27A – Reading Reflection No. 3

For my third and final reading reflection, I decided to take a look at "Thinking, Fast and Slow," by Daniel Kahneman. The general theme of this book was how the brain is basically run by two systems that continuously fight for the control of one's behavior. Kahneman goes over how this can lead to errors in decisions, judgement memory, and what someone can do to prevent those things from happening.

This book definitely helped me to take a step back, and see when I should use what kind of thinking. I was taught that there are times where one should follow the fast feeling and ideas of insightful instinct, but there are also opportunities that are better handled once they are well thought over. This plays in very well with what I've learned in this class, and I would describe it as uncovering lessons that were taught through this class, but not extremely focused on.

An exercise I would use for this class, stemming from this book, would be making a list of predicaments/problems and having the students answer how they would react and what kind of thinking they would use to solve each individual problem.


My biggest "aha" moment while reading this book was when Kahneman explained that the two systems of behavior in everyone's mind was an instinctual "automatic" type, and then a thought out, "conscious" type of thinking. I remember learning this before, but I never really understood what it meant until Kahneman explained it throughout the book. Every decision anyone makes can be categorized into either behavioral system, and there are ways to exploit that by deciding when to use one type of thinking vs the other.