Friday, February 10, 2012

ASET Book Club

Join the Arizona Society of Economics Teachers Book Club to discuss Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman on Wednesday, February 22, 2012. Please email programs@azecon.org for more information.

Date: February 22, 2012
Time: 5:45 - 7:45 p.m.
Location:

Arizona Council on Economic Education office
3260 North Hayden Road, Suite 207
Scottsdale, Arizona 85251

Excellent Reviews

Book Review: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
A Nobel laureate’s new book cautions us not to trust our gut
By Roger Lowenstein


Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman’s new and most accessible book, contains much that is familiar to those who have followed this debate within the world of economics, but it also has a lot to say about how we think, react, and reach—rather, jump to—conclusions in all spheres. What most interests Kahneman are the predictable ways that errors of judgment occur.

Synthesizing decades of his research, as well as that of colleagues, Kahneman lays out an architecture of human decision-making—a map of the mind that resembles a finely tuned machine with, alas, some notable trapdoors and faulty wiring.


http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/book-review-thinking-fast-and-slow-by-daniel-kahneman-10272011.html

New York Times Review

System 2, in Kahneman’s scheme, is our slow, deliberate, analytical and consciously effortful mode of reasoning about the world. System 1, by contrast, is our fast, automatic, intuitive and largely unconscious mode. It is System 1 that detects hostility in a voice and effortlessly completes the phrase “bread and. . . . ” It is System 2 that swings into action when we have to fill out a tax form or park a car in a narrow space. (As Kahneman and others have found, there is an easy way to tell how engaged a person’s System 2 is during a task: just look into his or her eyes and note how dilated the pupils are.)

More generally, System 1 uses association and metaphor to produce a quick and dirty draft of reality, which System 2 draws on to arrive at explicit beliefs and reasoned choices. System 1 proposes, System 2 disposes. So System 2 would seem to be the boss, right? In principle, yes. But System 2, in addition to being more deliberate and rational, is also lazy. And it tires easily. (The vogue term for this is “ego depletion.”) Too often, instead of slowing things down and analyzing them, System 2 is content to accept the easy but unreliable story about the world that System 1 feeds to it. “Although System 2 believes itself to be where the action is,” Kahneman writes, “the automatic System 1 is the hero of this book.” System 2 is especially quiescent, it seems, when your mood is a happy one.


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/books/review/thinking-fast-and-slow-by-daniel-kahneman-book-review.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Review of Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
By Max H. Bazerman

Do cognitive biases show up in people other than college sophomores? Do people make decision mistakes outside the lab, when real incentives are on the line? Are smart people immune from bias? Are these biases really mistakes? Does experience eliminate biases?

As a card-carrying member of the biases-and-heuristics crowd of the behavioral decision research field, these are the questions I have continually been asked over the years, despite my belief that they were answered conclusively long ago. In accepting an invitation to review Thinking, Fast and Slow (TFS) by Daniel (Danny) Kahneman, I anticipated getting a comprehensive and clear response to these decades-old questions. Instead, TFS provides an assessment and integration that goes far beyond these early, comparatively simple questions.

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/publications/observer/obsonline/thinking-fast-and-slow.html


Financial Times Review

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Kahneman presents our thinking process as consisting of two systems. System 1 (Thinking Fast) is unconscious, intuitive and effort-free. System 2 (Thinking Slow) is conscious, uses deductive reasoning and is an awful lot of work. System 2 likes to think it is in charge but it’s really the irrepressible System 1 that runs the show. There is simply too much going on in our lives for System 2 to analyse everything. System 2 has to pick its moments with care; it is “lazy” out of necessity.

Books on this subject tend to emphasise the failings of System 1 intuition, creating an impression of vast human irrationality. Kahneman dislikes the word “irrationality” and one of the signal strengths of Thinking, Fast and Slow is to combine the positive and negative views of intuition into one coherent story. In Kahneman’s words, System 1 is “indeed the origin of much that we do wrong” but it is critical to understand that “it is also the origin of most of what we do right – which is most of what we do”.





http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/15bb6522-04ac-11e1-91d9-00144feabdc0.html


Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204479504576639032103005502.html

Slate Magazine

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/science/2011/10/daniel_kahneman_s_thinking_fast_and_slow_reviewed_.html

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