CEP 21st Birthday Lecture Series

In Conversation - Thinking Fast and Slow

Speaker: Professor Daniel Kahneman, Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton

With: Professor Lord Richard Layard, Director of Wellbeing Programme, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

This event was held on Tueday 15 November 2011 at the LSE.

Overview: In Thinking Fast and Slow, the world's most influential psychologist Daniel Kahneman reveals the truth about our intuitions, and our rationality itself, to teach us how to better our lives. Kahneman explores the fascinating flaws and marvels of human behaviour and reveals to us the common errors in people's beliefs. Overturning the conventional way most of us consider decision-making to be rational, reliable and in our own interests, Kahneman takes us on a ground-breaking tour inside the mind to show us how we are all motivated by impulses that often turn out to be irrational, unreliable and detrimental to our well-being. Why do smart people make bad decisions? How come the best laid plans can go so wrong? What really makes us happy? Kahneman will disucss these questions and more with Richard Layard.

Thinking Fast and Slow: Buy the book from publisher's website

About the Speakers: Daniel Kahneman is a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He is also Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs Emeritus at the Woodrow Wilson School, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Princeton University, and a fellow of the Center for Rationality at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Dr. Kahneman is a member of the National Academy of Science, the Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the Econometric Society. He has been the recipient of many awards, among them the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association (1982) and the Grawemeyer Prize (2002), both jointly with Amos Tversky, the Warren Medal of the Society of Experimental Psychologists (1995), the Hilgard Award for Career Contributions to General Psychology (1995), the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences (2002), and the Lifetime Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association (2007).

Richard Layard is Emeritus Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, where he was, until 2003, the founder-director of the Centre for Economic Performance. He now heads the Centre’s Programme on Well-Being. Since 2000 he has been a member of the House of Lords.

For ticket information please contact the LSE Conferences and Events office

For information on future lectures in this series, please visit the CEP 21st Birthday Lecture Series webpage