A best seller and well-known book in Psychology, the author, Daniel Kahneman is a Nobel Prize winner in Economic Science- this was like a much awaited big star's movie opening in the science world when the book was published in 2011.
The most important part of the book is about 'Intuitive bias' that we tend to have while making decisions. Being a true believer of intuitions myself, there are many things that I found difficult to accept:
For example:
1. Many of us are hardwired to believe that intuition is a gift and we always believe it has some unexplainable power over rational mind when it proves to be correct at times (we couldn’t get inspired enough from ‘follow your heart’ mantra!!!!!)
But according to Mr.Kahneman it is just by chance or luck and not really because you knew it all along, he says "If you follow intuition you will more often than not err by misclassifying a random event as systematic. We are far too willing to regret the belief that much of what we see in life is random".
2. Mathematically, the influence of a high-quality CEO on the performance of a company is just a mere 10 percentage.This is much opposed to the hero worship of CEOs of the successful companies we often witness!
The book talks about biases we humans inherited from the evolution process of our brain or by nature's design and how they influence our beliefs and decisions. It is important to note that the author doesn’t really throw away the idea of ‘intuition’ but he says it should be trained and tamed in favorable situations so that we can avoid any errors in the process of decision-making.
Another important part of the book is what Mr.Kahneman calls 'Two selves'. There is an 'experience self' that experiences the present and then there is 'remembering self' which keeps our memories. There is a great TED talk you should watch if this topic interests you!
There are many insights that I found useful for productivity at work, mentioning a couple below here:
1. Meetings:
The psychological concept in act -‘The group behavior’
Let’s say you are the organizer or driver of a meeting at work. It is your responsibility to arrive at different perspectives to a problem and attain the best solution. You post a question to the group, the first one to speak is the most vocal, bold, strong voiced person who we say also has a good reputation among the group. what happens next is, his opinion will largely influence the judgement of the rest of the group. This will prevent leading to diversity in opinions.
In order to prevent this happening, a suggestion would be to ask the participants to write a brief summary of their opinion beforehand to make the meetings effective.
2. Interviews:
The psychological concepts in act-‘Halo Effect’ and ‘What You See Is All There Is’
Halo Effect: Impression created in one area influence the opinion in other area.
What You See Is All There Is: I will take an explanation from the book itself,
‘Hitler loved dog and children’- Most of us will find hard to believe this sentence is true because of the ‘WYSIATI’ belief that plays in our mind. We know a certain face of Hitler like ‘hate’,‘evil’ and this contradicts with an entirely different aspect of him.
I remember once in the company I used to work for, an executive was asked a question ‘what is the secret of picking the start performers?'. His reply was ‘ you just know it in your heart, you have a feeling in the stomach and you know it this is your star!'. This is a kind of error Mr.Kahneman talks about!
To overcome this, what can be done is prepare a set of questions that describes the qualities needed for the role and assign weightages to each attribute. The interviewer should evaluate the candidates strictly based on this with out their personal preferences or opinions clouding the interview process. There is also a practical application example in real life in the book and it has been proven successful.
There were a lot of times during the writing of this article I was going to write ‘I believe’ but then I remembered an important line in the book “The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence but of the coherence of the story that the mind has managed to construct.”
One of the books that really changed my thinking and fueled me to pursue behavioral psychology!!!!!!
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