Book: Thinking, Fast and Slow

Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman, is an interesting book connecting psychology, human behavior, everyday life, economics, learning situations, and research.  This book outlines a multitude of experiments he and his colleagues have conducted over the last few decades to show how human behavior impacts and often counteracts rational decision making.

Starting the with concept of System 1and System 2 thinking, something we all do, he shows how humans most of the time make decisions quickly, based on our emotion-connected System 1 thinking.  Most of the time, these decisions are accurate as they are grounded in our experiences, but many times, we need to take a moment to switch into our System 2 thinking, which takes more time, is more difficult, but tends to provide us with a more nuanced view and thus a less biased decision.

Add to this his findings on loss aversion - we do not like to lose or perceive that we lose, so we rather stay where we are than take a gamble, on avoidance of change - System 1 thinking makes it difficult to see change as valuable, on single evaluation -- based in System 1 thinking and plaguing justice systems, on hindsight bias, the illusion of understanding -- the list goes on and on.

What does this mean for teaching and learning?
1. We should be concerned about fast answers to complex issues. We need to give our students more time to come up with more nuanced answers, no matter how uncomfortable this may be.
2. We need to remember that experts when asked for their expertise tend to overthink and move into outlier situations while statistical data is more reliable, and we need to remember that we as teachers are seen as experts and may fall into the same trap.
3. Unlearning something is very difficult because it is part of our System 1 thinking that helps us create a vision of the world that makes a coherent sense - even if it is not founded in facts.  We can be blind to the obvious and to our blindness.
4. We can see the illusion of understanding in our classrooms all the time. How do we deal with this illusion?
5. We do not like to take risks -- so how can we construct our learning assignments so that students do not see them as major risk taking?
6. Opting out and opting in:  when you ask people to opt in, you get a lower response rate of participation as when the default is already set as in, and you ask people to opt out.  Not only are people lazy but opting out suggests that they are missing out on something - which humans do not like.  What can we do in our classes so that students are by default part of it and they can opt out?