Thinking, Fast and Slow

by Daniel Kahneman

We can be blind to the obvious and we are also blind to our blindness

You know the lines are equal but you cannot see them as equal.

Psychotherapist wisdom

The pupil data corresponded precisely to subjective experience: longer strings reliably caused larger dilations, the transformation task compounded the effort, and the peak of pupil

switching from one task to another is effortful, especially under time pressure.

People who experience flow describe it as “a state of effortless concentration so deep that they lose their sense of time, of themselves, of their problems,” and their descriptions of the joy of that state are so compelling that Csikszentmihalyi has called it an “optimal experience.”

Several psychological studies have shown that people who are simultaneously challenged by a demanding cognitive task and by a temptation are more likely to yield to the temptation.

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

self-control requires attention and effort.

In several experiments, people were able to resist the effects of ego depletion when given a strong incentive to do so.

many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions. They apparently find cognitive effort at least mildly unpleasant and avoid it as much as possible.

when people believe a conclusion is true, they are also very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it, even when these arguments are unsound.

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.

Hasn’t replicated. Results may not generalize

He went on to study the characteristics of students who score very low on this test—the supervisory function of System 2 is weak in these people—and found that they are prone to answer questions 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.

You do not believe that these results apply to you because they correspond to nothing in your subjective experience. But your subjective experience consists largely of the story that your System 2 tells itself about what is going on. Priming

phenomena arise in System 1, and you have no conscious access to them.

System 1 provides the impressions that often turn into your beliefs, and is the source of the impulses that often become your choices and your actions. It offers a tacit interpretation of what happens to you and around you, linking the present with the recent past and with expectations about the near future.