Thinking, Fast and Slow

by Daniel Kahneman

it is much easier to strive for perfection when you are never bored.

neither of us ever rejected out of hand anything the other said.

However, we found that participants in our experiments ignored the relevant statistical facts and relied exclusively on resemblance.

We proposed that they used resemblance as a simplifying heuristic (roughly, a rule of thumb) to make a difficult judgment.

traced these errors to the design of the machinery of cognition rather than to the corruption of thought by emotion.

students of

the power of resemblance as a cue to probability

by the effects of prolonged practice than by heuristics.

We can now draw a richer and more balanced picture, in which skill and heuristics are alternative sources of intuitive judgments and choices.

affect heuristic,

When the question is difficult and a skilled solution is not available, intuition still has a shot: an answer may come to mind quickly—but it is not an answer to the original question.

is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.

intuitive thought—the expert and the heuristic—as

We easily think associatively, we think metaphorically, we think causally, but statistics requires thinking about many things at once, which is something that System 1 is not designed to do.

our excessive confidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we live

hope for watercooler conversations that intelligently explore the lessons that can be learned from the past while resisting the lure of hindsight and the illusion of certainty.

the experiencing self and the remembering self, which do not have the same interests. For

it sometimes answers easier questions than the one it was asked,

It is an illusion—a cognitive illusion—and I (System 2) was taught how to recognize it and advised not to believe it or act on it.

Biases cannot always be avoided, because System 2 may have no clue to the error.

learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high.

and one of its main characteristics is laziness, a reluctance to invest more effort than is strictly necessary.

Casting about

Studies of the brain have shown that the pattern of activity associated with an action changes as skill increases, with fewer brain regions involved.

In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature.

Effort is required to maintain simultaneously in memory several ideas that require separate actions, or that need to be combined according to a rule—rehearsing

System 1 has more influence on behavior when System 2 is busy, and it has a sweet tooth.

controlling thoughts and behaviors is one of the tasks that System 2 performs.

trying to impress others

reacting aggressively to provocation

These students can solve much more difficult problems when they are not tempted to accept a superficially plausible answer that comes readily to mind.

The ease with which they are satisfied enough to stop thinking is rather troubling.

Those who avoid the sin of intellectual sloth could be called “engaged.” They are more alert, more intellectually active, less willing to be satisfied with superficially attractive answers, more skeptical about their intuitions. The psychologist Keith Stanovich would call them more rational.

The resisters had higher measures of executive control in cognitive tasks, and especially the ability to reallocate their attention effectively.

The testers found that training attention not only improved executive control; scores on nonverbal tests of intelligence also improved and the improvement was maintained for several months.

with the first idea that comes to mind and unwilling to invest the effort needed to check their intuitions.

Individuals who uncritically follow their intuitions about puzzles are also prone to accept other suggestions from System 1. In particular, they are impulsive, impatient, and keen to receive immediate gratification.

One of these minds (he calls it algorithmic) deals with slow thinking and demanding computation.

high intelligence does not make people immune to biases.

Another ability is involved, which he labels rationality.

The core of his argument is that rationality should be distinguished from intelligence. In his view, superficial or “lazy” thinking is a flaw in the ...

associative activation:

priming effect

ideomotor

Reciprocal links are common in the associative network. For example, being amused tends to make you smile, and smiling tends to make you feel amused.

We now know that the effects of priming can reach into every corner of our lives.

Money-primed people are also more selfish: they were much less willing to spend time helping another student who pretended to be confused about an experimental task.

When an experimenter clumsily dropped a bunch of pencils on the floor, the participants with money (unconsciously) on their mind picked up fewer pencils.

the idea of money primes individualism: a reluctance to be involved with others, to depend on others, or to accept demands from others.

living in a culture that surrounds us with reminders of money may shape our behavior and our attitudes in ways that we do not know about and of which we may not be proud.