⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (5/5)

„Thinking, Fast and Slow“ – Meilenstein der Psychologie und Ökonomie

📌 Kurzfazit

Kahneman, Nobelpreisträger für Wirtschaft, fasst in diesem Werk jahrzehntelange Forschung zu kognitiven Verzerrungen, Entscheidungsfindung und Heuristiken zusammen. Er erklärt die Dynamik zwischen zwei Denksystemen – dem schnellen, intuitiven „System 1“ und dem langsamen, analytischen „System 2“. Das Buch ist ein Standardwerk für alle, die verstehen wollen, warum Menschen oft irrational entscheiden.

📚 Inhalt in Kürze

System 1: schnell, automatisch, intuitiv

System 2: langsam, reflektiert, kontrolliert

Heuristiken und Biases: Verfügbarkeitsheuristik, Anker-Effekt, Verlustaversion, Overconfidence

Anwendungen: Wirtschaft, Politik, Alltagsentscheidungen

Erklärung, warum klassische ökonomische Modelle (Homo oeconomicus) nicht ausreichen

🔬 Wissenschaftliche Relevanz

Stärken:

Umfassende Darstellung der Arbeit von Kahneman & Tversky – Grundlage der Verhaltensökonomie.

Beeinflusst Ökonomie, Psychologie, Politikwissenschaft, Medizin und Management.

Viele Erkenntnisse empirisch mehrfach bestätigt.

Schwächen:

Kritik in den letzten Jahren an der Replizierbarkeit mancher sozialpsychologischer Studien.

Sehr dicht und anspruchsvoll geschrieben – kein „leichter“ Ratgeber.

👉 Fazit Wissenschaft: Trotz Kritik an einzelnen Studien bleibt das Buch ein wissenschaftlicher Eckpfeiler, weil es ein Paradigma veränderte.

🌍 Kulturelle Relevanz

Weltbestseller, über 10 Mio. verkaufte Exemplare.

Hat das Denken über Rationalität, Politik, Wirtschaft und Finanzen verändert.

Populär in Management- und Leadership-Literatur, aber auch in Journalismus und Politik zitiert.

Hat Begriffe wie „System 1 & 2“ in den kulturellen Mainstream gebracht.

💭 Meine persönliche Meinung

Positiv: Tiefgründig, brillant, lehrreich. Eines der wenigen Bücher, die wirklich das Denken verändern können.

Kritisch: Stellenweise schwerfällig, fast akademisch – nicht jedermanns Lesestil.

Für mich: Pflichtlektüre, wenn man menschliches Verhalten verstehen will – intellektuell fordernd, aber lohnend.

🎯 Fazit

Thinking, Fast and Slow ist ein epochales Werk, das die Psychologie und Wirtschaft nachhaltig geprägt hat. Es erklärt, warum wir oft systematisch falsch entscheiden – und liefert ein Vokabular, um darüber nachzudenken.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ – 5 von 5 Sternen

Weil: wissenschaftlich fundiert, kulturell prägend, intellektuell bereichernd.

Great book, 10/10

Das Buch ist interessant, einige Dinge ändern sich nicht, unabhängig von der Zeit.

Dieses Buch hat mich wirklich beeindruckt. Völlig zurecht weisen die beiden McKinsey Autoren darauf hin, dass die meisten Firmen bei ihrer Strategieentwicklung einen "inside View" anwenden und Verbesserungen ausprobieren, die sich bei einer Analyse der Unternehmenslandschaft als hanebüchen herausstellen. In diesem Buch wird also ein "outside View" vorgestellt, der auf einer Analyse von mehr als 2000 Unternehmen beruht. Dabei wurde sehr genau untersucht, welche Indikatoren ein Unternehmen aufweisen muss, um die Chance auf signifikante Steigerung der Wirtschaftlichkeit zu erhöhen. Kern der Untersuchung ist eine sog. "Power Curve" - die Verteilung des Economic Profits der über 2000 betrachteten Unternehmen. Die Untersuchungen in diesem Buch sind alle samt sehr schlüssig und alles in allem bin ich sehr froh, das Buch gelesen zu haben. Das Buch liefert zahlreiche Fakten, Zahlen und Statistiken, um den Dialog während der Strategieentwicklung zu intensivieren und zu verbessern.

