Thinking, Fast and Slow

by Daniel Kahneman

People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature.

A crucial capability of System 2 is the adoption of “task sets”: it can program memory to obey an instruction that overrides habitual responses.

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.

Several psychological studies have shown that people who are simultaneously challenged by a demanding cognitive task and by a temptation are more likely to yield to the temptation.

People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations.

Baumeister’s group has repeatedly found that an effort of will or self-control is tiring; 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. The phenomenon has been named ego depletion.

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.

The testers found that training attention not only improved executive control; scores on nonverbal tests of intelligence also improved and the improvement was maintained for several months.

Psychologists think of ideas as nodes in a vast network, called associative memory, in which each idea is linked to many others.

most of the work of associative thinking is silent, hidden from our conscious selves. The notion that we have limited access to the workings of our minds is difficult to accept because, naturally, it is alien to our experience, but it is true: you know far less about yourself than you feel you do.

We call this a priming effect and say that the idea of EAT primes the idea of SOUP, and that WASH primes SOAP.

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

Reciprocal priming effects tend to produce a coherent reaction: if you were primed to think of old age, you would tend to act old, and acting old would reinforce the thought of old age.

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.

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

Cognitive strain, whatever its source, mobilizes System 2, which is more likely to reject the intuitive answer suggested by System 1.

The mere exposure effect occurs, Zajonc claimed, because the repeated exposure of a stimulus is followed by nothing bad. Such a stimulus will eventually become a safety signal, and safety is good.

Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.

When uncertain, System 1 bets on an answer, and the bets are guided by experience. The rules of the betting are intelligent: recent events and the current context have the most weight in determining an interpretation. When no recent event comes to mind, more distant memories govern.

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

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.

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.

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

However, 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.

An active, coherence-seeking System 1 suggests solutions to an undemanding System 2.

Analysis of thousands of sequences of shots led to a disappointing conclusion: there is no such thing as a hot hand in professional basketball, either in shooting from the field or scoring from the foul line.

We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random.

Subjects’ unwillingness to deduce the particular from the general was matched only by their willingness to infer the general from the particular.