Autumn 2011

Rushing to Judgment

by Daniel Akst

THINKING, FAST AND SLOW.
By Daniel Kahneman.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 499 pp. $30

Body and soul, reason and passion, yin and yang—expressions of twoness pervade the world’s cultures, perhaps because duality comes naturally to creatures divided into males and females and destined to live through daily cycles of light and dark.

Dualism is the organizing principle of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, a genial survey of human irrationality that serves as an admirable summa of the author’s extraordinary life’s work. His pioneering research mapping the vast territory of human irrationality, much of it done with the late Stanford psychologist Amos Tversky, helped Kahneman win the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics—even though he’s a psychologist.

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Daniel Akst, a contributing editor to The Wilson Quarterly , is the author most recently of We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess , published earlier this year.
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