Blind to our blindness
Average Reading Time: less than a minute.
Daniel Kahneman, noted for his amazing work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making & behavioral economics, has a new book coming out this fall entitled Thinking, Fast and Slow.
Steven Levitt—the lucky guy—got to read an advance copy*.
Among the hundreds of interesting ideas in the book, there is one that I simply can’t get out of my head. Referring to how our minds work, Kahneman writes that not only are we sometimes “blind to the obvious,” but also we are “blind to our blindness.” For me, that one sentence summarizes a fundamental insight of his life’s work. It’s one of those simple insights which is obvious when you think about it, but somehow incredibly easy to forget when mesmerized by the happenings of everyday life, leading to poor decision making.
