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  • Thinking, Fast and Slow

  • By: Daniel Kahneman
  • Narrated by: Patrick Egan
  • Length: 20 hrs and 4 mins
  • 4.3 out of 5 stars (2,792 ratings)
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Thinking, Fast and Slow

By: Daniel Kahneman
Narrated by: Patrick Egan
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Editor reviews

Nobel Prize-winning Economic Scientist Daniel Kahneman has collated all of his ground-breaking research into one essential best-selling audiobook Thinking, Fast and Slow, which has been narrated by Patrick Egan. Your entire way of thinking and decision-making will be defied after reading this book. From the way in which you form your ideas to the reasons how and why these ideas came to you in the first place. Learn more about yourself and others as you are enlightened with Kahneman’s research. Available now from Audible.

Summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

Daniel Kahneman's pioneering work that tackles questions of intuition and rationality, read by Patrick Egan.

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman takes us on a ground-breaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think and make choices. One system is fast, intuitive and emotional; the other is slower, more deliberative and more logical. Kahneman exposes the extraordinary capabilities-and also the faults and biases-of fast thinking and reveals the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and behaviour. The importance of properly framing risks, the effects of cognitive biases on how we view others, the dangers of prediction, the right ways to develop skills, the pros and cons of fear and optimism, the difference between our experience and memory of events, the real components of happiness-each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems work together to shape our judgements and decisions.

Drawing on a lifetime's experimental experience, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our professional and our personal lives-and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Thinking, Fast and Slow will transform the way you take decisions and experience the world.

©2011 Daniel Kahneman (P)2011 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"There have been many good books on human rationality and irrationality, but only one masterpiece. That masterpiece is Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman, a winner of the Nobel Prize for economics, distils a lifetime of research into an encyclopedic coverage of both the surprising miracles and the equally surprising mistakes of our conscious and unconscious thinking. He achieves an even greater miracle by weaving his insights into an engaging narrative that is compulsively readable from beginning to end. My main problem in doing this review was preventing family members and friends from stealing my copy of the book to read it for themselves... this is one of the greatest and most engaging collections of insights into the human mind I have read." (William Easterly, Financial Times)
"Absorbing, intriguing...By making us aware of our minds' tricks, Kahneman hopes to inspire individuals and organisations to identify strategies to outwit them" (Jenni Russell, Sunday Times)
"Profound ... As Copernicus removed the Earth from the centre of the universe and Darwin knocked humans off their biological perch, Mr. Kahneman has shown that we are not the paragons of reason we assume ourselves to be." ( The Economist)

What listeners say about Thinking, Fast and Slow

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Interesting topic - but audiobook wrong format

Any additional comments?

This is a fascinating book - outlining key research areas in the psychology of decision making. It also does a very good job explaining clearly the fundamentals of statistics in research - I wish it had been available when I was doing my psychology degree! BUT - it is a difficult book to digest in audiobook format. There are lots of references to the PDFs (difficult to refer to when driving!) and there are a lot of "lists" which you have to hold in your head whilst the theory is explained. It would be much easier to digest in traditional paper format.

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146 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

Brilliant. DK is a genuine mind reader!

Who am I to say this noble laureate is brilliant, but I'll chuck in my two pennyworth anyway. Kahneman shows you how you think and how easy it is to be deluded and misled by the way your brain just happens to work. Some of the book is quite hard work, and sometimes it is a bit slow reading (laboured points), but the content is fascinating and also important. It will probably change how you think, view and live your life, which is quite something for a mere book.

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56 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars

Fascinating, but be prepared to concentrate

If you enjoyed works on behavourial economics such as 'Nudge' then you should listen to this. Daniel Kahneman is the godfather of the discipline and you get a nobel laureate giving you a comprehensive and fairly user friendly account of his pioneering work in this fascinating area. I only gave it four stars because i found it hard to follow when listening to it. He references PDFs which i think come with the download but i didn't have in front of me when walking the dog, and I ended up having to rewind to try and understand the bits i didn't understand, mostly giving up and going with the flow (ah, system one). I'll probably end up buying the book to go back over it, but i'm glad i downloaded it as otherwise i would never have read it. Recommended but be prepared to concentrate if you want to really understand it.

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42 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Excellent book, but not a great audiobook.

The contents of this book are extremely good, but unfortunately it has too many figures, and too many thought experiments that involve juggling information for the audio format to be effective.