Warum gibt es einen Stern Abzug? Zu Beginn des Buches wird die soziale Seite der Strategieentwicklung erörtert. Fraglos ein wichtiger Aspekt des Strategieprozesses, vielleicht sogar der wichtigste. Allerdings fand ich viele der Beobachtungen in diesem Kapitel relativ banal und wenig informativ. Hier wurden mir zu viele Stereotype benutzt. Auch die Lösungsvorschläge in diesem Kapitel haben mir nicht zugesagt. Generell war das erste Kapitel das schwächste.

Weiterhin wird zwar ausführlich beteuert, dass die Untersuchungen fundiert durchgeführt wurden. Ein tatsächliches Gefühl von der Vollständigkeit der Untersuchung wird jedoch nicht vermittelt. Es wird also kaum erklärt, wie das Wahrscheinlichkeitsmodell dieser Untersuchung aufgebaut wurde und wie die einzelnen Grenzen und Werte zustande kamen. Statt einer tieferen Betrachtung wird man mit der Beteuerung abgespeist, dass die Untersuchung komplex und vollständig war. Ggf. ließe sich hier zu der Arbeit der McKinsey Berater noch etwas im Internet recherchieren, um diese Fragen zu klären.

Abschließend: Super Buch, mit kleinen Schwächen.

In "Thinking, Fast and Slow", Daniel Kahneman brings the fundamental insights of behavioral economics to the general public. The book complements earlier work on prospect theory compiled in the academic volume "Choices, Values, and Frames", which was published in 2000. "Thinking, Fast and Slow" is updated with recent research insights, with many examples from everyday life, and with relevant references to other recent work in the field ("Nudge" from R. Thaler and C. Sunstein, published in 2008). The book provides a coherent and easy access into prospect theory for beginners, and a comprehensive round-up for the experts, who might get lost in the many diverging aspects of human judgement and decision making under risk and uncertainty, spanning from psychology over economy, finance, insurance, into politics.

The work does raise considerable doubt in the rationality of humans: many examples on biased judgement and decision making demonstrate that humans repeatedly violate the rules of classical economic theory and rationality: classical economic theory does lack the important role of a reference point, and it doesn't include crucial categories like risk seeking, risk aversion, loss aversion, or framing. The simple alternative "Take $100 with a probability of 90% or $1000 with a probability of 50%" highlights the limits of classical economic theory, which cannot explain why a majority of people behave risk averse and go for the $100, whereas any robot, programed to maximize the expected value ($1000 x 50% = $500), would follow classical economic theory and choose the second option. The appendix section of the book contains two prior milestone publications "Judgement under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases" and "Choices, Values, and Frames", which allow to recapitulate the fundamentals of prospect theory in condensed form.

The author does leave a major issue with the reader: how to successfully apply the knowledge to everyday life or to work, without alienating all the fellow human beings who don't bother with biases, frames, availability heuristics, or loss aversion?

Close to the end, the text says "The decision of whether or not to protect individuals against their mistakes ... presents a dilemma for behavioral economists". To raise the general awareness about cognitive illusions would be a small, but first step. Decision makers are cognitively busy and probably don't bother reading books to improve. In the conclusion section of the book, Daniel Kahneman provides a rather down-to-earth procedure of how to sustainably filter the findings of prospect theory into decision making: "That was my reason for writing a book that is oriented to critics and gossipers rather than to decision makers". One can read in between the lines the 40 years of efforts behavioral scientists have put into making fellow scientists, economists, politicians, and the general public aware about the human limitations and pitfalls of decision making.

