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cognitive ease,
cognitive strain.
When you feel strained, you are more likely to be vigilant and suspicious, invest more effort in what you are doing, feel less comfortable, and make fewer errors, but you also are less intuitive and less creative than usual.
A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.
Shane Frederick’s Cognitive Reflection Test consists of the bat-and-ball problem and two others, all chosen because they evoke an immediate intuitive answer that is incorrect. The other two items in the CRT are: If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets? 100 minutes OR 5 minutes In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake? 24 days OR 47 days
Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.
Speaking of Cognitive Ease “Let’s not dismiss their business plan just because the font makes it hard to read.” “We must be inclined to believe it because it has been repeated so often, but let’s think it through again.” “Familiarity breeds liking. This is a mere exposure effect.” “I’m in a very good mood today, and my System 2 is weaker than usual. I should be extra careful.”
Assessing Normality The main function of System 1 is to maintain and update a model of your personal world, which represents what is normal in it.
A capacity for surprise is an essential aspect of our mental life, and surprise itself is the most sensitive indication of how we understand our world and what we expect from it. There are two main varieties of surprise.
prominence of causal intuitions is a recurrent theme in this book because people are prone to apply causal thinking inappropriately, to situations that require statistical reasoning.
Speaking of Norms and Causes “When the second applicant also turned out to be an old friend of mine, I wasn’t quite as surprised. Very little repetition is needed for a new experience to feel normal!” “When we survey the reaction to these products, let’s make sure we don’t focus exclusively on the average. We should consider the entire range of normal reactions.” “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.”
Jumping to conclusions is efficient if the conclusions are likely to be correct and the costs of an occasional mistake acceptable, and if the jump saves much time and effort. Jumping to conclusions is risky when the situation is unfamiliar, the stakes are high, and there is no time to collect more information.
The initial attempt to believe is an automatic operation of System 1, which involves the construction of the best possible interpretation of the situation.
The moral is significant: when System 2 is otherwise engaged, we will believe almost anything. System 1 is gullible and biased to believe, System 2 is in charge of doubting and unbelieving, but System 2 is sometimes busy, and often lazy. Indeed, there is evidence that people are more likely to be influenced by empty persuasive messages, such as commercials, when they are tired and depleted.
The confirmatory bias of System 1 favors uncritical acceptance of suggestions and exaggeration of the likelihood of extreme and improbable events.
The tendency to like (or dislike) everything about a person—including things you have not observed—is known as the halo effect.
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. This procedure makes good use of the value of the diversity of knowledge and opinion in the group. The standard practice of open discussion gives too much weight to the opinions of those who speak early and assertively, causing others to line up behind them.
The measure of success for System 1 is the coherence of the story it manages to create. The amount and quality of the data on which the story is based are largely irrelevant.
WYSIATI, which stands for what you see is all there is.
It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern.
Speaking of Jumping to Conclusions “She knows nothing about this person’s management skills. All she is going by is the halo effect from a good presentation.” “Let’s decorrelate errors by obtaining separate judgments on the issue before any discussion. We will get more information from independent assessments.” “They made that big decision on the basis of a good report from one consultant. WYSIATI—what you see is all there is. They did not seem to realize how little information they had.” “They didn’t want more information that might spoil their story. WYSIATI.”
Todorov has found that people judge competence by combining the two dimensions of strength and trustworthiness.
The failure of System 1 to compute the total length of a set of lines at a glance may look obvious to you; you never thought you could do it. It is in fact an instance of an important limitation of that 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 size of the category, the number of instances it contains, tends to be ignored in judgments of what I will call sum-like variables.
Here we encounter a new aptitude of System 1. An underlying scale of intensity allows matching across diverse dimensions.
the control over intended computations is far from precise: we often compute much more than we want or need. I call this excess computation the mental shotgun.
Speaking of Judgment “Evaluating people as attractive or not is a basic assessment. You do that automatically whether or not you want to, and it influences you.” “There are circuits in the brain that evaluate dominance from the shape of the face. He looks the part for a leadership role.” “The punishment won’t feel just unless its intensity matches the crime. Just like you can match the loudness of a sound to the brightness of a light.” “This was a clear instance of a mental shotgun. He was asked whether he thought the company was financially sound, but he couldn’t forget that he likes their
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If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 will find a related question that is easier and will answer it. I call the operation of answering one question in place of another substitution.
The target question is the assessment you intend to produce. The heuristic question is the simpler question that you answer instead.
Another capability of System 1, intensity matching, is available to solve that problem.
the dominant impression of 3-D size dictates the judgment of 2-D size. The illusion is due to a 3-D heuristic.
Any emotionally significant question that alters a person’s mood will have the same effect. WYSIATI. The present state of mind looms very large when people evaluate their happiness.
affect heuristic in which people let their likes and dislikes determine their beliefs about the world.
In the context of attitudes, however, System 2 is more of an apologist for the emotions of System 1 than a critic of those emotions—an endorser rather than an enforcer. Its search for information and arguments is mostly constrained to information that is consistent with existing beliefs, not with an intention to examine them. An active, coherence-seeking System 1 suggests solutions to an undemanding System 2.
