Thinking, Fast and Slow

by Daniel Kahneman

you briefly thought of Mindik as a leader. You did not start by asking, “What would I need to know before I formed an opinion about the quality of someone’s leadership?”

The combination of a coherence-seeking System 1 with a lazy System 2 implies that System 2 will endorse many intuitive beliefs, which closely reflect the impressions generated by System

However, System 1 is expected to influence even the more careful decisions. Its input never ceases.

Jumping to conclusions on the basis of limited evidence is so important to an understanding of intuitive thinking,

WYSIATI, which stands for what you see is...

System 1 is radically insensitive to both the quality and the quantity of the information that gives rise...

Furthermore, participants who saw one-sided evidence were more confident of their judgments than those who saw both sides. This is just what you would expect if the confidence that people experience is determined by the coherence of the story they manage to construct from available information.

It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness.

Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you kno...

WYSIATI facilitates the achievement of coherence and of the cognitive ease that causes us to accept a statement as true. It explains why we can think fast, and how we are able to make sense of partial information in a complex world. Much of the time, the coherent story ...

As the WYSIATI rule implies, neither the quantity nor the quality of the evidence counts for much in subjective confidence. The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little.

We often fail to allow for the possibility that evidence that should be critical to our judgment is missing—what we see is all there is. Furthermore, our associative system tends to settle on a coherent pattern of activation and suppresses doubt and ambiguity.

“She knows nothing about this person’s management skills. All she is going by is the halo effect from a good presentation.”

before any discussion. We will get more information from independent assessments.”

“They made that big decision on the basis of a good report from one consultant. WYSIATI—what you see is all there is. They did not seem to realize how little information they had.” “They didn’t want more information that might spoil their story. WYSIATI.”

ratings of competence were far more predictive of voting outcomes in Todorov’s study than ratings of likability.

judgment heuristic

cultural milieu.

explains why we have intuitive judgments about many things that we know little about.

He was asked whether he thought the company was financially sound, but he couldn’t forget that he likes their product.”

The normal state of your mind is that you have intuitive feelings and opinions about almost everything that comes your way.

Whether you state them or not, you often have answers to questions that you do not completely understand, relying on evidence that you can neither explain nor defend.

I propose a simple account of how we generate intuitive opinions on complex matters. If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 will find a related question that is easier and will answer it. I call the operation of answering one question in place of another substitution. I also adopt the following terms:

The target question is the assessment you intend to produce. The heuristic question is the simpler question that you answer instead.

The automatic processes of the mental shotgun and intensity matching often make available one or more answers to easy questions that could be mapped onto the target question.

On some occasions, substitution will occur and a heuristic answer will be endorsed by System 2. Of course, System 2 has the opportunity to reject this intuitive answer, or to modify it by incorporating other information. However, a lazy System 2 often follows the path of least effort and endorses a heuristic answer without much scrutiny of whether it is truly appropriate. You will not be stumped, you will not have to work very hard, and you may not even notice that you did not answer the question you were asked. Furthermore, you may not realize that the target question was difficult, because an intuitive answer to it came readily to mind.

search for information and arguments is mostly constrained to information that is consistent with existing beliefs, not with an intention to examine them. An active, coherence-seeking System 1 suggests solutions to an undemanding System

is biased to believe and confirm

focuses on existing evidence and ignores absent evidence

This explanation is not causal.

The deeper truth is that there is nothing to explain.

“people are not adequately sensitive to sample size.”

System 1 is not prone to doubt. It suppresses ambiguity and spontaneously constructs stories that are as coherent as possible.

The exaggerated faith of researchers in what can be learned from a few observations is closely related to the halo effect, the sense we often get that we know and understand a person about whom we actually know very little.

System 1 runs ahead of the facts in constructing a rich image on the basis of scraps of evidence. A machine for jumping to conclusions will act as if it believed in the law of small numbers. More generally, it will produce a representation of reality that makes too much sense.

The associative machinery seeks causes.

Instead of focusing on how the event at hand came to be, the statistical view relates it to what could have happened instead.

We are pattern seekers, believers in a coherent world, in which regularities (such as a sequence of six girls) appear not by accident but as a result of mechanical causality or of someone’s intention.

Some years later, Amos and his students Tom Gilovich and Robert Vallone caused a stir with their study of misperceptions of randomness in basketball.

The hot hand is entirely in the eye of the beholders, who are consistently too quick to perceive order and causality in randomness.

The simple answer to these questions is that if you follow your intuition, you will more often than not err by misclassifying a random event as systematic.

We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random.

It is easy to construct a causal story that explains how small schools are able to provide superior education

The exaggerated faith in small samples is only one example of a more general illusion—we pay more attention to the content of messages than to information about their reliability, and as a result end up with a view of the world around us that is simpler and more coherent than the data justify.

Jumping to conclusions is a safer sport in the world of our imagination than it is in reality.

Statistics produce many observations that appear to beg for causal explanations but do not lend themselves to such explanations. Many facts of the world are due to chance, including accidents of sampling. Ca...

“I won’t believe that the new trader is a genius before consulting a statistician who could estimate the likelihood of his streak being a chance event.” “The sample of observations is too small to make any inferences. Let’s not follow the law of small numbers.”

There is a form of anchoring that occurs in a deliberate process of adjustment, an operation of System 2. And there is anchoring that occurs by

priming effect, an automatic manifestation of System 1.

The adjustment typically ends prematurely, because people stop when they are no longer certain that they should move farther.