If you are read­ing this blog, you are curi­ous about Human nature. If you are curi­ous about Human nature, there is a book you ABSOLUTELY have to read.  It’s the book I just finished.

Daniel Kah­ne­man is a Pro­fes­sor of psy­chol­ogy. An extra­or­di­nary one. A psy­chol­o­gist who won a Nobel Prize in Eco­nomic Sci­ence.
Together with his long time col­lab­o­ra­tor Amos Tver­sky, they con­ducted research since the 1970’s that have dis­proved the widely accepted eco­nomic model which tra­di­tion­ally assumes that humans are ratio­nal and max­imise util­ity.
Their research lead to the devel­op­ment of a new sci­ence called ‘Behav­ioural Eco­nom­ics’ based on the assump­tion that humans are irra­tional, and that we tend to be influ­enced by data that is totally irrel­e­vant to the topic at hand.

For exam­ple, in one exper­i­ment they asked col­lege stu­dents two ques­tions:
“How happy are you with your life in gen­eral?” and “How many dates did you have last month?“
When asked in this order they found almost no cor­re­la­tion. How­ever, sim­ply chang­ing the order of the ques­tions influ­enced the stu­dents a great deal: those who had been on a lot of dates rated them­selves as much hap­pier than those who had not.

In another exper­i­ment in Ger­many, they found that expe­ri­enced judges were much more likely to give shoplifters a longer sen­tence if they had rolled a dice loaded to give a higher num­ber just before mak­ing that decision.

‘Think­ing, Fast & Slow“‘ is a great way to start the year: after read­ing the book, you will feel com­pletely com­fort­able being as irra­tional as you want, and let’s face it, noth­ing is more lib­er­at­ing than irra­tional­ity.

Another way to under­stand Human nature and the com­plex processes behind our deci­sion mak­ing is to take one of the NLP courses that we have lined up for you this year. Visit the sched­ule of all courses to read more about them.

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