Thinking, Fast and Slow

by Daniel Kahneman

The expectation of intelligent gossip is a powerful motive for serious self-criticism, more powerful than New Year resolutions to improve one’s decision making at work and at home.

“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.”

If the individual has relevant expertise, she will recognize the situation, and the intuitive solution that comes to her mind is likely to be correct.

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.

Fast thinking includes both variants of intuitive thought—the expert and the heuristic—as well as the entirely automatic mental activities of perception and memory, the operations that enable you to know there is a lamp on your desk or retrieve the name of the capital of Russia.

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.