How Daniel Kahneman cut through the noise
Buy-ology (2010) and Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational (2010). At the time, both books were best-sellers and regularly cited alongside other widely read titles such as Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. After I finished Lindstrom and Ariely’s books, I realised that the best sections in both owed their existence to the same man: Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel-winning psychologist, economist and writer who died last week, at the age of 90.
The problem with Ariely’s book was its preferred mode of operation: It would open a new chapter with a case study, build layer upon layer of theory, and then make a clumsy attempt to both demonstrate and over-simplify the theory, with America-centric examples of consumer behaviour. It felt like Ariely was unsure about his target audience, torn between writing for fellow economists and a more general audience. Kahneman’s book, on the other hand, the best-selling Thinking, Fast And Slow (2011), provided a much more holistic picture.
The examples Kahneman used were globally applicable for the most part, and crucially, his language had much more scientific rigour and thoroughness. He was the rare pop-science author who knew exactly how to balance accessibility and academic rigour. Kahneman, now recognised as one of the founding fathers of behavioural economics, upended “conventional wisdom" among economists—the assumption that consumers make perfectly rational decisions, guided by the “expected utility" derived from those decisions.
In Thinking, Fast And Slow, Kahneman draws a distinction between two modes of thought. Fast thinking involves rapid and instinctive thinking, guided more by emotion than rationality. Slow thinking involves deliberate, deconstructive logic that arrives at a conclusion after
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