Thinking, Fast and Slow

We like to believe that we know how our minds work, but the reality is that much of our mental activity -- how we think, how we perceive the world, and how we make decisions -- remains a mystery.  In fact, the basic assumption that humans behave rationally, according to logic and reason, has been proven false.

Daniel Kahneman, who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his research into cognitive biases, published his key findings in his 2011 best-seller Thinking, Fast and Slow. 

Kahneman is professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.  He was recognized by Foreign Policy magazine as a “top global thinker” in 2011 and by The Economist as the seventh most influential economist in the world in 2015.

Thinking, Fast and Slow was named one of the best books of 2011 by The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The New York Times Book Review, and the Globe and Mail. New York Times columnist David Brooks compared Kahneman and his colleague Amos Tversky to “the Lewis and Clark of the mind.”  Brooks argues that their research is “a crucial pivot point in the way we see ourselves” that it “will be remembered hundreds of years from now.”