---
product_id: 219959
title: "Thinking, Fast and Slow"
price: "€ 24.80"
currency: EUR
in_stock: true
reviews_count: 13
url: https://www.desertcart.hr/products/219959-thinking-fast-and-slow
store_origin: HR
region: Croatia
---

# Premium gift-ready packaging Nobel Prize-winning insights 512 pages of cognitive mastery Thinking, Fast and Slow

**Price:** € 24.80
**Availability:** ✅ In Stock

## Summary

> 🧠 Unlock the science of thinking fast and slow — because your mind deserves a Nobel-level upgrade!

## Quick Answers

- **What is this?** Thinking, Fast and Slow
- **How much does it cost?** € 24.80 with free shipping
- **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship
- **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.hr](https://www.desertcart.hr/products/219959-thinking-fast-and-slow)

## Best For

- Customers looking for quality international products

## Why This Product

- Free international shipping included
- Worldwide delivery with tracking
- 15-day hassle-free returns

## Key Features

- • **Master Your Mind's Dual Engines:** Explore System 1's intuition vs. System 2's deliberate thinking for smarter decisions.
- • **Concise, Insight-Packed Chapters:** Short, focused chapters make complex psychology accessible and easy to reference anytime.
- • **Perfect Gift for Thought Leaders:** Elegantly packaged and ideal for professionals who crave intellectual growth and social edge.
- • **Award-Winning Behavioral Economics:** Absorb Nobel Prize-winning research that reshapes how you understand judgment and bias.
- • **Practical Wisdom for Everyday Life:** Apply real-world examples and experiments to improve your thinking and avoid costly mistakes.

## Overview

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman is a groundbreaking 512-page exploration of human cognition, blending Nobel Prize-winning research with practical insights into how our intuitive System 1 and rational System 2 shape decisions. Ranked #1 in Medical Cognitive Psychology and praised for its accessible, experiment-driven chapters, this book is a must-have for professionals seeking to master their mental biases and elevate their decision-making skills. Packaged for gifting and backed by over 48,000 glowing reviews, it’s the ultimate intellectual investment for the modern thinker.

## Description

*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.