I think this is a great book with much insight about a large number of errors in our daily decision making. The book is easy to read, broken up in very short sections that can each be read in 30 mins or less, thus making it a great commute book. It is however not trivial take in. The truth about the field, and Kahneman himself recognizes it, is that it is still in its infancy. Although very empirical (lots of experiments are described which make the arguments much more convincing than other psychology books based only on small case studies and "expert opinions") it remains too descriptive for my taste thus with all the author's efforts the book somewhat lacks structure. This is not his fault the consolidation required to reveal the structure, and perhaps some predictive consequences, usually comes after much more generations of researchers banging their heads for answers and much more empirical evidence.

Some reviewers mention that it is long winded but I think that depends on the reader. I think kahneman did this partly because repetition is useful to remember things when not enough structure is present and partly because things are much more subtle than people are used to think. On this point I agree with the author that for this very social fenomena and, because people too often think they already know what is being talked about, words can often be false friends and developing a vocabulary is a tenuous albeit absolutely necessary endeavor. (You'll understand when you read the book)

(a potatoe for your troubles)

Kahneman, Daniel

This book will change your thinking. It starts simply with almost primitive to be specified questions and betting a few dollars. From this develops a theory of the mind.

The reader is involved in this process, as he has to answer questions, for example, or can opt for betting. He decides almost exactly like the majority of respondents,and that is very often wrong. In this way our mind is analyzed in its course and located in two planes. System 1 and System 2.

System 1 is the intuitive, spontaneous system, which decides very quickly without thinking and without analyzing the situation. It decides spontaneously, as they say intuitively from the gut. This system governs our daily lives. Without it we could not live. For if we should endeavor in every decision, the analytical, exhausting, deeply thoughtful System 2, we would get bogged down and deplete us. We could not really put our lives on the line. Everyone knows that if he, for example, is driving a car on a straight road and suddenly finds that he just went way too without even being aware of it in detail. System 1 has controlled.

Everyone knows, however, the myth of the "first impression" of a person, who is said to be the right one. This first impression based solely on one or two features of the new and unknown person is without value because it says nothing about hundreds of other traits. A few features are considered for all. A system 1 error, we all succumb to daily, unconsciously.

But, this system 1 is 98% absolutely right and is essential for daily life. However, it is prone to error as shown above and there are always the same typical, fatal errors. These typical errors (not more than 10 at all)reveals the author. They can hurt us significantly e.g. decisions on savings plans, retirement, investments, property management, expensive purchases, choice of business partners, entering into relationships, etc.

The theory comes to the economy, to sophisticated negotiating tactics, to (also wrong) decisions in the economy, to politics anyway. Details can not be reported. For it is all too extensive but overall amazing and shockingly easy.

These mistakes we all make, almost without exception, are made aware to the reader. Some of them you have already guessed, but here it is measured and demonstrated. No doubt, the reader thinks critically after reading this book, he analyzes more, he tries to consult statistics and logic, even if it is stressful. Anyway, he now knows the thinking traps and may try to avoid them.

An excellent summery of Prof. Kahnemanns results of research.Amusing and very instruktiv.

Joa, schwierig. Anfangs ist es noch interessant , irgendwann wird es etwas mühselig weiterzulesen. Es liest sich etwas schwer und es sind so viele Details, dass man die Motivation verliert … bei mir liegt es seit Jahren herum und ich hab nur 1/3 gelesen. Es fehlt, dass die Informationen besser aufbereitet werden, so dass man Lust hat weiterzulesen

Hard cover. Very good quality. Finished reading first two chapters. The book essentially talks about how the mind works. This is helpful in identifying our biases and actively countering them. So definitely a read for those who are interested in understanding how does our brain impact our actions.

Thoughtful, applicable, insightful, entertaining. I enjoyed dissecting the numerous thought experiments and studies for merit that I could apply to my everyday thinking.

System 1 and System 2 form the backbone of this book.

