Session 15

The Science of Happiness, Session 15,

“Thinking Fast” and Happiness

It is mesmerizing to find that we have extraordinary abilities that we can use really Fast and we can be brave enough to use them:

1.       You can take decisions in the “blink of an eye”, using “Thin Slicing”, System 1

2.       If you make mistakes, we can think about Harvard Professor Tal Ben- Shahar and his mantra:

3.       Learn to fail, or fail to learn

4.       Finally, there is the phenomenon called Hedonic Adaptation- you can adapt to almost anything…

Some say that the world’s most influential living psychologist is Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Prize, but for Economic Sciences

-          Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize Winner

-          World’s most influential living psychologist

-          Thinking Fast and Slow

He explains in that masterpiece the two systems that we utilize in our everyday life and that we can benefit from:

1.       System 1- fast, intuitive and emotional

2.       System 2- slower, more deliberative and more logical

There is also a theory that is called Thin Slicing and it is analyzed in another extraordinary work by Malcolm Gladwell

-          “Thin Slicing”- the ability to find patterns based only on “thin slices”, narrow windows of experience

-          Blink, The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

Benefits of Fast Thinking have been researched and there are examples in the domains of:

-          Art – the Getty Museum and the ancient statues

-          Medicine- saving many lives in Emergency

-          Military exercises- the War Games

Mistakes are possible, sometimes with grave consequences:

-          Vincennes Aircraft carrier – Iran Air passenger flight, 1988

-          Amadou Diallo, the Bronx

One is better off knowing the rules of the game and the situations wherein some aspects could play to or against his or her advantage:

-          The Harding Effect

-           About half of the companies on the Fortune 500 have been polled

-          on average CEOs were just a shade under six feet

-          “Given that the average American male is 5’9″ that means that CEOs, as a group, have about three inches on the rest of their sex. But this statistic actually understates matters. In the U.S. population, about 14.5 percent of all men are six feet or over. Among CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, that number is 58 percent. Even more strikingly, in the general American population, 3.9 percent of adult men are 6’2″ or taller. Among the CEO sample, 30 percent were 6’2″ or taller…”

We should probably be aware of that

For many important decisions we need to utilize

-          System 2

-          We can’t multiply 145 with 57 while driving in difficult, slippery conditions

-          And should not even try…