Review: How to reconcile our two mental systems, and capitalize on the best each has to offer - Thoughtful, applicable, insightful, entertaining. I enjoyed dissecting the numerous thought experiments and studies for merit that I could apply to my everyday thinking. System 1 and System 2 form the backbone of this book. System 1 is impulsive, and provides heuristic and intuitive guesses and reactions to stimuli without prompting. It can't be turned off. Why You See Is All There Is (WYSIATI). But it's also responsible for remarkably well-tuned intuitions, fast information-processing, "muscle memory," pattern-matching, intensity matching, face & situation recognition, and much of what makes human minds human. Author Daniel Kahneman points out situations in which System 1 is scientifically poor, including statistics (like the difference between 0.01% and 0.001%), random events, weighting time & duration in retrospect. System 2 is more calculated, requires devoted effort and concentration in rationalizing & making decisions. It assigns value to past events, keeps score, questions bias, and carries out more intensive, deliberate calculations involving more data. It's like fetching data from main memory, rather than relying on the cache. Kahneman's prose is rich with examples and experimental case studies, from visceral phenomena like pleasure vs. pain tolerance, and the tendency to derive general from specific, rather than the specific from the general (statistic).... to logic fallacies like optimism in planning, misjudging statistics, underestimating sampling, and sunk costs. He gives simple, easy-to-remember names to a lot of the phenomena he observed in studies, like the peak-end rule that describes how humans tend to judge pain or pleasure of a past event based on an average of how it ended and the peak of the experience, neglecting duration. He also provides solutions and checks & balances that can help us reduce bias, where possible. For example, to mitigate the planning fallacy, he writes: 1.) Identify an appropriate reference class. 2.) Obtain the statistics of the reference class. Use the statistics to generate a baseline prediction. 3.) Use specific information about the case to adjust the baseline prediction, if there are particular reasons to expect the optimistic bias to be more of less pronounced in this project than in others of the same type. The author's life experiences, from serving as an evaluator in the Israeli defense forces to publishing papers as a professor, inform many of the studies and give them a human element and interest to which I could easily relate. I also appreciate his emotion, adding exclamation points to the observations that surprised him, or proved him wrong. He writes in an unassuming, humble, curious way that made each anecdote or cited study a joy to read. Finally, I thought he -- and his editors -- divided the book brilliantly. Chapters are short, usually 8~16 pages, and they always concentrate on some nugget or fallacy that could be later referenced by a single term, like "anchoring," "regression to the mean," "the fourfold pattern," or "the halo effect." He builds up knowledge brick by brick, experiment by experiment, that after a few nights of reading, you begin to recognize fallacies and patterns in everyday life by the terms Kahneman has assigned to them. My favorite part of each chapter is the end: a short section of quotations that describe and use key terms from the chapter, in an everyday, relatable way. There are too many topics and quotes to list them all. Some of my favorites: "The best we can do is a compromise: learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high. The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people's mistakes than our own." "Self-control requires attention and effort." "His System 1 constructed a story, and his System 2 believed it. It happens to all of us." "They didn't want more information that might spoil their story. WYSIATI." "We often compute much more than we want or need. I call this excess computation the mental shotgun. It is impossible to aim at a single point with a shotgun because it shoots pellets that scatter, and it seems almost equally difficult for System 1 not to do more than System 2 charges it to do." "Money-primed people become more independent than they would be without the associative trigger." "He was asked whether he thought the company was financially sound, but he couldn't forget that he likes their product." "Our aim in the negotiation is to get them anchored on this number." "Let's make it clear that if that is their proposal, the negotiations are over. We do not want to start there." "When the evidence is weak, one should stick with the base rates." "They added a cheap gift to the expensive product, and made the whole deal less attractive. Less is more in this case." "System 1 can deal with stories in which the elements are