Last Spring, I went on a cruise with five of my college roommates, and as we departed, I remembered that I was about to lose my cell service for the next week. I hadn’t brought a book with me, so I quickly tried to find some interesting articles to download on my phone that I could read until our boat docked. Amongst the random collection of saved articles was a 20-page report on the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment. I was well aware of the experiment but had never read deeper into the subject beyond the surface-level results that seemingly everybody knows about. Surprisingly, in those 20 pages, I found such remarkable insights that lingered in my mind well past the end of the cruise and into the remainder of the school year. With a newfound interest in psychological studies, I found myself searching online for a book that would overview other experiments whose results were equally as profound as those of the Stanford Prison Experiment. Although I couldn’t find a book that was exactly what I was searching for, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow caught my attention as I repeatedly came across it during many of my searches. With the interest in human behavior still looming, I decided to purchase this book from our Student Store in hopes that it would subdue my newfound fascination.
At first, I was hooked: visual illusions, riddles, unexpected contradicting statements, and statistics filled the first chapters and were exactly what I was looking for. Some of the more popular studies and illusions I had encountered, but many were foreign and throughout the book’s questions, I found myself falling for the ‘trap’ answer (even when I knew the question was meant to be tricky given its placement in a psychology book). I ended up flying through the first third of the book, and my roommates at the time probably heard enough of it as I challenged them with the same misleading puzzles and riddles that I was falling for. Yet, I was surprised to find my excitement steeply declined during the second third of the book. What initially gave me the fascination of a curious child in a science museum quickly changed to me dreading having to continue reading the later chapters in the book. Perhaps my perspective changed or my fascination with human behavior had been sufficiently serviced, but it felt like I was reading a lightly phrased textbook. Combine this with the chaos of finals and graduation, and it shouldn’t surprise that this book ended up on my bedside quickly after.
One rule I implicitly set for myself a long time ago was to finish every book I started, so I knew I would eventually return to it; however, every time I brought it with me to a coffee shop or library, I would end up finding something else to read in hopes of delaying the inevitable. That summer, I traveled through Europe experiencing new cultures and meeting new friends, yet every few days I found myself dreading the thought of finishing the book. And so, with the lingering mentality, Thinking, Fast and Slow ended up on the windowsill in my New York apartment. After settling in, I found myself wanting to finally finish what I had started. After pushing through the middle chapters, I found myself heavily engaged with the last third of the book. Suddenly, the fascination that grew as I read the initial chapters of the book came back towards the end. I’ll never be sure if that was a consequence of my overestimating the book’s boringness during my hiatus or if my interest in human behavior had resurfaced, but I once again found myself excited at having enough time to work through another chapter of the book. And sure enough, I ended up finishing the remainder of the book within a week. Now that Thinking, Fast and Slow occupies the same spot on my windowsill minus the dread of having an unfinished book, I’m left with mixed thoughts. On one hand, the book was exactly as it was described: an overview of human psychology as explained through the lens of the author. On the other hand, I couldn’t understand how the book was so highly praised, both in reviews and by the frequency with which it appeared on my Twitter timeline. Although I learned a lot from this book, it was dense (perhaps too much so, at times) and required constant full focus to fully understand and appreciate. Perhaps it was because I was searching for a less rigid overview, but I wished the author had slowed down at times to put more emphasis on analysis rather than fact.
That being said, the book does deliver the abundance of information it promises. The author, rather than strictly presenting information, fills the book with various questions and puzzles for the reader to complete before introducing the full nuances of a topic. This format made the book far more entertaining, and these primers helped gauge an increase in a topic before it was even introduced. Kahneman also does a fantastic job of staying mostly objective, and when he does insert his opinions, they are very clear and don’t detract from the importance of the discussed topics. For anyone who wants a dense and complete overview of many varied psychological topics, this book should be mostly fitting. But for those who want to hear about the principal takeaways without such a dense presentation of information, I am inclined to think you can learn just as much by reading articles online.
Rating: 2.5/5