CoursesCourse 10
Thinking, fast and slow
Most of our choices are made in a moment, by a mind that takes shortcuts. This course follows the discoveries of Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and their critics: when the shortcuts serve us, when they mislead us, and which of the famous findings have held up.
Start lesson 1Lessons
- 1 Two ways of thinkingA man whose reasoning was untouched could no longer make simple decisions. Why feeling is part of choosing, how fast and slow thinking share the work, and why the brain prefers to economize.
- 2 The shape of a choiceThe same facts, worded two ways, lead to different choices. How framing, defaults, and the sting of loss steer us, and how much of it survives outside the laboratory.
- 3 Shortcuts that misfireA shy, tidy man: librarian or farmer? How resemblance, memory, first impressions, and the first number we hear sway our judgments, and why the same shortcuts are also how we cope.
- 4 Luck, time, and priceWhy we read patterns into luck, plan as if nothing will go wrong, and feel prices in odd ways: free things, sunk costs, and favors that money spoils.
You’ll be able to
- Explain why feeling is part of good decision-making, and describe fast and slow thinking along with the limits of that two-part picture.
- Show how framing, defaults, and loss aversion change choices, and say how large and how reliable those effects have proved to be.
- Recognize representativeness, availability, confirmation bias, first impressions, and anchoring in everyday judgments, and use base rates and natural frequencies to correct them.
- Explain regression to the mean and the planning fallacy, describe the odd ways we value free things, sunk costs, and favors, and tell which findings are robust and which have not replicated.
About this course
This course covers 快思慢想 (Thinking, Fast and Slow), the psychology of how people actually make decisions. It continues from Course 9, Sex, love, and romantic relationships, which asked where our wants come from. Here we turn from the wants to the mind that chooses among them, and ask how far it can be trusted.
The argument and examples lead. Around them we add the primary research behind each claim (the original experiments of Kahneman and Tversky, the work of Herbert Simon and Antonio Damasio, and the critiques of Gerd Gigerenzer), background for readers outside China, and hands-on activities. This is a field that has been through a replication crisis, so each lesson says plainly which findings are solid, which have shrunk, and which failed when other laboratories tried them again. Where a popular retelling differs from the published study, we use the published study.