causally linked, but it is weak in statistical reasoning." "The experiment shows that individuals feel relieved of responsibility when they know that others have heard the same request for help." "We can't assume that they will really learn anything from mere statistics. Let's show them one or two representative individual cases to influence their System 1." "But those with the most knowledge are often less reliable. The reason is that the person who acquires more knowledge develops an enhanced illusion of her skill and becomes unrealistically overconfident." "The question is not whether these experts are well trained. It is whether their world is predictable." "The research suggests a surprising conclusion: to maximize predictive accuracy, final decisions should be left to formulas, especially in low-validity environments." "In this view, people often (but not always) take on risky projects because they are overly optimistic about the odds they face." "A well-run organization will reward planners for precise execution and penalize them for failing to anticipate difficulties, and for failing to allow for difficulties that they could not have anticipated --the unknown unknowns." "She is the victim of a planning fallacy. She's assuming a best-case scenario, but there are too many different ways for the plan to fail, and she cannot foresee them all." "He weighs losses about twice as much as gains, which is normal." "Think like a trader! You win a few, you lose a few." "Decision makers tend to prefer the sure thing over the gamble (they are risk averse) when the outcomes are good. They tend to reject the sure thing and accept the gamble (they are risk seeking) when both outcomes are negative." "We are hanging on to that stock just to avoid closing our mental account at a loss. It's the disposition effect." "The salesperson showed me the most expensive car seat and said it was the safest, and I could not bring myself to buy the cheaper model. It felt like a taboo tradeoff." "Did he really have an opportunity to learn? How quick and how clear was the feedback he received on his judgments?" "We want pain to be brief and pleasure to last. But our memory, a function of System 1, has evolved to represent the most intense moment of an episode of pain or pleasure (the peak) and the feelings when the episode was at its end. A memory that neglects duration will not serve our preference for long pleasure and short pains." There are many, many more. Read the book for yourself and enjoy the wisdom!
Review: Brilliant! - Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman “Thinking, Fast and Slow” is a fascinating look at how the mind works. Drawing on knowledge acquired from years of research in cognitive and social psychology, Nobel Prize Winner, Dr. Daniel Kahneman delivers his magnum opus on Behavioral Economics. This excellent book focuses on the three key sets of distinctions: between the automatic System 1 and the effortful System 2, between the conception of agents in classical economics and in behavioral economics, and between the experiencing and the remembering selves. This enlightening 512-page book is composed of thirty-eight chapters and broken out by the following five Parts: Part I. Two Systems, Part II. Heuristics and Biases, Part III. Overconfidence, Part IV. Choices, and Part V. Two Selves. Positives: 1. Award-winning research. A masterpiece of behavioral economics knowledge. Overall accessible. 2. Fascinating topic in the hands of a master. How the mind works. The biases of intuition, judgment, and decision making. 3. Excellent format. Each chapter is well laid out and ends with a Speaking of section that summarizes the content via quotes. 4. A great job of defining and summarizing new terms. "In summary, most of what you (your System 2) think and do originates in your System 1, but System 2 takes over when things get difficult, and it normally has the last word." 5. Supports findings with countless research. Provides many accessible and practical examples that help readers understand the insightful conclusions. 6. A great job of letting us what we know and to what degree. "It is now a well-established proposition that both self-control and cognitive effort are forms of mental work." 7. You are guaranteed to learn something. Countless tidbits of knowledge throughout this insightful book and how it applies to the read world. "The best possible account of the data provides bad news: tired and hungry judges tend to fall back on the easier default position of denying requests for parole. Both fatigue and hunger probably play a role." 8. The differences of Systems 1 and 2 and how they function with one another. "System 1 is impulsive and intuitive; System 2 is capable of reasoning, and it is cautious, but at least for some people it is also lazy." "System 1 is gullible and biased to believe, System 2 is in charge of doubting and unbelieving, but System 2 is sometimes busy, and often lazy." 9. Important recurring concepts like WYSIATI (What You See Is All There IS). "You surely understand in principle that worthless information should not be treated differently from a complete lack of information, but WYSIATI makes it very difficult to apply that principle." 