Daniel Kahneman, born March 5, 1934 in Tel Aviv, is an Israeli-Israeli psychologist and economist, professor at Princeton University, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2002. An exceptional event because the laureate is above all a psychologist.
Simply, since the early 1970s, his work in the psychology of knowledge and decision have sought to challenge the fundamental rationality of thought, the foundation of neoclassical economic theories.
Take a breath before you dive into the 500 pages of this fascinating book that explains why our way of thinking leads us very regularly to make errors of judgment. Because if we can be victims of optical illusions, we are much more often of cognitive illusions. The whole book demonstrates it and you can experiment with it yourself thanks to the many small educational tests that are offered.
An example to be convinced: you are in the subway and between a passenger who starts reading the Newspaper. In your opinion, is this person more likely to have a PhD or not have a post-secondary education? You look for the PhD, while the number of people without higher education taking the subway is much larger than that of people with a doctorate. Daniel Kahneman enters the meanders of our reasoning and explains everything that can lead us to make mistakes. Of course, all of his results come from tests of behavior in the laboratory and nothing assures that people would always react in the same way in real life. Yet we come out frightened of how our emotions, our mood, what we have done or heard just before, or our ability to build relationships where there is none distort our judgment.
In his latest book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, he gives us the secrets of our conscious and unconscious way of thinking, divided into two systems. For Daniel Kahneman, our thinking is composed of two systems:
The first, fast thinking is unconscious, intuitive, natural. "This system simplifies the events and uses a system of idea association to produce a quick sketch of a given situation. He responds to situations with modeled solutions.
The second, slow thinking, uses more thinking, reasoning and requires much more effort. It is difficult to operate because there are too many things to analyze.
What is certain is that it is the fast thinking that governs our decisions. These are our intuitions and Daniel Kahneman emphasizes "the failings of this system that gives the impression of widespread irrationality in men. "
In fact, given its predominance, System 1 is certainly responsible for our mistakes but also for our successes. Our mistakes? Yes since he can not analyze all the probabilities and models of situations. It does not, for example, take into account the arrival of exceptional events.
According to Daniel Kahneman, we are dominated by fast thinking and the dictatorship of intuition, including subject matter experts. In order for them to be able to operate the system 2, they would have to prepare and train themselves in particular situations so that the system 1 could respond adequately and modeled. But that's partly unrealistic. Yes, this training can be applied to a chess game but how to predict the outcome of a conflict. It's impossible.
Unfortunately, ordinary people will not be able to escape the decisions that come from their intuitions.
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