System 1 is impulsive, and provides heuristic and intuitive guesses and reactions to stimuli without prompting. It can't be turned off. Why You See Is All There Is (WYSIATI). But it's also responsible for remarkably well-tuned intuitions, fast information-processing, "muscle memory," pattern-matching, intensity matching, face & situation recognition, and much of what makes human minds human. Author Daniel Kahneman points out situations in which System 1 is scientifically poor, including statistics (like the difference between 0.01% and 0.001%), random events, weighting time & duration in retrospect.

System 2 is more calculated, requires devoted effort and concentration in rationalizing & making decisions. It assigns value to past events, keeps score, questions bias, and carries out more intensive, deliberate calculations involving more data. It's like fetching data from main memory, rather than relying on the cache.

Kahneman's prose is rich with examples and experimental case studies, from visceral phenomena like pleasure vs. pain tolerance, and the tendency to derive general from specific, rather than the specific from the general (statistic).... to logic fallacies like optimism in planning, misjudging statistics, underestimating sampling, and sunk costs. He gives simple, easy-to-remember names to a lot of the phenomena he observed in studies, like the peak-end rule that describes how humans tend to judge pain or pleasure of a past event based on an average of how it ended and the peak of the experience, neglecting duration. He also provides solutions and checks & balances that can help us reduce bias, where possible. For example, to mitigate the planning fallacy, he writes:

1.) Identify an appropriate reference class.

2.) Obtain the statistics of the reference class. Use the statistics to generate a baseline prediction.

3.) Use specific information about the case to adjust the baseline prediction, if there are particular reasons to expect the optimistic bias to be more of less pronounced in this project than in others of the same type.

The author's life experiences, from serving as an evaluator in the Israeli defense forces to publishing papers as a professor, inform many of the studies and give them a human element and interest to which I could easily relate. I also appreciate his emotion, adding exclamation points to the observations that surprised him, or proved him wrong. He writes in an unassuming, humble, curious way that made each anecdote or cited study a joy to read.

Finally, I thought he -- and his editors -- divided the book brilliantly. Chapters are short, usually 8~16 pages, and they always concentrate on some nugget or fallacy that could be later referenced by a single term, like "anchoring," "regression to the mean," "the fourfold pattern," or "the halo effect." He builds up knowledge brick by brick, experiment by experiment, that after a few nights of reading, you begin to recognize fallacies and patterns in everyday life by the terms Kahneman has assigned to them.

My favorite part of each chapter is the end: a short section of quotations that describe and use key terms from the chapter, in an everyday, relatable way.

There are too many topics and quotes to list them all. Some of my favorites:

"The best we can do is a compromise: learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high. The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people's mistakes than our own."

"Self-control requires attention and effort."

"His System 1 constructed a story, and his System 2 believed it. It happens to all of us."

"They didn't want more information that might spoil their story. WYSIATI."

"We often compute much more than we want or need. I call this excess computation the mental shotgun. It is impossible to aim at a single point with a shotgun because it shoots pellets that scatter, and it seems almost equally difficult for System 1 not to do more than System 2 charges it to do."

"Money-primed people become more independent than they would be without the associative trigger."

"He was asked whether he thought the company was financially sound, but he couldn't forget that he likes their product."

"Our aim in the negotiation is to get them anchored on this number."

"Let's make it clear that if that is their proposal, the negotiations are over. We do not want to start there."

"When the evidence is weak, one should stick with the base rates."

"They added a cheap gift to the expensive product, and made the whole deal less attractive. Less is more in this case."

"System 1 can deal with stories in which the elements are causally linked, but it is weak in statistical reasoning."

"The experiment shows that individuals feel relieved of responsibility when they know that others have heard the same request for help."

"We can't assume that they will really learn anything from mere statistics. Let's show them one or two representative individual cases to influence their System 1."

"But those with the most knowledge are often less reliable. The reason is that the person who acquires more knowledge develops an enhanced illusion of her skill and becomes unrealistically overconfident."