10. Understanding heuristics and biases. "The strong bias toward believing that small samples closely resemble the population from which they are drawn is also part of a larger story: we are prone to exaggerate the consistency and coherence of what we see. The exaggerated faith of researchers in what can be learned from a few observations is closely related to the halo effect, the sense we often get that we know and understand a person about whom we actually know very little. System 1 runs ahead of the facts in constructing a rich image on the basis of scraps of evidence. A machine for jumping to conclusions will act as if it believed in the law of small numbers. More generally, it will produce a representation of reality that makes too much sense." 11. Paradoxical results for your enjoyment. "People are less confident in a choice when they are asked to produce more arguments to support it." 12. Understanding how our brains work, "The world in our heads is not a precise replica of reality; our expectations about the frequency of events are distorted by the prevalence and emotional intensity of the messages to which we are exposed." 13. Wisdom. "'Risk' does not exist 'out there,' independent of our minds and culture, waiting to be measured. Human beings have invented the concept of “risk” to help them understand and cope with the dangers and uncertainties of life. Although these dangers are real, there is no such thing as 'real risk' or 'objective risk.'" Bonus. "To be useful, your beliefs should be constrained by the logic of probability." 14. You will learn lessons that are practical. "Rewards for improved performance work better than punishment of mistakes." 15. An interesting look at overconfidence. "Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance." "Remember this rule: intuition cannot be trusted in the absence of stable regularities in the environment." 16. Have you ever had to plan anything in your life? Meet the planning fallacy. "This may be considered the single most important piece of advice regarding how to increase accuracy in forecasting through improved methods. Using such distributional information from other ventures similar to that being forecasted is called taking an “outside view” and is the cure to the planning fallacy." 17. A very interesting look at Econs and Humans. "Economists adopted expected utility theory in a dual role: as a logic that prescribes how decisions should be made, and as a description of how Econs make choices." 18. Prospect theory explained. "The pain of losing $900 is more than 90% of the pain of losing $1,000. These two insights are the essence of prospect theory." 19. Avoiding poor psychology. "The conclusion is straightforward: the decision weights that people assign to outcomes are not identical to the probabilities of these outcomes, contrary to the expectation principle. Improbable outcomes are overweighted—this is the possibility effect. Outcomes that are almost certain are underweighted relative to actual certainty. The expectation principle, by which values are weighted by their probability, is poor psychology." 20. Great stuff on well being. 21. An excellent Conclusions chapter that ties the book up comprehensively. Negatives: 1. Notes not linked up. 2. No formal separate bibliography. 3. Requires an investment of time. Thankfully, the book is worthy of your time. 4. The book overall is very well-written and accessible but some topics are challenging. 5. Wanted more clarification on how Bayes's rules work. In summary, a masterpiece on behavioral economics. Dr. Kahneman shares his years of research and provides readers with an education on how the mind works. It requires an investment of your time but it so well worth it. A tremendous Kindle value don't hesitate to get this book. I highly recommend it! Further suggestions: "Subliminal" by Leonard Mlodinow, "Incognito" by David Eagleman, "Switch" by Chip and Dan Heath, “Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us” by Daniel H. Pink, “Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell, “The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg, “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't T Stop Talking” by Susan Cain, "The Social Animal" by David Brooks, "Who's In Charge" Michael S. Gazzaniga, "The Belief Instinct" by Jesse Bering, "50 Popular Beliefs that People Think Are True" by Guy P. Harrison, "The Believing Brain" by Michael Shermer, "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely, "Are You Sure?" by Ginger Campbell, and "Mistakes Were Made But Not By Me" by Carol Tavris.

