Thinking, Fast and Slow

The godfather of behavioural science . . . Kahneman’s steely analysis of the human mind and its many flaws remains perhaps the most useful guide to remaining sane and steady — Josh Glancy ? The Sunday Times

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.Kahneman, a winner of the Nobel Prize for economics, distils a lifetime of research into an encyclopedic coverage of both the surprising miracles and the equally surprising mistakes of our conscious and unconscious thinking. He achieves an even greater miracle by weaving his insights into an engaging narrative that is compulsively readable from beginning to end. My main problem in doing this review was preventing family members and friends from stealing my copy of the book to read it for themselves…this is one of the greatest and most engaging collections of insights into the human mind I have read — William Easterly ? Financial Times

Absorbing, intriguing…By making us aware of our minds’ tricks, Kahneman hopes to inspire individuals and organisations to identify strategies to outwit them — Jenni Russell ? Sunday Times

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

[Thinking, Fast and Slow] is wonderful, of course. 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

It is an astonishingly rich book: lucid, profound, full of intellectual surprises and self-help value. It is consistently entertaining and frequently touching, especially when Kahneman is recounting his collaboration with Tversky . . . 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.’ They are, Brooks said, ‘like the Lewis and Clark of the mind’ . . . By the time I got to the end of Thinking, Fast and Slow, my skeptical frown had long since given way to a grin of intellectual satisfaction. Appraising the book by the peak-end rule, I overconfidently urge everyone to buy and read it. But for those who are merely interested in Kahenman’s takeaway on the Malcolm Gladwell question it is this: If you’ve had 10,000 hours of training in a predictable, rapid-feedback environment-chess, firefighting, anesthesiology-then blink. In all other cases, think ? The New York Times Book Review

[Kahneman’s] disarmingly simple experiments have profoundly changed the way that we think about thinking . . . We like to see ourselves as a Promethean species, uniquely endowed with the gift of reason. But Mr. Kahneman’s simple experiments reveal a very different mind, stuffed full of habits that, in most situations, lead us astray — Jonah Lehrer ? The Wall Street Journal

This is a landmark book in social thought, in the same league as The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smithand The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud — Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of ‘The Black Swan’