Thinking, Fast and Slow

by Daniel Kahneman

People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media.

“The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.”

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

which describes a puzzling limitation of our mind: 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 in.

We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events. Overconfidence is fed by the illusory certainty of hindsight. My views on this topic have been influenced by Nassim Taleb, the author of The Black Swan. I hope

When we think of ourselves, we identify with System 2, the conscious, reasoning self that has beliefs, makes choices, and decides what to think about and what to do. Although

The automatic operations of System 1 generate surprisingly complex patterns of ideas, but only the slower System 2 can construct thoughts in an orderly series of steps.

The control of attention is shared by the two systems.

The highly diverse operations of System 2 have one feature in common: they require attention and are disrupted when attention is drawn away. Here are some examples:

System 2 has some ability to change the way System 1 works, by programming the normally automatic functions of attention and memory.

When waiting for a relative at a busy train station, for example, you can set yourself at will to look for a white-haired woman or a bearded man, and thereby increase the likelihood of detecting your relative from a distance.

The gorilla study illustrates two important facts about our minds: we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.

System 2 is also credited with the continuous monitoring of your own behavior—the control that keeps you polite when you are angry, and alert when you are driving at night.

In summary, most of what you (your System 2) think and do originates in your System 1, but System 2 takes over when things get difficult, and it normally has the last word.

The division of labor between System 1 and System 2 is highly efficient: it minimizes effort and optimizes performance.

One of the tasks of System 2 is to overcome the impulses of System 1. In other words, System 2 is in charge of self-control.

System 1 operates automatically and cannot be turned off at will, errors of intuitive thought are often difficult to prevent. Biases cannot always be avoided, because System 2 may have no clue to the error. Even when cues to likely errors are available,

errors can be prevented only by the enhanced monitoring and effortful activity of System 2.

The best we can do is a compromise: learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high.

The defining feature of System 2, in this story, is that its operations are effortful, and one of its main characteristics is laziness, a reluctance to invest more effort than is strictly necessary.

As a consequence, the thoughts and actions that System 2 believes it has chosen are often guided by the figure at the center of the story, System 1.

Highly intelligent individuals need less effort to solve the same problems, as indicated by both pupil size and brain activity. A general “law of least effort” applies to cognitive as well as physical exertion.

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.

crucial capability of System 2 is the adoption of “task sets”: it can program memory to obey an instruction that overrides habitual responses.

Any task that requires you to keep several ideas in mind at the same time has the same hurried character.

System 2 also has a natural speed.

The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced six-cent-mihaly) has done more than anyone else to study this state of effortless attending, and the name he proposed for it, flow, has become part of the language. People

“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.” Many

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

People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations.

Baumeister’s group has repeatedly found that an effort of will or self-control is tiring; if you have had to force yourself to do something, you are less willing or less able to exert self-control when the next challenge comes around. The phenomenon has been named ego depletion.

tired and hungry judges tend to fall back on the easier default position of denying requests for parole.

One of the main functions of System 2 is to monitor and control thoughts and actions “suggested” by System 1,

People who say 10¢ appear to be ardent followers of the law of least effort. People who avoid that answer appear to have more active minds.

Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed. Memory function is an attribute of System 1.

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 reflective mind, a failure of rationality. This is an attractive and thought-provoking idea.

Speaking of Control “She did not have to struggle to stay on task for hours. She was in a state of flow.” “His ego was depleted after a long day of meetings. So he just turned to standard operating procedures instead of thinking through the problem.” “He didn’t bother to check whether what he said made sense. Does he usually have a lazy System 2 or was he unusually tired?” “Unfortunately, she tends to say the first thing that comes into her mind. She probably also has trouble delaying gratification. Weak System 2.”

Psychologists think of ideas as nodes in a vast network, called associative memory, in which each idea is linked to many others. There are different types of links: causes are linked to their effects (virus cold); things to their properties (lime green); things to the categories to which they belong (banana fruit). One way we have advanced beyond Hume is that we no longer think of the mind as going through a sequence of conscious ideas, one at a time.

In the current view of how associative memory works, a great deal happens at once. An idea that has been activated does not merely evoke one other idea. It activates many ideas, which in turn activate others. Furthermore, only a few of the activated ideas will register in consciousness; most of the work of associative thinking is silent, hidden from our conscious selves.

Another major advance in our understanding of memory was the discovery that priming is not restricted to concepts and words. You cannot know this from conscious experience, of course, but you must accept the alien idea that your actions and your emotions can be primed by events of which you are not even aware.

This remarkable priming phenomenon—the influencing of an action by the idea—is known as the ideomotor effect.

Reciprocal priming effects tend to produce a coherent reaction: if you were primed to think of old age, you would tend to act old, and acting old would reinforce the thought of old age.

why the common admonition to “act calm and kind regardless of how you feel” is very good advice: you are likely to be rewarded by actually feeling calm and kind.

The general theme of these findings is that the idea of money primes individualism: a reluctance to be involved with others, to depend on others, or to accept demands from others.

Feeling that one’s soul is stained appears to trigger a desire to cleanse one’s body, an impulse that has been dubbed the “Lady Macbeth effect.”

You have now been introduced to that stranger in you, which may be in control of much of what you do, although you rarely have a glimpse of it. 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.

Same as discussed in the book called the order of time . The definition of music

“I made myself smile and I’m actually feeling better!”

You can think of a cockpit, with a set of dials that indicate the current values of each of these essential variables. The assessments are carried out automatically by System 1, and one of their functions is to determine whether extra effort is required from System 2. One of the dials measures cognitive ease, and its range is between “Easy” and “Strained.” Easy is a sign that things are going well—no threats, no major news, no need to redirect attention or mobilize effort. Strained indicates that a problem exists, which will require increased mobilization of System 2.

A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.