## Features

- A good option for a Book Lover
- It comes with proper packaging
- Ideal for Gifting

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #416 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #1 in Cognitive Psychology (Books) #1 in Decision-Making & Problem Solving #1 in Medical Cognitive Psychology |
| Customer Reviews | 4.6 out of 5 stars 48,195 Reviews |

## Images

![Thinking, Fast and Slow - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61fdrEuPJwL.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ How to reconcile our two mental systems, and capitalize on the best each has to offer
*by H***S on June 15, 2020*

Thoughtful, applicable, insightful, entertaining. I enjoyed dissecting the numerous thought experiments and studies for merit that I could apply to my everyday thinking. System 1 and System 2 form the backbone of this book. System 1 is impulsive, and provides heuristic and intuitive guesses and reactions to stimuli without prompting. It can't be turned off. Why You See Is All There Is (WYSIATI). But it's also responsible for remarkably well-tuned intuitions, fast information-processing, "muscle memory," pattern-matching, intensity matching, face & situation recognition, and much of what makes human minds human. Author Daniel Kahneman points out situations in which System 1 is scientifically poor, including statistics (like the difference between 0.01% and 0.001%), random events, weighting time & duration in retrospect. System 2 is more calculated, requires devoted effort and concentration in rationalizing & making decisions. It assigns value to past events, keeps score, questions bias, and carries out more intensive, deliberate calculations involving more data. It's like fetching data from main memory, rather than relying on the cache. Kahneman's prose is rich with examples and experimental case studies, from visceral phenomena like pleasure vs. pain tolerance, and the tendency to derive general from specific, rather than the specific from the general (statistic).... to logic fallacies like optimism in planning, misjudging statistics, underestimating sampling, and sunk costs. He gives simple, easy-to-remember names to a lot of the phenomena he observed in studies, like the peak-end rule that describes how humans tend to judge pain or pleasure of a past event based on an average of how it ended and the peak of the experience, neglecting duration. He also provides solutions and checks & balances that can help us reduce bias, where possible. For example, to mitigate the planning fallacy, he writes: 1.) Identify an appropriate reference class. 2.) Obtain the statistics of the reference class. Use the statistics to generate a baseline prediction. 3.) Use specific information about the case to adjust the baseline prediction, if there are particular reasons to expect the optimistic bias to be more of less pronounced in this project than in others of the same type. The author's life experiences, from serving as an evaluator in the Israeli defense forces to publishing papers as a professor, inform many of the studies and give them a human element and interest to which I could easily relate. I also appreciate his emotion, adding exclamation points to the observations that surprised him, or proved him wrong. He writes in an unassuming, humble, curious way that made each anecdote or cited study a joy to read. Finally, I thought he -- and his editors -- divided the book brilliantly. Chapters are short, usually 8~16 pages, and they always concentrate on some nugget or fallacy that could be later referenced by a single term, like "anchoring," "regression to the mean," "the fourfold pattern," or "the halo effect." He builds up knowledge brick by brick, experiment by experiment, that after a few nights of reading, you begin to recognize fallacies and patterns in everyday life by the terms Kahneman has assigned to them. My favorite part of each chapter is the end: a short section of quotations that describe and use key terms from the chapter, in an everyday, relatable way. There are too many topics and quotes to list them all. Some of my favorites: "The best we can do is a compromise: learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high. The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people's mistakes than our own." "Self-control requires attention and effort." "His System 1 constructed a story, and his System 2 believed it. It happens to all of us." "They didn't want more information that might spoil their story. WYSIATI." "We often compute much more than we want or need. I call this excess computation the mental shotgun. It is impossible to aim at a single point with a shotgun because it shoots pellets that scatter, and it seems almost equally difficult for System 1 not to do more than System 2 charges it to do." "Money-primed people become more independent than they would be without the associative trigger." "He was asked whether he thought the company was financially sound, but he couldn't forget that he likes their product." "Our aim in the negotiation is to get them anchored on this number." "Let's make it clear that if that is their proposal, the negotiations are over. We do not want to start there." "When the evidence is weak, one should stick with the base rates." "They added a cheap gift to the expensive product, and made the whole deal less attractive. Less is more in this case." "System 1 can deal with stories in which the elements are causally linked, but it is weak in statistical reasoning." "The experiment shows that individuals feel relieved of responsibility when they know that others have heard the same request for help." "We can't assume that they will really learn anything from mere statistics. Let's show them one or two representative individual cases to influence their System 1." "But those with the most knowledge are often less reliable. The reason is that the person who acquires more knowledge develops an enhanced illusion of her skill and becomes unrealistically overconfident." "The question is not whether these experts are well trained. It is whether their world is predictable." "The research suggests a surprising conclusion: to maximize predictive accuracy, final decisions should be left to formulas, especially in low-validity environments." "In this view, people often (but not always) take on risky projects because they are overly optimistic about the odds they face." "A well-run organization will reward planners for precise execution and penalize them for failing to anticipate difficulties, and for failing to allow for difficulties that they could not have anticipated --the unknown unknowns." "She is the victim of a planning fallacy. She's assuming a best-case scenario, but there are too many different ways for the plan to fail, and she cannot foresee them all." "He weighs losses about twice as much as gains, which is normal." "Think like a trader! You win a few, you lose a few." "Decision makers tend to prefer the sure thing over the gamble (they are risk averse) when the outcomes are good. They tend to reject the sure thing and accept the gamble (they are risk seeking) when both outcomes are negative." "We are hanging on to that stock just to avoid closing our mental account at a loss. It's the disposition effect." "The salesperson showed me the most expensive car seat and said it was the safest, and I could not bring myself to buy the cheaper model. It felt like a taboo tradeoff." "Did he really have an opportunity to learn? How quick and how clear was the feedback he received on his judgments?" "We want pain to be brief and pleasure to last. But our memory, a function of System 1, has evolved to represent the most intense moment of an episode of pain or pleasure (the peak) and the feelings when the episode was at its end. A memory that neglects duration will not serve our preference for long pleasure and short pains." There are many, many more. Read the book for yourself and enjoy the wisdom!

