Thinking, Fast and Slow

by Daniel Kahneman

when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.

continuous vigilance is not necessarily good, and it is certainly impractical.

People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices,

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.

people were able to resist the effects of ego depletion when given a strong incentive to do so.

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.

Those who avoid the sin of intellectual sloth could be called “engaged.”

You can see 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.

“Bad Is Stronger Than Good,”

stable relationship

requires that good interactions outnumber bad interactions by at least 5 to 1.

A restaurant that is usually good may occasionally serve a brilliant or an awful meal. Your friend is usually good company, but he sometimes turns moody and aggressive.

These rewards and punishments, promises and threats, are all in our heads. We carefully keep score of them. They shape our preferences and motivate our actions,

What we learn from the past is to maximize the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experience. This is the tyranny of the remembering self.

the fact that it ended badly does not mean it was all bad.”

Caring for people often takes the form of concern for the quality of their stories, not for their feelings.

Mood at work, for example, is largely unaffected by the factors that influence general job satisfaction, including benefits and status. More important are situational factors such as an opportunity to socialize with coworkers, exposure to loud noise, time pressure (a significant source of negative affect), and the immediate presence of a boss (in our first study, the only thing that was worse than being alone).

suggest that another way to improve experience is to switch time from passive leisure, such as TV watching, to more active forms of leisure, including socializing and exercise.

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that happiness is the experience of spending time with people you love and who love you.

well-being is on average unaffected by marriage, not because marriage makes no difference to happiness but because it changes some aspects of life for the better and others for the worse.

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.

The neglect of duration combined with the peak-end rule causes a bias that favors a short period of intense joy over a long period of moderate happiness.

Decision makers are sometimes better able to imagine the voices of present gossipers and future critics than to hear the hesitant voice of their own doubts.

and when they expect their decision to be judged by how it was made, not only by how it turned out.