Logic of Scientific Discovery: unless we approach the data with an hypothesis in mind - unless, indeed, we seek out data likely to be relevant to a particular hypothesis, we're not going to make any enduring progress in understanding that data in a comprehensively meaningful way, let alone be able to make falsifiable deductions about elements of the system for which we have at present no data. Popper's quotation from the German philosopher Novalis comes to mind - "Theories are nets: only he who casts will catch."

    In the final, "Conclusions", chapter, K caricatures the abstract economists' model of homo econimicus (man as a rational optimizer of his utility), contrasting it with the more sophisticated and experientially grounded model of psychologists such as himself. In keeping with his penchant for framing (or spinning) his presentation favorably to his own perspective, he calls the economists' model "Econ", and his own "Human". In fact, "Econ" was never meant to represent man in all his humanity, and Kahneman's Economics Nobel, recognizing his decision theory contributions to economics, was preceded by many other Nobels to economists who had been expanding the concept of the economic actor into psychological territory for decades. In fact, the essential view of the Austrian economists dating from the 1920s (von Mises, Hayek, and their predecessors) is that economics is in the end wholly dependent on psychology because it is predicated on the unknowable, unquantifiable subjective value preferences of humans, acting individually and in concert. Cautious generalizations can perhaps be made about human psychology in general, but I think that on the whole the Austrians have been a bit wiser in their restraint than Kahneman and his many, and mostly lesser, pop psychology compatriots have proved in their often sensationalist extrapolations from lab experiments.

    Here is an example, I think of Kahneman over-reaching. He speaks repeatedly of the laziness of System 2, and its foot dragging reluctance to get involved in the thinking process, but in the real world, snap judgements are good enough for immediate purposes, and the better part of rationality may be to go with one's fast thinking intuitive System 1: indeed, Kahneman acknowledges this himself in passing, both in his beginning and his ending, but this isn't enough to counterbalance the overall argument of his book.

    Kahneman also, in his final chapter, speculatively extends his findings into the political sphere (his liberal Democratic Party bias has already been made clear by gratuitous and somewhat annoying usage of salient modern politicians in examples), but not to any great effect.

    Kahneman advocates "libertarian paternalism" consisting of government programs that people are enrolled in automatically unless they opt out by checking a box on forms - thus manipulating the presentation frame so as to trick them into signing on to what some government bureaucrat thinks is good for them. Of course, as long as people are allowed to opt out, one can't call the choice here anything but libertarian, though to be consistent with their socialist mores, liberals like Kahneman really ought to object to such practices as being manipulative advertising. This libertarian finds nothing objectionable about the way such a choice might be presented - after all, the average man, if adequately educated and prepared for the real world, should have no trouble seeing through the frames. What is not only paternalistic, but totalitarian in spirit, is the extortion of taxpayer money to finance such government programs in the first place.

    Somehow, it fails to occur to Kahneman that most people could be trained to recognize and avoid fallacious thinking during all those years of enforced and mostly wasteful schooling - just as most people can be trained to recognize the Müller-Lyer illusion for what it is. IMO every high school graduate should be required to learn to recognize and avoid the paradigm cases of fallacious thinking presented in Thinking, Fast, and Slow, and this material could profitably be expanded to cover the many rhetorical tricks used by the manipulators and spinmeisters, both public and private, who batten off of our society. With such training in critical thinking, and with the reintroduction of enough honest and rigor to begin high school graduates up to the 12th grade reading and writing proficiencies that were routine in the 1950s, the need for college as life preparation would be altogether obviated, and most young people could avoid wasting their early years in college, piling up debt, and get on with their work and/or their self-education, as they chose.
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  • Reviewed in the United States on April 20, 2025
    Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
    I will not argue here whether Kahneman gets it right or wrong. Plenty of other reviews here to satisfy those appetites.

