Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman

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Chapters

CHAPTER 1 — The Characters of the Story — 1 min
Two characters run your thinking. One produces quick answers: impressions, feelings, and impulses that appear without effort. The…
CHAPTER 2 — Attention and Effort — 1 min
Attention is limited, and you can feel the limit. Effortful thinking has a cost: it slows you down,…
CHAPTER 3 — The Lazy Controller — 1 min
The slow system likes to think it is in charge. In reality, it often rubber-stamps what the fast…
CHAPTER 4 — The Associative Machine — 1 min
The fast system is an associative machine. It links ideas by similarity, cause, and mood, producing quick interpretations…
CHAPTER 5 — Cognitive Ease — 1 min
Some thoughts feel smooth. They arrive quickly, are easy to process, and create a pleasant sense of certainty.…
CHAPTER 6 — Norms, Surprises, and Causes — 1 min
You navigate the world by noticing what breaks a pattern. Norms fade into the background; surprises demand explanation.…
CHAPTER 7 — A Machine for Jumping to Conclusions — 1 min
The fast system is built to leap. It turns partial evidence into a whole picture, then treats that…
CHAPTER 8 — How Judgments Happen — 1 min
Judgment often begins as impression. The fast system proposes a verdict—good, bad, risky, safe—before you have articulated reasons.…
CHAPTER 9 — Answering an Easier Question — 1 min
When faced with a hard question, the mind often performs a quiet substitution. Instead of answering what was…
CHAPTER 10 — The Law of Small Numbers — 1 min
Small samples tempt you into strong stories. A few observations feel like evidence of a pattern, especially when…
CHAPTER 11 — Anchors — 1 min
Numbers you encounter—even irrelevant ones—can become anchors. Once an anchor is present, your estimates drift toward it, as…
CHAPTER 12 — The Science of Availability — 1 min
You assess frequency and probability by ease of recall. If examples come to mind quickly, the event feels…
CHAPTER 13 — Availability, Emotion, and Risk — 1 min
Risk rarely feels statistical. It feels emotional. If a hazard is vivid, frightening, or easy to picture, it…
CHAPTER 14 — Tom W’s Specialty — 1 min
When you judge what someone is “like,” you rely on resemblance to a stereotype. A description that fits…
CHAPTER 15 — Linda: Less is More — 1 min
Some judgments feel more plausible when they are more detailed. A richer story seems more “real,” even if…
CHAPTER 16 — Causes Trump Statistics — 1 min
Your mind is built to see causes. When you encounter a pattern, you immediately ask what produced it,…
CHAPTER 17 — Regression to the Mean — 1 min
Extreme performances tend to be followed by less extreme ones. This is not fate, punishment, or reward. It…
CHAPTER 18 — Taming Intuitive Predictions — 1 min
Predictions feel like insight, but they are often extrapolations from a small, vivid set of cues. Intuition overreacts…
CHAPTER 19 — The Illusion of Understanding — 1 min
You understand the past by turning it into a story. Events get arranged into causes and consequences until…
CHAPTER 20 — The Illusion of Validity — 1 min
You can feel sure even when the evidence is thin. The feeling of confidence is often driven by…
CHAPTER 21 — Intuitions Vs. Formulas — 1 min
Human judgment feels flexible and rich, but it is also inconsistent. The same expert can give different answers…
CHAPTER 22 — Expert Intuition: When Can We Trust It? — 1 min
Not all intuition is equal. Some intuitions are genuine expertise: fast recognition built from long practice. Others are…
CHAPTER 23 — The Outside View — 1 min
When you plan, you naturally adopt the inside view: focusing on your specific intentions, resources, and obstacles. The…
CHAPTER 24 — The Engine of Capitalism — 1 min
Overconfidence is not only a personal flaw; it can be an economic force. Optimism pushes people to start…
CHAPTER 25 — Bernoulli’s Errors — 1 min
Classical economics imagines a rational chooser who evaluates outcomes by their final states. But human judgment does not…
CHAPTER 26 — Prospect Theory — 1 min
Prospect theory replaces the smooth rational chooser with a mind that treats losses and gains asymmetrically. Losses loom…
CHAPTER 27 — The Endowment Effect — 1 min
Ownership changes value. Once something is “yours,” giving it up feels like a loss, and losses are weighted…
CHAPTER 28 — Bad Events — 1 min
Bad events carry extra weight. A loss is not simply a negative gain; it has a sharper psychological…
CHAPTER 29 — The Fourfold Pattern — 1 min
Your appetite for risk shifts with two variables: whether you are facing gains or losses, and whether the…
CHAPTER 30 — Rare Events — 1 min
Rare events are handled poorly by intuition. They get overweighted when they are vivid, recent, or emotionally charged—and…
CHAPTER 31 — Risk Policies — 1 min
Case-by-case decision making invites inconsistency. Each new problem feels unique, so the mind improvises—and improvisation amplifies mood, framing,…
CHAPTER 32 — Keeping Score — 1 min
You do not treat all money as interchangeable. The mind keeps separate accounts: savings, windfalls, “play money,” painful…
CHAPTER 33 — Reversals — 1 min
Preferences can reverse when nothing substantive changes. The switch is often caused by how options are presented or…
CHAPTER 34 — Frames and Reality — 1 min
A frame is not decoration. It defines what counts as a gain, what counts as a loss, and…
CHAPTER 35 — Two Selves — 1 min
You live life twice: once as experience, once as memory. The experiencing self answers, “How is it right…
CHAPTER 36 — Life as a Story — 1 min
The remembering self does not store raw experience. It constructs a story: highlights, turning points, explanations, endings. That…
CHAPTER 37 — Experienced Well-Being — 1 min
Experienced well-being is the quality of moments: how you feel as time passes. It is different from life…
CHAPTER 38 — Thinking About Life — 3 min
When you make life choices—jobs, cities, relationships—you often consult memory and imagination, not lived experience. The remembering self…