Thinking, Fast and Slow

by Daniel Kahneman

Their decision was governed by a simple rule of intuitive choice: pick the option you like the most, or dislike the least.

Rules of memory determined how much they disliked the two options, which in turn determined their choice.

System 1 represents sets by averages, norms, and prototypes, not by sums.

For an objective observer evaluating the episode from the reports of the experiencing self, what counts is the “area under the curve” that integrates pain over time; it has the nature of a sum.

The memory that the remembering self keeps, in contrast, is a representative moment, strongly influenced by the peak and the end.

The cold-hand study showed that we cannot fully trust our preferences to reflect our interests, even if they are based on personal experience, and even if the memory of that experience was laid down within the last quarter of an hour!

We want

pain to be brief and pleasure to last. But our memory, a function of System 1, has evolved to represent the most intense moment of an episode of pain or pleasure (the peak) and the feelings when the episode was at its end.

A memory that neglects duration will not serve our preference for long pl...

This is

how the remembering self works: it composes stories and keeps them for future reference.

Caring for people often takes the form of concern for the quality of their stories, not for their feelings.

Most important, of course, we all care intensely for the narrative of our own life and very much want it to be a good story, with a decent hero.

Distinct industries have developed to cater to these alternatives: resorts offer restorative relaxation; tourism is about helping people construct stories and collect memories.

As in the cold-hand experiment, right or wrong, people choose by memory when they decide whether or not to repeat an experience.

There are many different experiences we would rather continue than stop, including both mental and physical pleasures.

The resistance to interruption was a sign I had been having a good time, both with my toys and with the swings.

A more practical alternative was needed, so we developed a method that we called the Day Reconstruction Method (DRM).

Our questionnaire also included measures of life satisfaction, which we interpreted as the satisfaction of the remembering self.

We called the percentage of time that an individual spends in an unpleasant state the U-index.

For 1,000 American women in a Midwestern city, the U-index was 29% for the morning commute, 27% for work, 24% for child care, 18% for housework, 12% for socializing, 12% for TV watching, and 5% for sex.

The biggest surprise was the emotional experience of the time spent with one’s children, which for American women was slightly less enjoyable than doing housework.

Frenchwomen spend less time with their children but enjoy it more, perhaps because they have more access to child care and spend less of the afternoon driving children to various activities.

When happily in love, we may feel joy even when caught in traffic, and if grieving, we may remain depressed when watching a funny movie.

The feelings associated with different activities suggest that another way to improve experience is to switch time from passive leisure, such as TV watching, to more active forms of leisure, including socializing and exercise.

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that happiness is the experience of spending time with people you love and who love you.

Gallup’s life evaluation is measured by a question known as the Cantril Self-Anchoring Striving Scale:

Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?

More education is associated with higher evaluation of one’s life, but not with greater experienced well-being.

ill health has a much stronger adverse effect on experienced well-being than on life evaluation.

Religious participation also has relatively greater favorable impact on both positive affect and stress reduction than on life evaluation.

Can money buy happiness?

The conclusion is that being poor makes one miserable, and that being rich may enhance one’s life satisfaction, but does not (on average) improve experienced well-being.

The average increase of experienced well-being associated with incomes beyond that level was precisely zero. This is surprising because higher income undoubtedly permits the purchase of many pleasures, including vacations in interesting places and opera tickets, as well as an improved living environment.

A plausible interpretation is that higher income is associated with a reduced ability to enjoy the small pleasures of life.

affective forecasting.

The startling news of figure 16 is the steep decline of life satisfaction.

The graph is commonly interpreted as tracing a process of adaptation, in which the early joys of marriage quickly disappear as the experiences become routine.

Even when it is not influenced by completely irrelevant accidents such as the coin on the machine, the score that you quickly assign to your life is determined by a small sample of highly available ideas, not by a careful weighting of the domains of your life.

Even newlyweds who are lucky enough to enjoy a state of happy preoccupation with their love will eventually return to earth, and their experienced well-being will again depend, as it does for the rest of us, on the environment and activities of the present moment.

The details of how the two groups used their time explained the finding.

They spend more time making love, which is wonderful, but also more time doing housework, preparing food, and caring for children, all relatively unpopular activities.

One reason for the low correlations between individuals’ circumstances and their satisfaction with life is that both experienced happiness and life satisfaction are largely determined by the genetics of temperament.

The goals that people set for themselves are so important to what they do and how they feel about it that an exclusive focus on experienced well-being is not tenable.

focusing illusion,

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.

However, the focusing illusion can also bring comfort. Whether or not the individual is actually happier after the move, he will report himself happier, because thoughts of the climate will make him believe that he is.

Here it appears that the remembering self is subject to a massive focusing illusion about the life that the experiencing self endures quite comfortably.

The mind is good with stories, but it does not appear to be well designed for the processing of time.

The remembering self is a construction of System 2. However, the distinctive features of the way it evaluates episodes and lives are characteristics of our memory. Duration neglect and the peak-end rule originate in System 1 and do not necessarily correspond to the