Daniel Kahneman said reading his seminal work, Thinking Fast and Slow, won’t help individuals think better just as writing it didn’t make him a more effective thinker.
In an interview with Moneycontrol last year, the late Nobel laureate explained why changing one’s thinking pattern is very hard. Kahneman died on March 27.
“I’ve remained pretty much the same person I was and (despite writing the book) I think in the same ways,” he said. The point Kahneman was trying to stress on was that it is much easier to change the behaviour of an organisation through structured thinking than changing the thinking of individuals.
Thinking, Fast and Slow came out in 2011. The book’s main idea was that human brain uses two systems while thinking. System 1 is fast, intuitive and automatic. This system is prone to bias and errors. System 2, on the other hand, is slow, analytical and deliberate. This system is used for complex tasks. While System 2 believes it is in charge, Kahneman wrote that, in reality, System 1 is in command.
In the interview, Kahneman said that he was not a very good example for thinking fast and slow. In fact, he said, he was a good illustration of the mistakes he has written about.
Also read: Here is 'one of the most idiotic things' Daniel Kahneman believed he did
“I’m a good example of the flaws that we’ve been writing about. It’s not an accident. Because in the original work that Amos (Amos Tversky who worked with Kahneman on the study that the book is based on) and I did was it started from introspection. It started from thinking about situations where intuitive thinking would be wrong in some way. So, those were the situations we looked for and those were the mistakes we were trying to both predict and explain. But intuitive thinking is very difficult to control and my intuitive thinking hasn’t changed much,” he said.
Kahneman said that he did recognise some errors in his thinking. However, he only recognises them when the topic is not important. “Because if it is an important topic, I’m too busy making the mistakes to recognise that,” he added.
Check out his full conversation with Moneycontrol here.
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