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Brilliant!
*by B***K on January 12, 2014*

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman “Thinking, Fast and Slow” is a fascinating look at how the mind works. Drawing on knowledge acquired from years of research in cognitive and social psychology, Nobel Prize Winner, Dr. Daniel Kahneman delivers his magnum opus on Behavioral Economics. This excellent book focuses on the three key sets of distinctions: between the automatic System 1 and the effortful System 2, between the conception of agents in classical economics and in behavioral economics, and between the experiencing and the remembering selves. This enlightening 512-page book is composed of thirty-eight chapters and broken out by the following five Parts: Part I. Two Systems, Part II. Heuristics and Biases, Part III. Overconfidence, Part IV. Choices, and Part V. Two Selves. Positives: 1. Award-winning research. A masterpiece of behavioral economics knowledge. Overall accessible. 2. Fascinating topic in the hands of a master. How the mind works. The biases of intuition, judgment, and decision making. 3. Excellent format. Each chapter is well laid out and ends with a Speaking of section that summarizes the content via quotes. 4. A great job of defining and summarizing new terms. "In summary, most of what you (your System 2) think and do originates in your System 1, but System 2 takes over when things get difficult, and it normally has the last word." 5. Supports findings with countless research. Provides many accessible and practical examples that help readers understand the insightful conclusions. 6. A great job of letting us what we know and to what degree. "It is now a well-established proposition that both self-control and cognitive effort are forms of mental work." 7. You are guaranteed to learn something. Countless tidbits of knowledge throughout this insightful book and how it applies to the read world. "The best possible account of the data provides bad news: tired and hungry judges tend to fall back on the easier default position of denying requests for parole. Both fatigue and hunger probably play a role." 8. The differences of Systems 1 and 2 and how they function with one another. "System 1 is impulsive and intuitive; System 2 is capable of reasoning, and it is cautious, but at least for some people it is also lazy." "System 1 is gullible and biased to believe, System 2 is in charge of doubting and unbelieving, but System 2 is sometimes busy, and often lazy." 9. Important recurring concepts like WYSIATI (What You See Is All There IS). "You surely understand in principle that worthless information should not be treated differently from a complete lack of information, but WYSIATI makes it very difficult to apply that principle." 10. Understanding heuristics and biases. "The strong bias toward believing that small samples closely resemble the population from which they are drawn is also part of a larger story: we are prone to exaggerate the consistency and coherence of what we see. The exaggerated faith of researchers in what can be learned from a few observations is closely related to the halo effect, the sense we often get that we know and understand a person about whom we actually know very little. System 1 runs ahead of the facts in constructing a rich image on the basis of scraps of evidence. A machine for jumping to conclusions will act as if it believed in the law of small numbers. More generally, it will produce a representation of reality that makes too much sense." 11. Paradoxical results for your enjoyment. "People are less confident in a choice when they are asked to produce more arguments to support it." 12. Understanding how our brains work, "The world in our heads is not a precise replica of reality; our expectations about the frequency of events are distorted by the prevalence and emotional intensity of the messages to which we are exposed." 13. Wisdom. "'Risk' does not exist 'out there,' independent of our minds and culture, waiting to be measured. Human beings have invented the concept of “risk” to help them understand and cope with the dangers and uncertainties of life. Although these dangers are real, there is no such thing as 'real risk' or 'objective risk.'" Bonus. "To be useful, your beliefs should be constrained by the logic of probability." 14. You will learn lessons that are practical. "Rewards for improved performance work better than punishment of mistakes." 15. An interesting look at overconfidence. "Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance." "Remember this rule: intuition cannot be trusted in the absence of stable regularities in the environment." 16. Have you ever had to plan anything in your life? Meet the planning fallacy. "This may be considered the single most important piece of advice regarding how to increase accuracy in forecasting through improved methods. Using such distributional information from other ventures similar to that being forecasted is called taking an “outside view” and is the cure to the planning fallacy." 17. A very interesting look at Econs and Humans. "Economists adopted expected utility theory in a dual role: as a logic that prescribes how decisions should be made, and as a description of how Econs make choices." 18. Prospect theory explained. "The pain of losing $900 is more than 90% of the pain of losing $1,000. These two insights are the essence of prospect theory." 19. Avoiding poor psychology. "The conclusion is straightforward: the decision weights that people assign to outcomes are not identical to the probabilities of these outcomes, contrary to the expectation principle. Improbable outcomes are overweighted—this is the possibility effect. Outcomes that are almost certain are underweighted relative to actual certainty. The expectation principle, by which values are weighted by their probability, is poor psychology." 20. Great stuff on well being. 21. An excellent Conclusions chapter that ties the book up comprehensively. Negatives: 1. Notes not linked up. 2. No formal separate bibliography. 3. Requires an investment of time. Thankfully, the book is worthy of your time. 4. The book overall is very well-written and accessible but some topics are challenging. 5. Wanted more clarification on how Bayes's rules work. In summary, a masterpiece on behavioral economics. Dr. Kahneman shares his years of research and provides readers with an education on how the mind works. It requires an investment of your time but it so well worth it. A tremendous Kindle value don't hesitate to get this book. I highly recommend it! Further suggestions: "Subliminal" by Leonard Mlodinow, "Incognito" by David Eagleman, "Switch" by Chip and Dan Heath, “Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us” by Daniel H. Pink, “Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell, “The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg, “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't T Stop Talking” by Susan Cain, "The Social Animal" by David Brooks, "Who's In Charge" Michael S. Gazzaniga, "The Belief Instinct" by Jesse Bering, "50 Popular Beliefs that People Think Are True" by Guy P. Harrison, "The Believing Brain" by Michael Shermer, "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely, "Are You Sure?" by Ginger Campbell, and "Mistakes Were Made But Not By Me" by Carol Tavris.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ A scientist's look at how we think
*by P***S on January 14, 2012*

