Daniel Kahneman

Main ideas

• System 1 decides quickly, automatically, and without effort; System 2 is slow, conscious, and lazy about getting involved. Most everyday decisions belong to System 1. He took the names from Stanovich and West, as he says himself.
• With Amos Tversky he described systematic cognitive biases, and he founded the research for which he received the Nobel Prize in Economics (2002).
• Confidence is not proof of being right — "what you see is all there is" (WYSIATI).

What we take

We reckon with the answers in the test being a rationalization of a fast judgment, rather than its cause. And we keep his finding that confidence is not proof of the quality of a decision — which is why we do not measure how correctly you decided, but where your decision grows from.

What we do differently

Kahneman studied how deciding fails; what interests us is where decisions grow from. Biases are not a layer — they are the glasses every layer looks through.

Recommended books

• Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), in Czech Myšlení rychlé a pomalé
• Noise (2021, with Sibony and Sunstein), in Czech Šum

Sources

• Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185, 1124–1131.
• Stanovich, K. E., & West, R. F. (2000). Individual differences in reasoning. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23, 645–665 — where the names System 1 and System 2 come from.
• Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux — WYSIATI.
• The Nobel Prize in Economics, 2002, the citation: "for having integrated insights from psychological research into economic science". Tversky did not live to see it; the prize is not awarded posthumously.