Thinking fast and slow?

Currently reading Thinking, Fast and Slow from Daniel Kahneman, I'm fascinated by the influence of the 'priming' effect (which is, basically, the effect of one idea to another one. Let's pretend you read some words about 'fatigue', 'old age' and 'high temperatures' for example...well, this will conduct you to move and walk slower, for example). What strikes me on the reading is how sensitive we are on contextual (even unconscious) information. Because if you take a serious look at what Kahneman is saying (and his explanation is based on various academic publications), it means that even when you think that you make a coherent, well-thought, rational choice...you're not.

 

A conclusion that brings me then in my business environment, where we all try (especially as a management consultant) to give best guidance and advices to make the client take the proper and best decision as possible. Decision-making as a process is certainly far from being simple (you've plenty of elements to take into consideration, like the market environment [Porter], your competitive position on that specific market, your available resources (from available capital to skilled manpower in order to design a new product or a new service), your innovation capacity etc...but now that Kahneman has published his work...we need to take the psychological elements into considerations as well.

 

This means that you need to figure out how your consumers / future clients will consume the product, but you even have to integrate your own way of thinking (and try to figure out in what sense you might have been influenced by your contextual environment). But this means also that our economic educational system needs to integrate much more of the social science debate, where non-quantitative elements might take the major stance.