Thinking, Fast and Slow

by Daniel Kahneman

“The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.”

The word illusion brings visual illusions to mind, because we are all familiar with pictures that mislead. But vision is not the only domain of illusions; memory is also susceptible to them, as is thinking more generally.

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. Only then can you decide whether or not to unbelieve it.

Democracy is inevitably messy, in part because the availability and affect heuristics that guide citizens’ beliefs and attitudes are inevitably biased, even if they generally point in the right direction. Psychology should inform the design of risk policies that combine the experts’ knowledge with the public’s emotions and intuitions.

The test of learning psychology is whether your understanding of situations you encounter has changed, not whether you have learned a new fact.

It is wrong to blame anyone for failing to forecast accurately in an unpredictable world. However, it seems fair to blame professionals for believing they can succeed in an impossible task. Claims for correct intuitions in an unpredictable situation are self-delusional at best, sometimes worse. In the absence of valid cues, intuitive “hits” are due either to luck or to lies. If you find this conclusion surprising, you still have a lingering belief that intuition is magic. Remember this rule: intuition cannot be trusted in the absence of stable regularities in the environment.