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What’s this? An off-schedule drop-in edition? We’ve gathered here today to pay our respects to a giant of the Better Living Through Books universe, a man without whom many of the books that have changed our lives would never have existed.
Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, whose decades of research with partner Amos Tversky changed our understanding of how humans make decisions, died last week at the age of 90. If you’ve spent time with hack-your-brain books like Freakonomics and Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, you owe a thank-you to Kahneman because until he and Tversky came along, we didn’t really know that our brains needed hacking. Wild, right?
While Kahneman and Tversky were not the first psychologists to suggest that humans aren’t fully rational actors who make decisions based on careful, considered logic, they were the first to construct an empirically-verifiable model of what we’re actually doing and to compile data so compelling that it ultimately changed economic science. (This is why the pair, who never set foot into an econ class, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002.) So, what was the breakthrough?
Robert D. Hershey, Jr. summarizes it beautifully in his obituary of Kahneman:
The mind operates in two modes: fast and intuitive (mental activities that we’re more or less born with, called System One), or slow and analytical, a more complex mode involving experience and requiring effort (System Two).
Ever heard that our thinking and decision-making are shaped by unconscious “cognitive biases?” That’s Kahneman and Tversky. Confirmation bias? Illusory correlation? Endowment effect? Loss aversion? Gambler’s fallacy? Kahneman and Tversky’s paradigm-shifting findings laid the groundwork that the researchers who identified those heuristics were building on. Kahneman summarized the history and evolution of their work (Tversky died in 1996) in 2011’s Thinking, Fast and Slow.
It’s a big book in many senses—dense in both subject matter and small font, heavily footnoted, much closer to a scholarly paper than a pleasure read—and that’s why I’m not here to recommend it to you today. I’m not here to dissuade you, either, if dense and scholarly is your jam. It’s just that there are easier and dare I say more enjoyable ways to learn the valuable material Kahneman and Tversky spent decades uncovering, and I’m pretty sure they’d agree that if your choice is between not reading their 500-page pretend-you’re-in-grad-school tome or actually absorbing these important ideas via someone else’s translation, the latter is better.
So here we go. Eight books (and some bonus recs) to help you get know your brain (and everyone else’s) a little bit better.
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