THINKING, FAST AND SLOW by Daniel Kahneman (2011), Allen Lane - an
imprint of Penguin Books, p 499
Last week while my wife was shopping from
a small departmental store at Shillong, she observed one of the vendor (from
Hindustan Unilever) talking to the shopkeeper and insisting on keeping Ponds
Talcum powder on the shelf, the shopkeeper responded by showing the old
stock. The shopkeeper was telling him the feedback of the customers
- 'the customers these days want deo, not talcum powder'. His response
was driven by the fact that there is a shift in the customer choice driven by
the change in the time, expectations, competitor's response, etc etc.
While she shared her experience with me, I
was also thinking that with the emergence of new products the old ones are
fading off. The choices which the customer is making in the market is
also the effect of aggressive advertising and increase in the purchasing power.
It was sheer a coincidence that I was going through this book entitled 'Thinking Fast and Slow' by
Daniel Kahneman. This book was able to answer some such questions.
How the decisions are taken? Which is a better choice? Why do people
think what they think? Why things/people are not as they look? There were many
such questions which kept pondering over my head and I began to connect them
with the contents of the book.
I heard and learnt about Daniel Kahneman
only through the accolades that he received after getting the Nobel Prize in
the area of economic sciences in 2002. It was precisely the year when I
started teaching organizational behaviour though it had been a subject very
close to my heart and I have been reading related literature. There was a
time (some 25 years back) when I developed interest in Psychology during the
period I was doing masters (commerce), I wish we had Psychology as a subject in
our college.
Later while in teaching profession, I went
through some papers of Kahneman and could always share the learning with
students and colleagues whenever I got chance.
When I read the review of this book after its release, I acquired a copy
and started reading it. I should not say just reading it, rather studying it,
which included, lot of breaks in between as I wanted to read some of the cited
works in the book, so honestly it took much more than an usual time which I
take to complete reading a book. I think if I recollect, I might not have taken
this much time of reading a book as I took for this title. The experience
of going through this book made me so rich through innumerable downloads of
related material, scanning through some of the experiments available on the
web, buying some of the books, and going through cited work in depth in few
cases.
As the title suggests, the whole book
classifies the thinking process through two systems, System 1 (thinking fast),
and System 2 (thinking slow). System
1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of
voluntary control, and System
2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including
complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated
with the subjective experience of agency, choice and concentration (p 20-21). As mentioned in the book System
1 and System 2 as terms were first used by Keith Stanovich and Richard West,
who call it now Type 1 and Type 2. Kahneman uses the original version. With numerous experiments and illustrations he establishes the
practicality of these two systems which invariably operate while we make
choices, decisions, judgments and calculations. The use (and also the
conflict) of these two systems by an individual in different circumstances
portray mental conditioning and preferences. System 2 is primarily used
to overcome the impulses of System 1, which is in charge of self control.
Many times we suffer from bias, using
system 1 and falling prey to mis-judge the outcome. Many times the
illusory sense dominates over the factual existence of the object as
projected through Muller-Lyer illusion. The bat and ball puzzle
(originally devised by Shane Frederick) is so apt that one makes judgment
without using System 2 and over estimating the conformity through System 1. While I was
reading Malcolm Gladwell's BLINK,
it made lot of sense to believe on the gut feel, which is based on System 1,
though the decision or judgment not always leading to the correct view.
As one keeps turning the pages of the book it becomes more and more
convincing that one needs to take time in decision making and not necessarily
that one has to go by the gut always, which increases the degree of risk one
bears on making choices based on System 1.
As known, Kahneman and Amos Tversky had
questioned the belief that by nature human being are rational and in case of
emotions as fear, anger, hatred, affection, people depart from rationality. This book discusses and defends their stand through applied psychological
frameworks, findings of various experiments and works of many researchers.
Divided in five parts comprising of 38 different chapters, with the ‘speaking
of …’ statements at the end of each chapter, the book strongly narrates the
causation factor of decisions, making choices out of different alternatives,
the follies of statistics, risk policies, etc.
I remember vividly about the media reports
on Kahneman’s Nobel achievement which highlighted Irrationality of stock investors, however what he emphasizes is no rationality. The
argument of irrationality not being opposite of rationality is quite firm and
convincing. This is where Dan Ariely's contribution becomes more relevant. Kahneman's acceptance of Dan's work is well placed in this context. The learning through the book is immense. At many instances where I was to use System 1, I chose System 2, which
took little more time.
Richard Layard, dedicated his book -
Happiness, lessons from a new science, to Daniel Kahneman. Richard
mentions in his book that it was Kahneman who opined that happiness can be
measured. Kahneman developed a tool named as Day Reconstruction Method
(DRM) based on remembering self and experiencing self which reports on the
feelings of individuals. DRM is used by many researchers in different
geographies to measure the satisfaction level which is used as a proxy of
well-being.
The book conveys vehemently the basic
premise that it is
easier to recognize other people's mistakes than our own (p 28), whether we think fast using system
1 or we think slow using system 2. The book is strongly recommended for the students of contemporary psychology.
