Spawned in the labs of psychologists and economists, a sweeping revolution is taking place in how we view human behavior. Rational-choice theory, which essentially argues that each person is a reasonable actor seeking to maximize his or her happiness, has enjoyed a lengthy reign as one of the guiding principles of economics (and many styles of politics). It is, however, on its way out. More sophisticated psychological experiments and the advent of brain-imaging technology have begun to reveal that the real story of how our minds work — how we make decisions, judge relative risks, and assess new information — is much more complicated and sloppy than the so-called Chicago school would have us believe.
And now we have a wonderful book that can explain to nonacademics why they should care about this revolution.
In “Thinking, Fast and Slow,’’ Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist at Princeton University, offers up a sweeping, compelling tale of just how easily our brains are bamboozled, bringing in both his own research and that of numerous psychologists, economists, and other experts.
THINKING, FAST AND SLOW
Kahneman lays out his book as “a psychodrama with two characters’’ controlling our thoughts, System 1 and System 2. It’s worth using Kahneman’s own language here, since this is the foundation of much of the book: System 1 “operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control,’’ while System 2 “allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.’’
System 1 helps us (or, more accurately, forces us) to determine which of two objects is more distant, make a disgusted face when shown something disgusting, or detect from a friend’s voice whether she is angry. System 2, which requires attention in a way System 1 does not, helps us perform complex calculations or search out a specific face in a crowded room.
One key, potentially confusing aspect of this story is that Systems 1 and 2 often perform different versions of the same tasks. Calculations and walking are two examples: Solving the problem of 1 + 1 is (for most of us, anyway) a System 1 job, while figuring out 367 x 17 requires the heavier lifting of System 2. Walking at your normal, everyday speed is pure System 1, while moving at a faster- or slower-than-usual gait summons System 2.
Another tricky thing involves how the two systems interact: System 2 can be lazy, so rather than do the requisite legwork to accurately assess a situation, it will often simply justify System 1’s superficial judgments with deceptively complex-sounding reasoning. (For example: System 1, unbeknownst to you, determines that your new boss looks like a dearly loved deceased uncle; when asked by a friend how your new boss is, System 2 constructs an elaborate justification for expressing admiration pegged to his professionalism and deftness as a mentor.)
Kahneman intentionally shies away from delving too deeply into the physical underpinnings of each system. “Thinking, Fast and Slow’’ is a book of psychology, not neurology, and Kahneman rightly leaves out - for the most part - dendrites and axial tails and cortexes, lest they tangle an otherwise elegant treatment of the subject.
And elegant it is. Unlike many academics, Kahneman has a remarkable ability to take decades worth of research and distill from it what would be important and interesting for a lay audience. He totally succeeds in his goal to “enrich the vocabulary that people use when they talk about the judgments and choices of others, the company’s new policies, or a colleague’s investment decisions.’’ Despite that the book is jam-packed with social science, much of it reads as smoothly as a well-crafted novel. Each chapter is crisp and to the point - and when Kahneman embarks on a tangent, it is almost always a worthwhile one (his analyses of the mistakes he has made during his career offer up interesting insights into thorny methodological issues). Chapters end, in an almost textbook-like-fashion, with a few quotes that serve to transform the scientific into the everyday - for instance, after a chapter on “the availability heuristic,’’ a cognitive mechanism that leads us to overestimate the importance of whatever information we have recently or heavily been exposed to, one of the quotes is, “She has been watching too many spy movies recently, so she’s seeing conspiracies everywhere.’’ It’s a useful way of driving home the book’s insights.
Overall, “Thinking, Fast and Slow’’ is an immensely important book. Many science books are uneven, with a useful or interesting chapter too often followed by a dull one. Not so here. With rare exceptions, the entire span of this weighty book is fascinating and applicable to day-to-day life. Everyone should read ”Thinking, Fast and Slow” - and that is a thoroughly System 2 judgment.
Try BostonGlobe.com today and get two weeks FREE. Jesse Singal is a frequent contributor to the Globe. He can be reached at jessesingalglobe@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @jessesingal.