In 2002, Daniel Kaneman received the Alfred Nobel Economics Award for "the application of psychological methodology in economic science, in particular - in the study of the formation of judgments and making decisions in conditions of uncertainty."
Excerpt for familiarization
Everything that facilitates the work of an associative mechanism distorts the assessment. Frequent repetitions are a reliable way to make people believe untrue, because it is not easy to distinguish the truth and feeling of something familiar. Authoritarian regimes and marketers have long known about this, but psychologists have found that for credibility it is not necessary to repeat the statement completely. People who often hear the words “chicken body temperature” are easier to take as the truth “chicken body temperature is 62 °” (or any other number). The only familiar phrase in the statement is enough for the whole statement to seem familiar, and therefore true. If you cannot remember where you heard it, and you can’t correlate it with other facts known to you, you can only rely on cognitive lightness.
The book describes two systems of our thinking - fast (automatic, instinctive) and slow (analytical, responsible for complex calculations). The author explains how these two systems work together and why often we tend to mistakenly believe in certain statements, without even trying to analyze them.
As the author himself writes in the introduction, this book is not at all an attempt to discredit the human mind - after all, for example, a discussion of diseases in medical texts in no case denies good health. But Kaneman explains how to make the unconscious instinctive thinking prevent us from making balanced decisions based on logic and facts, and not on speculation, myths and other people's assessments.
You can download or read the book by link.
