Thinking, Fast and Slow

by Daniel Kahneman

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 premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people’s mistakes than our own.

“Automatic system” takes longer to say than “System 1” and therefore takes more space in your working memory. This matters, because anything that occupies your working memory reduces your ability to think.

This is as hard as people can work—they give up if more is asked of them.

One of the significant discoveries of cognitive psychologists in recent decades is that switching from one task to another is effortful, especially under time pressure.

attending, and the name he proposed for it, flow, has become part of the language.

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.

many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions.

they are the individuals who excel in intelligence tests and are able to switch from one task to another quickly and efficiently.

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

“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.

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

If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.

In addition to making your message simple, try to make it memorable. Put your ideas in verse if you can; they will be more likely to be taken as truth.

Finally, if you quote a source, choose one with a name that is easy to pronounce. Participants

animals. To survive in a frequently dangerous world, an organism should react cautiously to a novel stimulus, with withdrawal and fear.

These findings add to the growing evidence that good mood, intuition, creativity, gullibility, and increased reliance on System 1 form a cluster. At the other pole, sadness, vigilance, suspicion, an analytic approach, and increased effort also go together. A happy mood loosens the control of System 2 over performance: when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors.

“She can’t accept that she was just unlucky; she needs a causal story. She will end up thinking that someone intentionally sabotaged her work.”

Gilbert proposed that understanding a statement must begin with an attempt to believe it: you must first know what the idea would mean if it were true.

A deliberate search for confirming evidence, known as positive test strategy, is also how System 2 tests a hypothesis.

The tendency to like (or dislike) everything about a person—including things you have not observed—is known as the halo effect.

Alan: intelligent—industrious—impulsive—critical—stubborn—envious Ben: envious—stubborn—critical—impulsive—industrious—intelligent

days. A simple rule can help: before an issue is discussed, all members of the committee should be asked to write a very brief summary of their position.

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

Base-rate neglect: Recall Steve, the meek and tidy soul who is often believed to be a librarian. The personality description is salient and vivid, and although you surely know that there are more male farmers than male librarians, that statistical fact almost certainly did not come to your mind when you first considered the question. What you saw was all there was.

system. Because System 1 represents categories by a prototype or a set of typical exemplars, it deals well with averages but poorly with sums.

The almost complete neglect of quantity in such emotional contexts has been confirmed many times.

“Evaluating people as attractive or not is a basic assessment. You do that automatically whether or not you want to, and it influences you.”

How many dates did you have last month? How happy are you these days?

The students who had many dates were

reminded of a happy aspect of their life, while those who had none were reminded of loneliness and rejection.

“The question we face is whether this candidate can succeed. The question we seem to answer is whether she interviews well. Let’s not substitute.”

the law of small numbers is part of two larger stories about the workings of the mind.

it. Paradoxically, it is easier to construct a coherent story when you know little, when there are fewer pieces to fit into the puzzle.

“She has no evidence for saying that the firm is badly managed. All she knows is that its stock has gone down. This is an outcome bias, part hindsight and part halo effect.”

it. It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously, but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.

Nassim Taleb pointed out in The Black Swan, our tendency to construct and believe coherent narratives of the past makes it difficult for us to accept the limits of our forecasting ability.

The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.