Kahneman’s work confirms that your brain instinctively prioritises conserving energy and overly relies on fast thinking as a result.

In contrast, slow thinking requires considerable attention and delivers a more accurate understanding. It’s fast but those shortcuts are ultimately unreliable.

Slow thinking (system 2): which is effortful, reasoned, more reliable and used for complex decisions.įast thinking is a primal survival mechanism that uses heuristics, or cognitive shortcuts, to quickly respond to threats.

This is by far the majority of how we think each day.

Fast thinking (system 1): which is automatic, intuitive, error-prone and used for most common decisions.

Kahneman’s findings are captured in his 2011 bestselling book Thinking Fast and Slow where he describes two distinct thinking systems: Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman’s mental model of Fast and Slow Thinking underpins behavioural economics by explaining how you live most of your life on automatic pilot, are essentially irrational, and prone to cognitive biases. It's a foundational model in behavioural economics that will help inform your understanding of cognitive biases, behaviour change and humanity in general. This could read as the start of an ' unauthorised instruction book of your brain' that you didn't know you needed, but won't be able to live without.

Thinking fast