Speaking of Substitution and Heuristics “Do we still remember the question we are trying to answer? Or have we substituted an easier one?” “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.” “He likes the project, so he thinks its costs are low and its benefits are high. Nice example of the affect heuristic.” “We are using last year’s performance as a heuristic to predict the value of the firm several years from now. Is this heuristic good enough? What other information do we need?”
Characteristics of System 1 generates impressions, feelings, and inclinations; when endorsed by System 2 these become beliefs, attitudes, and intentions operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort, and no sense of voluntary control can be programmed by System 2 to mobilize attention when a particular pattern is detected (search) executes skilled responses and generates skilled intuitions, after adequate training creates a coherent pattern of activated ideas in associative memory links a sense of cognitive ease to illusions of truth, pleasant feelings, and reduced vigilance
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The law of small numbers is a manifestation of a general bias that favors certainty over doubt, which will turn up in many guises in following chapters.
The exaggerated faith in small samples is only one example of a more general illusion—we pay more attention to the content of messages than to information about their reliability, and as a result end up with a view of the world around us that is simpler and more coherent than the data justify. Jumping to conclusions is a safer sport in the world of our imagination than it is in reality. Statistics produce many observations that appear to beg for causal explanations but do not lend themselves to such explanations. Many facts of the world are due to chance, including accidents of sampling.
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Speaking of the Law of Small Numbers “Yes, the studio has had three successful films since the new CEO took over. But it is too early to declare he has a hot hand.” “I won’t believe that the new trader is a genius before consulting a statistician who could estimate the likelihood of his streak being a chance event.” “The sample of observations is too small to make any inferences. Let’s not follow the law of small numbers.” “I plan to keep the results of the experiment secret until we have a sufficiently large sample. Otherwise we will face pressure to reach a conclusion prematurely.”
The phenomenon we were studying is so common and so important in the everyday world that you should know its name: it is an anchoring effect. It occurs when people consider a particular value for an unknown quantity before estimating that quantity. What happens is one of the most reliable and robust results of experimental psychology: the estimates stay close to the number that people considered—hence the image of an anchor.
Any number that you are asked to consider as a possible solution to an estimation problem will induce an anchoring effect.
Anchoring as Adjustment Amos liked the idea of an adjust-and-anchor heuristic as a strategy for estimating uncertain quantities: start from an anchoring number, assess whether it is too high or too low, and gradually adjust your estimate by mentally “moving” from the anchor. The adjustment typically ends prematurely, because people stop when they are no longer certain that they should move farther.
Anchoring as Priming Effect When Amos and I debated anchoring, I agreed that adjustment sometimes occurs, but I was uneasy. Adjustment is a deliberate and conscious activity, but in most cases of anchoring there is no corresponding subjective experience.
the concept of suggestion is no longer obscure: suggestion is a priming effect, which selectively evokes compatible evidence.
The “high anchor” in this experiment was 1,200 feet. For other participants, the first question referred to a “low anchor” of 180 feet. The difference between the two anchors was 1,020 feet. As expected, the two groups produced very different mean estimates: 844 and 282 feet. The difference between them was 562 feet. The anchoring index is simply the ratio of the two differences (562/1,020) expressed as a percentage: 55%. The anchoring measure would be 100% for people who slavishly adopt the anchor as an estimate, and zero for people who are able to ignore the anchor altogether. The value of
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As in many other games, moving first is an advantage in single-issue negotiations—for example, when price is the only issue to be settled between a buyer and a seller.
My advice to students when I taught negotiations was that if you think the other side has made an outrageous proposal, you should not come back with an equally outrageous counteroffer, creating a gap that will be difficult to bridge in further negotiations. Instead you should make a scene, storm out or threaten to do so, and make it clear—to yourself as well as to the other side—that you will not continue the negotiation with that number on the table.
They instructed negotiators to focus their attention and search their memory for arguments against the anchor. The instruction to activate System 2 was successful. For example, the anchoring effect is reduced or eliminated when the second mover focuses his attention on the minimal offer that the opponent would accept, or on the costs to the opponent of failing to reach an agreement. In general, a strategy of deliberately “thinking the opposite” may be a good defense against anchoring effects, because it negates the biased recruitment of thoughts that produces these effects.
We saw in the discussion of the law of small numbers that a message, unless it is immediately rejected as a lie, will have the same effect on the associative system regardless of its reliability. The gist of the message is the story, which is based on whatever information is available, even if the quantity of the information is slight and its quality is poor: WYSIATI.
Speaking of Anchors “The firm we want to acquire sent us their business plan, with the revenue they expect. We shouldn’t let that number influence our thinking. Set it aside.” “Plans are best-case scenarios. Let’s avoid anchoring on plans when we forecast actual outcomes. Thinking about ways the plan could go wrong is one way to do it.” “Our aim in the negotiation is to get them anchored on this number.” “Let’s make it clear that if that is their proposal, the negotiations are over. We do not want to start there.” “The defendant’s lawyers put in a frivolous reference in which they mentioned a
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We defined the availability heuristic as the process of judging frequency by “the ease with which instances come to mind.”