"The question is not whether these experts are well trained. It is whether their world is predictable."

"The research suggests a surprising conclusion: to maximize predictive accuracy, final decisions should be left to formulas, especially in low-validity environments."

"In this view, people often (but not always) take on risky projects because they are overly optimistic about the odds they face."

"A well-run organization will reward planners for precise execution and penalize them for failing to anticipate difficulties, and for failing to allow for difficulties that they could not have anticipated --the unknown unknowns."

"She is the victim of a planning fallacy. She's assuming a best-case scenario, but there are too many different ways for the plan to fail, and she cannot foresee them all."

"He weighs losses about twice as much as gains, which is normal."

"Think like a trader! You win a few, you lose a few."

"Decision makers tend to prefer the sure thing over the gamble (they are risk averse) when the outcomes are good. They tend to reject the sure thing and accept the gamble (they are risk seeking) when both outcomes are negative."

"We are hanging on to that stock just to avoid closing our mental account at a loss. It's the disposition effect."

"The salesperson showed me the most expensive car seat and said it was the safest, and I could not bring myself to buy the cheaper model. It felt like a taboo tradeoff."

"Did he really have an opportunity to learn? How quick and how clear was the feedback he received on his judgments?"

"We want pain to be brief and pleasure to last. But our memory, a function of System 1, has evolved to represent the most intense moment of an episode of pain or pleasure (the peak) and the feelings when the episode was at its end. A memory that neglects duration will not serve our preference for long pleasure and short pains."

There are many, many more. Read the book for yourself and enjoy the wisdom!

Même si l'expression est un cliché, disons-le sans hésitation : ce livre est un must. D'abord, songez au prestige que vous vous attirerez en glissant, au hasard d'une conversation, que vous êtes en train de lire un ouvrage signé d'un prix Nobel d'économie ! Mais surtout, cet ouvrage constitue une plongée des plus passionnantes dans les arcanes de l'esprit humain, sous la conduite d'un guide qui, en plus de sa profonde érudition et de son expertise, n'oublie jamais d'être accessible, pratique, voire drôle ! Plus d'une fois, au détour d'une page, vous vous surprendrez à penser : « Bien sûr, c'est cela ! », tant les démonstrations de Daniel Kahneman font écho à notre expérience quotidienne, aux mécanismes psychiques avec lesquels nous nous débattons dans notre for intérieur.

Au fil des chapitres, l'auteur passe en revue les merveilles et les nombreux travers de la pensée intuitive, cette « star masquée » qui, sans que nous le réalisions, prend bien souvent le dessus sur notre esprit rationnel : hyper-sensibilité à l'environnement extérieur et à une kyrielle de biais (effet de halo, excès de confiance, etc.), tendance à poser ses conclusions d'emblée et à chercher ensuite les raisons qui les justifient, oubli des principes statistiques les plus élémentaires... Sans être inaccessible, le chapitre sur la théorie des perspectives - le domaine qui a valu à l'auteur son prix Nobel - est plus pointu et s'adresse aux lecteurs soucieux d'entrer dans le détail d'une théorie à la pointe des réflexions actuelles sur la prise de décision.

Fort de ses plus de 500 pages, ce livre est un ouvrage de référence, à lire et à méditer en prenant son temps, car un contenu d'une telle richesse ne se digère pas en quelques heures.

Although the behaviorial economics economics is right now thrown doubt on because of either faked or dubious experimental records by a couple of scholars, this book impresses me with its coherent, convincing argument which reconciles with what I have been feeling about irraationality of human beings. However, that might be exactly what " System 1" of me tells me, though. This book teaches us how to exercise our "System 2" to put things in perspective so that we can enjoy more well-being as well as life satisfaction.

Surprising, unsettling, enlightening. Thank goodness for authors like this, who open our minds, challenge our prejudices, and break down our preconceptions.