A scientist's look at how we think Review of Kahneman's Thinking, fast and slow by Paul F. Ross A friend called Kahneman's book to my attention. I purchased it immediately and put it at the top of my stack of "to be read" books. Having finished the read just a day ago, writing my impressions immediately is important to catching the details of my observations, the yin and yang of this book. The work, indeed, captures my high interest. Kahneman, psychologist at Princeton University, is known for his work on understanding people as they interact with "the economy," work Kahneman did in concert with Amos Tversky. The work won the 2002 Nobel prize in economics for having persuaded economists that humans, contrary to the assumptions long a part of economists' theories of people as economic actors, do _____________________________________________________________________________________ Kahneman, Daniel Thinking, fast and slow 2011, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York NY, vi + 499 pages _____________________________________________________________________________________ not always consider all the information available to them and make choices in their own individual best interests with respect to wealth. The difference between Econs and Humans, these labels adopted from today's economist Richard Thaler, is one of the continuing themes of Kahneman's story. Daniel Bernoulli (d. 1782, he and Adam Smith working at the same time ... there being not a single reference in Kahneman to Adam Smith) proposed that people make their economic choices so as to maximize the decision-maker's own wealth. Kahneman sees too many economists today, including several from the highly regarded (University of) Chicago School, as accepting this erroneous view of economic actors (as Econs) and failing to understand that people (as Humans) are influenced in their choices by many circumstances well beyond the decision's outcome as it affects the decision-maker's wealth. This book is Kahneman's explanation for the general reader about the work which won the Nobel prize. In thirty nine chapters divided into five parts, Kahneman makes distinctions between Econs and Humans, between associative memory that thinks fast using simplified relationships (he calls it System 1) and analytical mental processes which think slowly and, prodded into doing work, can cope with complexity (he calls it System 2), between heuristics and biases in thinking, between choices as Econs make choices and choices as Humans make choices, between the influence of the decision's frame and the details of the choice itself, between broadly framed decision-making and narrowly focused decision-making. The publisher reprints as appendices the 1974 paper in Science by Tversky and Kahneman (Judgment under uncertainty: heuristics and biases) and the 1984 paper in American Psychologist by Kahneman and Tversky (Choices, values, and frames) which were key steps in winning widespread recognition for their work. "Prospect theory," described in their 1984 paper, was a step in their thinking that showed the sharp distinction Humans make between gains and losses. Kahneman and Tversky can be classified among the behavioral economists who do experiments with people in choice-making exercises to uncover the regularities and irregularities in, the influences upon, peoples' decisions. I thoroughly enjoy this work by Kahneman (Tversky died in 1996) especially because it shows so distinctly the observed-in-experiments, evidence-based foundations for psychology and psychology's claim to understanding human behavior. I enthusiastically recommend the read for those thoughtfully interested in people and people-effects on our individual lives as well as our shared lives in organizations, governments, and cultures. Walk up and down the aisles of the local large bookstore looking for psychology and one finds self help books that present "ways to think about" our lives, implying by their very structure and presentation that all one needs to do to understand self and others is to take thought. That's pure nonsense, yet that's the modal view - actually it's almost the only view - of how psychological science gets built. For those willing to read the footnotes, Kahneman thoroughly undoes this view. Psychology, as all psychologists should know, is built upon empirical investigations of human behavior. It is something of a bitter joke that it should take two psychologists to persuade economists that human beings make economic decisions using inputs well beyond the wealth-maximizing rule posited by Bernoulli in the 18th century. Yet, as Kahneman states so clearly in his chapter titled Conclusions, there are still many economists who continue to use the Econ model of the human being as the individual economic actor. The subject of economics is taught in universities with Econ as the decision-making universal actor for all humankind. The Econ model is simply incomplete as a model for the individual actor and obviously even has its difficulties in accurately forecasting group behavior as we are learning through hard lessons in our inadequately understood attempts in Keynesian economics following the 2008-2009 economic downturn, efforts we make as we grope for economic recovery. Begin reading Kahneman's book by first reading the chapter on Conclusions, the last in the book. While that may prove a bit difficult because of the unfamiliar concepts presented as key words or phrases (Econs, Humans, System 1, System 2, prospect theory, utility theory, etc. etc.), the reader can quickly learn some of the handles that Kahneman uses and, particularly, the view of politics and society from which he thinks and writes. Then, of course, read the Conclusions again as you finish the book. Very much admiring this work by the behavioral economists and by the neurobiologists in exploring human behavior with respect to economic choices, I'm also critical. Psychologists and thoughtful readers need to know not only the achievements of this work but also its shortfalls ... thus perhaps avoiding frustrations in the reading and errors of overgeneralization for the findings. First, one of the rules of science is that it seek the simplest possible explanations for the phenomena being explored. Kahneman has the difficult task of speaking from and to both psychological and economics backgrounds, sometimes also adding neuroscience. In taking on that task, he refers to concepts and data from all three disciplines. Sometimes the concepts are closely related, almost duplicates. Needing to communicate with two or three highly specialized audiences, Kahneman uses the several terminologies and offers the reader no charts or tables listing, classifying, and simplifying the concepts. A tour through the book's index turns up ... affect heuristic, anchoring index, associative coherence, associative memory, availability cascades, baseline predictions, base rates, broad framing, broken-leg rule, causal base rates, causal stereotypes, cognitive ease, cognitive illusion, cognitive strain, coherence, competition neglect, confirmation bias, conjunction fallacy, decision utility, decision weights, decorrelated errors, default options, disposition effect, duration neglect, duration weighting, econs, ego depletion, emotional coherence, endowment effect, evaluability hypothesis, expectation principle, expected