Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow has been hugely influential in improving our understanding of decision making. It has been described as a masterpiece and, indeed, it is full of wisdom that we can apply to all aspects of our lives.
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It is a dense read and to help you benefit from his wisdom, we’ve selected some of the key messages from his book for you here:

1. Our brain thinks in two ways: fast and slow. Fast thinking is low effort, intuitive, and unconscious. Slow thinking requires mental effort, needs focus, and requires self control.
2. Fast thinking leads us to jump to conclusions. Be conscious of this and remember to stop and think slowly and consciously about problems that are important. This will help you avoid biases, the halo effect, and other decision-impairing influences.
3. Our actions and emotions can be primed by events of which we are not aware of. For example the sight of people in uniforms can stifle creativity or when we look for flaws we find them. It’s worth considering how the priming of a situation can impact the outcome. So if you are working on something creative prime yourself for this or if you need to concentrate on something put a picture of Rodin’s The Thinker within sight.
4. Mood has a powerful effect on our thinking. Good mood, intuition, creativity, and gullibility are all associated with fast thinking while sadness, vigilance, suspicion, an analytical approach, and increased effort are all associated with slow thinking. Therefore, if you need to make an important decision and carefully think through the pros and cons then it’s worth grounding yourself first.
5. When we are familiar with something we are much more likely to like it and/or believe it. But this is mere exposure effect. So don’t automatically dismiss the unfamiliar.
6. We like to think that everything happens for a reason when often it’s just good or bad luck. For example, bumping into a friend in a random place is just a coincidence rather than they were stalking you :-)
7. Our fast thinking likes to jump to conclusions. So don’t assume specific traits of somebody just because you have taken an immediate like or dislike to them.
8. Our fast thinking also judges somebody without us noticing and this influences us. For example, a photo of a political candidate. Our brain immediately evaluates traits such as dominance and this influences our opinion of them.
9. If our fast thinking part of the brain can’t find an answer to a difficult question immediately - it will answer a different question, i.e. ‘Is this house good value for money?’ is easily replaced with ‘Do I like this house?’. Be aware of whether you are answering the right questions and draw on your slow thinking part of our brain to think through the question and answer.

We have been fascinated by the many lessons in this book and how we can put them to use in everyday work and personal situations. By being aware of how our brains think we can make much better decisions, be less influenced by advertising, and let our wonder womanness flourish.

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