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32 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Didn't work as an audiobook

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

I would recommend the paper version, but not the audiobook. I found there were too many references to visual things, which would have been easier to look at. Also, it's impossible to interrupt the book as there aren't any chapters on the audiobook (the Audible app crashes all the time, so no point in using that) It requires a lot of attention to follow...if you're a visual person, I would recommend the book.

What do you think the narrator could have done better?

The narrator isn't very engaging. He has a nice voice, but isn't very dynamic.

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26 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars

Not Convinced

Its an interesting read but in places leaves you scratching your head. There are a number of mind puzzles, that simply do not work. I understand the System 1 and System 2 dynamics of understanding things, but the puzzles presented were not great, to say the least.

One which the author continually uses as an example is a bat and ball pricing puzzle. I've asked this puzzle to about 10 people including my 16 year old daughter. Not one person got this wrong, 8 got it right within 2-3 seconds, 2 deferred to answer thinking I was tricking them. Yes - I know mine are not controlled experiments, but I think the text states most people get this wrong, and only 80% of Harvard graduates get it right. hmmmm.

Then, (I wont ruin this) he strings two words together designed to make you you sweat, feel ill and seriously want to cringe, with the same reaction that you get scratching a chalkboard. I won't tell you the words but for me it did nothing. I think if you have kids and tease them like I do, then I use words much worse to tell them what they have for lunch, In fact the two words for me was tame ! I can give him much worse I assure you.

I think a lot of this is written from an American perspective. We have a TV show in the UK called QI, which basically sums up his System1 and System 2 in one episode.

Q> How Many Wifes did Henry VIII have ?
System 1 is Alan Davies saying 6 wifes (followed by a big alarm bell)
System 2 is Stephen Fry explaining he had 2 wifes contrary to popular belief

The show is full of classics like this where the public believe something which is blatantly false which is disproved, like not eating closed mussels. (in fact they are the best ones, not the worst).

Going back to the book, another amazing admission is that the author claims to have go his statistical sampling wrong. Although this is great to hear, and the whole explanation really fascinated me, I then thought, what about his results before this revelation. He never mentions if the core of the work, basically in his early years was then rewritten or accepted with error.

So, in summary, its a fascinating read, but to me there is no science here. Its common sense and the results are dubious based on the statistical errors admitted to.

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20 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

Excellence surpassed

It is not often I would describe a book as 'priceless' but Thinking, Fast and Slow definotely warrants such praise, at least from this corner of the World.

The narration was excellent - I often forgot I wasn't actually listening to Daniel Kahneman (the author) personally as the delivery was faultless.

The subject matter however was exemplary! I have always had a healthy interest in both my own decision making process and needed to understand it, from a business perspective, in others.

Often however, such learning can be quite dry but not in this instance.

The exercises provided - many instantly available to grasp by just listening, some needing you to access accompanying documents - conveyed the point being made exquisitely.

I'm so thrilled with this book that it has beasily become my No.1 recommendation to like-minded friends and family.

Grab it, enjoy it ... and know yourself, oh so much better!

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18 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • R
  • 19-07-12

How we think

An excellent book, very well read. The source document for many other snippety books on similar subjects, this book delves a bit deeper and gives a more complete account of how we think, how we unconsciously apply biases and the impact of luck on performance. An ear-opener in many ways from a Nobel prizewinner with decades of examples to give and some nice personal stories. Can't recommend highly enough.

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18 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

Read the book... you'll have to anyway

This book persistently asks you to view an accompanying PDF. It's not at all suitable as an audio book. I found that any enjoyment to be had from only listening to the book is spoiled by the narrator's voice.
Very poor for what has been rated as excellent material otherwise.

Don't buy this in audio format. It's very poor.

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16 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Sensational: you'll understand how your mind works

What made the experience of listening to Thinking, Fast and Slow the most enjoyable?

The surprise, when you again and again, stumble over your own behaviour being described in the book. How you use assumptions, shortcuts and reduction of information to make everyday decisions, and Kahneman even exposes it to you with a quick math question regarding a baseball and a bat...

What was one of the most memorable moments of Thinking, Fast and Slow?

...when I was proud to have no glitches in some questions before and then stubbled over a question with animals and an ark...

Did you have an emotional reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

This book wasn't easy to stop listening...

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12 people found this helpful