So, for example, in a section on how a bias can be created by 'priming' the subject with information, he talks about a paper which demonstrates how people exposed to money are apparently likely to be mean and then congratulates the author of the paper for not hammering the obvious conclusion home (giving the impression he has merely been primed to come to that conclusion himself). Some statements, like the idea that people struggle to hold six-digit numbers in short term memory (something I do every day as part of my job) or that it's not possible to walk quickly and think at the same time, are just the author projecting his own limitations onto his audience, others show more serious failings.

And yet the book is filled with demonstrably flawed research and spurious conclusions.

Not only does admit that it isn't widely accepted in the field, at various points he attempts to bludgeon the reader into accepting as gospel some wild piece of speculation by accusing doubters of being everything from depressed to autistic. This leads him to some improbable claims: for example, treating the association of tattoos to the lower orders as if it were some kind of genetic programming, when anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of cultural history would be aware the tattoos started as a trapping of a societal elite and only gained their current associations gradually.Īnd it's clear that Kahneman himself isn't entirely confident in his theory. Unfortunately, it's also too simple and the author's mistake is that he takes it as almost a complete blueprint for human beings, not just failing to take into account the impact of learning on intuition, but rejecting it outright. The premise of the book, that our brain is divided into two systems: system 1 for fast, intuitive thinking system 2 for detailed, analytical thinking is both attractive and superficially reasonable. Having watched Horizon's documentary: 'How You Really Think' and finding the basic idea interesting, but the detail somewhat weak, I thought maybe the book would be better. There's something almost amusingly ironic about a book which purports to explain how the brain works written by someone clearly lacking in self-awareness.

Thinking fast and slow book review