Daniel Kahneman is a Nobel Laureate in Economics who is a psychologist by training. He won the prize mostly for his work in decision making, specifically Prospect Theory. This book distills a lifetime of work on the engine of human thinking, highlighting our cognitive biases and showing both the brilliance and limitations of the human mind. This summary attempts to capture some of the more interesting findings.
(Excerpts and quotes are from: Daniel Kahneman. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Apple Books. https://books.apple.com/us/book/thinking-fast-and-slow/id443149884)
Kahneman writes the book as a lay person’s introduction to experimental psychology and summarizes some of the major results of the past 40 years. In doing so, he gives a high level description of the scientific method as applied in social science, the art of creating hypotheses, the clever experiments to test them, and a little about how the data are analyzed. He shows how slowly but surely, in conjunction with many researchers around the globe, our understanding of human thinking has advanced.
He also recounts the impressive history of the field, going back to great rational thinkers, Bernoulli (of the famous Bernoulli Equation) and David Hume, the Scottish philosopher.