    I am an admirer of Kanheman and Tversky's meticulous and often brilliant original experimental research, which provoked the hypothesis that our brains are hard-wired for making systematic errors in judgement and obstruct more thoughtful responses to information. To their credit these two psychologists refused to accept that one could take such inferences from their work. But their research did, again to their credit, provoke neuroscientists and others to investigate that possibility. Indeed, after enough actual data was collected through MRI studies and other credible methods, it was confirmed that there were, indeed, two different regions of our brains that handled incoming signals (information) in two very distinct ways. The reactive region, adjacent the occipital lobe, is the command and control center, a triage processor that sorts out "immediate" threats to the organism which it handles, itself, in the most efficient (least thoughtful) way, saving time, and perhaps the life, of the organism. The other part, our familiar neo-cortex, works with whatever signals the reactive-brain considers of low-threat potential and does not, itself, need to act upon. The contemplative-brain may not even receive any information about what happened after a serious threat event, after the fact. We see them, somewhat in shock, not recalling anything of what just transpired or what they did

    My disappointment in this book was that its very title, betrays what was a good start on what may be the most important discovery about how and why we think (or don't think) the way we do. Instead, this volume strays far from the disciplines of science and into the realms of pure speculation. Limited sample of "cases" that hardly rise above the level of subjective anecdotes and wild hypothesis about the "energetics" of these processes, let alone speculations on the interactions between the two regions (e.g. a smile that indicates contemplative, frontal lobe processing) remain unexplored territory. We haven't even begun to look at the details of energy transfers and economies used by our brains to say much about that at all. As said, even the title "Thinking, Fast and Slow" is a species of betrayal. His nomenclature encourages the least useful avenues for research, while diverting attention from what may be some of the most important questions we face. It is why I use the terms 'reactive-brain' and 'contemplative-brain' to describe these distinct process, rather than 'fast/slow' or 'system1/system2'. My nomenclature would at least call attention to explore things like someone hearing a couple of people proclaim they had a bad reaction to vaccine and then ignoring all evidence, statistical and biological, to the contrary even as they and their children spread or die of a disease in far greater proportion than those who have been vaccinated. They are clearly reactive mode, giving very little thought to the matter at hand. The threat alarm is sounded, and they respond immediately. Why else would someone approve of putting a person like RFK in charge of public health? Could it be, they all operate in a reactive mode which gives little room for thoughtful consideration

    It is a reasonable hypotheses, that the problem lies in how that master triage center, our reactive-brain, adjusts its tests for "immediate threat" content and, over time, has allowed for more and more remote and abstract "potential threats", to trigger its mechanisms. Manipulations through fear, no matter how unwarranted and unfounded, easily serve to remove thoughtful control of important matters, no matter how remote they may be. True, that is just an hypothesis, one among many, but reasonable enough to call for further investigation. Reducing such matters to pop-psychology speculations on cerebral energy relationships or exercises in 'self-improvement' and 'making better business decisions' certainly doesn't encourage us to look into these far more important questions. What this book does, is ignore these more important questions, and focus the reader on arguing over how boring or exciting the subject maybe, or whether his statistics take acinto count luck or intuition, as most of the reviews here do. Looked at through the lens of the subject, one might reasonably say the comments here could be characterized as being primarily reactive. Two stars for continuing the discussion of this important subject; zero stars for how badly it has distracted us from more important questions that need to be explored, and real research encouraged to answer them.
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  • Vijit Singh
    5.0 out of 5 stars As per my expectations
    Reviewed in the United Arab Emirates on September 24, 2021
    Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
    Hard cover. Very good quality. Finished reading first two chapters. The book essentially talks about how the mind works. This is helpful in identifying our biases and actively countering them. So definitely a read for those who are interested in understanding how does our brain impact our actions.
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    The only unhappy thing about the book is that it’s unfriendly to highlighting, as seen in the photo.
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    Quin Louie
    5.0 out of 5 stars
    Eye opener

    Reviewed in Australia on February 22, 2025
    As an elementary student in psychology, this book is amazing. The language is easy to understand and the book itself is entertaining. There are experiments by different famous psychologists and explanations included in the book, allowing yourself to experience the psychological phenomenon yourself.

    The only unhappy thing about the book is that it’s unfriendly to highlighting, as seen in the photo.
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