Fast thinking, slow thinking

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Fast thinking, slow thinking (English original title: Thinking, Fast and Slow ) is a book by Daniel Kahneman , which summarizes his research from several decades, often carried out together with Amos Tversky . The central thesis is the distinction between two types of thinking: the fast, instinctive and emotional system 1 and the slower, thoughtful and more logical system 2 . The book describes cognitive distortions in the thinking of System 1, and offers a broad cross-section of research results from the so-called heuristics-and-biases school, which was founded by Tversky and Kahneman in the 1970s. The English-language original edition was published on October 25, 2011 under the title Thinking, Fast and Slow , the German translation in May 2012.

Two systems

In the first part of the book, Kahneman describes the two different ways in which the brain thinks:

  • System 1: Fast, automatic, always active, emotional, stereotyping, unconscious
  • System 2: Slow, strenuous, rarely active, logical, calculating, conscious

Kahneman describes a series of experiments that highlight the differences between the two thought processes and shows how the two systems often come to different conclusions.

The system 2 is quickly "lazy", "busy and exhausted". The author describes the phenomenon of " priming " of certain views through certain stimulus words.

He describes how “cognitive ease” promotes certain unrealistic ways of thinking.

He also explains how the brain comes to hasty conclusions based on incomplete or incorrect information ( Halo effect ; "What you see is all there is" - WYSIATI).

The subchapter on judgment examines how difficult it is for the brain to think statistically on the basis of quantities.

In a subsection on heuristics (rules of thumb), Kahneman shows how people replace difficult-to-answer questions with easier ones.

Heuristics and cognitive biases

The second part examines some of the points raised from Part I in more detail. It explains why people find it difficult to think statistically correctly; B. in cases where only small amounts of data are available. To do this, Kahneman uses the theory of heuristics . Examples of heuristics of System 1 are the anchor heuristic , the replacement of a difficult question with a simpler one, and the representativity heuristic .

He also describes several other effects that can reduce cognitive performance in making decisions:

  • incomplete but randomly available information is overrated
  • Information gaps are ignored in the assessment.
  • People often quickly invent causal connections between two events that are not related at all. In contrast, inferences from frequencies are reluctant to draw.
  • Natural statistical spreads of events that deviate significantly from the actually more probable mean are considered representative (" regression to mean ")

Overconfidence

According to Kahneman, the most important cognitive biases include the tendency to have too much confidence in one's own knowledge and other forms of over-optimism, such as the planning fallacy .

Another phenomenon is the illusion of having foreseen a catastrophe or a problem (using the example of the economic crisis in 2008), because one does not (exactly) remember one's own attitude.

decisions

In this section, Kahneman turns he developed prospect theory (dt. New expectations theory ) to. He writes about the tendency to view problems in isolation and how the choice of framing can have a massive impact on decisions.

Two selves

Kahneman discusses the difference between two different perspectives on well-being: the well-being of the “remembering self”, which people state in retrospect, for example after a painful medical procedure, and the actually experienced well-being of the “experiencing self”. If test persons are asked to report their perceived pain in short intervals during a procedure, then the pain experienced corresponds to the "total" of all these pain sensations, i.e. the area under the curve of the pain intensity over time. The two dimensions differ from one another - for the retrospective assessment it is almost irrelevant how long the procedure lasted. For example, if a person experiences a pain that is felt to be constant, if the duration is twice the pain experienced would be twice as great, but the pain remembered would change only slightly.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jim Holt: Two Brains Running . In: The New York Times , November 27, 2011, p. 16. 
  2. ↑ Daniel Kahneman: Fast Thinking, Slow Thinking . Siedler Verlag, Munich, from American English by Thorsten Schmidt, June 27, 2012, ISBN 978-3-88680-886-1 (accessed April 4, 2014). Original: Daniel Kahneman: Thinking, Fast and Slow . Macmillan, October 25, 2011, ISBN 978-1-4299-6935-2, (Retrieved April 8, 2012).
  3. ↑ The hardcover ( ISBN 978-0-374-27563-1 ); since May 2012 also available as paperback: Penguin Books, ISBN 978-0-14-103357-0 . Kindle Edition B005MJFA2W