Wednesday, August 8, 2018

Book Report

Thinking Fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman is a book that dives into the difficult task of looking at the way humans think and more specifically the way humans deal with irrationality. His book is essentially written in three phases following his research. His first phase dove into the topic of our mishaps in reasoning that subconsciously happen to people sometimes.One of these effects looks at the way that irrelevant numbers have played a factor in peoples decision making. He also touches on the way that peoples decisions making is not always in the thought process of what economist would think consumer do that would be to maximize utility. The later part of the book covers Kahnemans last part research was deals with human happiness.
      Even Being more specific the book really focuses on the relationship of the two modes of thought System 1 and Systems 2. System 1 is the system that deals with fast instinctual and emotional feelings while system 2 deals with the much slower logical reasoning of the human mind. My favorite part of the book was its ability to describe what he calls the anchoring effect. The anchoring effect is a theory that looks at our tendency to be effected by and make decisions regarding the influence of random numbers. In short when he ran experiments people who were shown higher or lower numbers were just in line with giving higher and lower responses. The experiment showed on how much a environment could effect our decision making.  In the lecture we looked at the ways we think and how there are different modes of thinking  from people who think more selfishly to people who are more sensitive and think about others around them. It makes me wonder that if people really took to this idea that ones environment plays a large role in ones final decision what in this world could be changed and even from a economical stand point what people want compared to what they need might always be changed by the environment that they are immersed in. 
     This book helped me understand why some humans make error in judgement and also reinforce the idea that no body is perfect and everybody is subject to making mistake. The book also served me as a self help book as it allowed me to look at maybe the reasons why I sometimes make the wrong judgement call on certain subjects. The book allowed me to maybe realize when I was relying to much on system one thinking while I could of maybe used more logic and slowed down the pace of things and really think about all the evidence and inputs before coming to a solution.

Here is a link to the author describing the Theories in his book. it really helped me understand what he was trying to talk about : https://youtu.be/CjVQJdIrDJ0


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