Book of the week: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

In his first book written for a lay audience, the cognitive psychologist and 2002 Nobel Prize winner draws an insightful portrait of how human beings make decisions.

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30)

When it comes to making decisions, you’re pretty ill-equipped, said Christopher F. Chabris in The Wall Street Journal. Not to worry, though. According to cognitive psychologist Daniel Kahneman, so is everybody else around you. In his first book written for a lay audience, the 2002 Nobel Prize winner has condensed five decades of groundbreaking research into a “tour de force of psychological insight.” Kahneman’s findings “overturn the assumption that human beings are rational decision-makers who weigh all the relevant factors logically before making choices.” Rather, when we’re faced with decisions, we often get them drastically wrong because we’re of two minds: “System 1,” which makes quick, intuitive decisions grounded in associative memory, and “System 2,” which reasons deliberatively, but requires time and energy and therefore often lets System 1’s judgments stand.

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