Thinking fast and slow: A book review

Hey guys what is up welcome back to my blog I’m so thankful that you guys took the time out of your day to read my blog post. Hope you all are safe from the COVID-19 and having a great day. Another amazing book I’m glad to have spent my time on. Let’s get into Thinking Fast and Slow.

The human mind interests me greatly, I love reading about psychology and illusions and mentality and all those different things but this book right off the bat was different from the others, you can feel it right from the start. The book talks about the different strategies that marketers use to make us buy their products and the strategies that they should use to make us buy more as well as how we should avoid being pulled into these illusions that our mind creates.

First off the book divides the mind itself into two parts, two selves, two characters. One is System 1, responsible for all the reflexive activities that we do, activities that don’t need us to put in thought and effort. Then there’s the System 2, the self that puts in thought and effort. The best way to discriminate is ‘What’s the answer to 2+2 ?’ and ‘What is 13 X 27?’ Both are mathematical questions but you put in more effort in one than the other. You intuitively know that 2+2 will be 4 but you don’t know the answer to 13 X 27. It’s a difficult problem so you might even need pen and paper to solve it. The answer coming to your mind instantly is from System 1 while working the problem out is System 2. When you reflexively do something, marketers take advantage of that decision of you not thinking carefully while when you tend to overthink things with your System 2 they take advantage of that fear. Either way the book will give you amazing tips to avoid them both.

The two things that I’m going to talk about that I liked from the book are ‘The sunk cost bias’ and ‘Keeping Score’. The sunk cost bias talks about how we are biased towards something just because we have put money into it or not even money anything like time, effort. An example would be buying a Treadmill and keeping it in your house. You don’t use it but you don’t want to sell it because you believe that you need it still but you don’t because you don’t use it nor will you ever, it’s just going to be kept there. Another example can be showing your support for a band or something else and when they’re caught in a controversy you defend them regardless of whether they’re right or wrong in that matter. This is sunk cost bias, you want something to continue just because you have spent time, money or some asset into it.

Next is keeping score. It’s a fairly easy term to understand, it’s self explanatory that is it’s keeping score of the things in life. An example provided would be that you have two stocks in your portfolio that you need to sell, both are of the same value. One is now lower than the price at which you bought it and the other is higher. A normal person being emotional would close the one with the profit since they won’t like to close at a loss. A trader would know that the winning stock would go up more and the losing would go down more and it would be a better choice to close down the losing stock to prevent further losses. This is something that can be done in relationships and friendships like keeping score of all the times you’ve helped your friend and the times they’ve helped you. That emotional connect to losses and wins is what leads you down the wrong path.

All in all you can read the book from two perspectives, from the perspective of a consumer and the perspective of a seller both sides gain immensely from the book and as someone who read it as a consumer and someone who is fascinated with the human mind I loved the book and recommend it to all. Whether you read it to improve your business, for knowing more about economics or because you want to know about neurology, it’s a must read.

So that is it for this post guys hope you got some value from this.  Thank you guys for reading to the end hit me up on Instagram and Twitter with your thoughts and if you have any ideas on what I should write about. Stay safe from the COVID-19. Thank you again and I’ll see you all next week.