utility theory, experienced utility, flowers syllogism, focusing illusion, fourfold pattern, halo effect, happiness, hedonimeter, hubris hypothesis, ideomotor effect, indifference map, joint evaluations, judgment heuristics, law of small numbers, less-is-more pattern, loss aversion, loss aversion ratio, mental shotgun, narrative fallacy, narrow framing, negativity dominance, neuroeconomics, norm theory, one-sided evidence, optimistic bias, outcome bias, peak-end rule, planning fallacy, possibility effect, precautionary principle, preference reversals, pretentiousness language, priming, probability neglect, professional stereotypes, prospect theory, psychopathic charm, rational-agent model, reciprocal priming, recognition-primed decision, reference class forecasting, retrievability of instances, risk assessment, risk aversion, risk seeking, selves, single evaluations, somatic marker hypothesis, structured settlements, sum-like variables, sunk-cost fallacy, System 1, System 2, theory-induced blindness, utility theory, validity, vividness, wealth, well-being, WYSIATI ... and this is indeed a complex mapping of what is intended to be a joined and simplified configuration explaining human thinking particularly as it is exercised in decisions about economic choices. I respect Kahneman's intent. His characterization of System 1 and System 2 is an important and simplified communication. I think he could do an even better job at simplifying what he is teaching, particularly by using tables and other means for classifying, grouping, his concepts. Of course, other bright people have similar problems. The physicists have their Standard Model of seventeen particles and forces classified as fermions and bosons, quarks and leptons, and that is not simple enough to allow the rest of us to keep firmly in mind what these seventeen particles-forces and several classifications mean ... nor does it explain mass, astronomy's dark matter, or even gravity! Communicating science simply often is no easy task. However it is an essential task if science is to have any use beyond mental stimulation. This reader demands that science, in its most valuable form, be useful. Communicating science simply is a task that must be mastered on the way to making one's science maximally useful. Kahneman, as do the behavioral economists generally, is reporting experiments that have been run, primarily, with college students as participants ... and not even with a representative group of college students. They come heavily from UC Berkeley, U of Oregon, Michigan U ... very selective places where Kahneman and Tversky have taught and their graduate students have done work in the mode of their teachers. A few years ago I entered a conversation with a respected colleague, a colleague much better informed than am I on these matters, at The Ohio State University. "Psychology built upon studies with college sophomores must be questioned," I insisted. "Not so," he responded. "The work frequently generalizes well to the general population." The work Kahneman highlights so well in this book is work built heavily upon experiments run with college students as the participants. Despite these assurances from very able scholars, I cannot brush from my memory the very impressive account that Herrnstein and Murray (1994) presented in their controversial The bell curve which followed a representative cohort of American youth through a rather lengthy part of their life span (maybe age 12 to age 42 ... I don't recall accurately and, as I write now, am setting aside the task of looking it up). The work showed that life as experienced by youth at the high end of the bell curve on intelligence was a very, very different experience from life experienced by youth at the low end. Those at the low end seemed to find life a blooming, buzzing confusion and they got into lots of trouble. Their minds worked differently from the minds of their peers who found themselves to be college eligible and, in many instances, got that education. The evidence was overwhelmingly clear in life's outcomes (current income, marriage, need for and use of social support networks, use of drugs, crime rates, divorce, time in jail, . . .). The people in this longitudinal study had not yet reached the ends of their lives! Having taken the Herrnstein and Murray findings to heart, I think I might be relatively safe in transferring what I learn in Kahneman's book to the professionals and executives I have met in working with organizational leaders, but I'm still not convinced, despite my colleague's assurance from his superior and more current knowledge, that findings learned with college students as the participants can be assumed to be true for all human beings. The behavioral and management sciences (psychology and economics included) receive a tiny fraction of the world's R&D funding. They are regarded by the college educated populations of the world as second class sciences, at best, and probably not sciences at all. Kahneman's book is a stout statement very much, and appropriately, in the face of this non-knowledge. But to win public support and public funding, to have what is known by these sciences at work in reducing problems that the world faces every day, to see these sciences contribute practices that enhance human well-being, it is absolutely essential that what the sciences know be communicated to opinion leaders - those who escaped college without having learned much about these sciences - in a way that is accurate, clear, and understandable. As shown by the list of ideas from the index of Kahneman's book, I think Kahneman has not yet formed the clearest and most communicable framework for his core ideas and that he, like the rest of us, needs to spend more time practicing communication with able people (non-scientist students and adults) and converting what he learns into written form. Our behavioral and management sciences have much they already know that could significantly relieve problems and add immensely to well-being. Accomplishing those prospective outcomes depends upon us scientists communicating what we know to audiences like those Kahneman is addressing in this book. Read this book. You'll find you've profited. Bellevue, Washington 19 December 2011 References Herrnstein, Richard J. and Murray, Charles The bell curve: Intelligence and class structure in American life 1994, The Free Press, New York NY Kahneman, Daniel Thinking, fast and slow 2011, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York NY Copyright (c) 2011 by Paul F. Ross All rights reserved.

## Frequently Bought Together

- Thinking, Fast and Slow
- Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
- Man's Search for Meaning

---

## Why Shop on Desertcart?

- 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016
- 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories
- 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price
- 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members)
- 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection
- ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews

**Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.hr/products/219959-thinking-fast-and-slow](https://www.desertcart.hr/products/219959-thinking-fast-and-slow)

---

*Product available on Desertcart Croatia*
*Store origin: HR*
*Last updated: 2026-05-26*