Thinking, Fast and Slow

by Daniel Kahneman

Café Rimon, the favorite hangout of bohemians and professors in Jerusalem,

To visit in jerusalem

“Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.”

To read

“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.”

About Intuition

Nassim Taleb, the author of The Black Swan.

To read

For example, we can expose people to two painful experiences. One of these experiences is strictly worse than the other, because it is longer. But the automatic formation of memories—a feature of System 1—has its rules, which we can exploit so that the worse episode leaves a better memory. When people later choose which episode to repeat, they are, naturally, guided by their remembering self and expose themselves (their experiencing self) to unnecessary pain. The distinction between two selves is applied to the measurement of well-being, where we find again that what makes the experiencing self happy is not quite the same as what satisfies the remembering self. How two selves within a single body can pursue happiness raises some difficult questions, both for individuals and for societies that view the well-being of the population as a policy objective.

About 2 in one body

Keith Stanovich and Richard West,

Psychologist To study

The Invisible Gorilla.

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.

Gorilla Film

People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations. Memorizing and repeating digits loosens the hold of System 2 on behavior, but of course cognitive load is not the only cause of weakened self-control. A few drinks have the same effect, as does a sleepless night. The self-control of morning people is impaired at night; the reverse is true of night people.

Morning People

The proportion spikes after each meal, when about 65% of requests are granted. During the two hours or so until the judges’ next feeding, the approval rate drops steadily, to about zero just before the meal. As you might expect, this is an unwelcome result and the authors carefully checked many alternative explanations. The best possible account of the data provides bad news: tired and hungry judges tend to fall back on the easier default position of denying requests for parole. Both fatigue and hunger probably play a role.

Hungry hungry judges

The bat-and-ball problem is our first encounter with an observation that will be a recurrent theme of this book: many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions. They apparently find cognitive effort at least mildly unpleasant and avoid it as much as possible.

Lazy people

As Bargh had predicted, the young people who had fashioned a sentence from words with an elderly theme walked down the hallway significantly more slowly than the others. The “Florida effect” involves two stages of priming. First, the set of words primes thoughts of old age, though the word old is never mentioned; second, these thoughts prime a behavior, walking slowly, which is associated with old age. All this happens without any awareness.

Florida effect

the influencing of an action by the idea—is known as the ideomotor effect.

Priming indirect

A study of voting patterns in precincts of Arizona in 2000 showed that the support for propositions to increase the funding of schools was significantly greater when the polling station was in a school than when it was in a nearby location.

Голосование В школах

Timothy Wilson wrote a book with the evocative title Strangers to Ourselves. You have now been introduced to that stranger in you, which may

To read Strangers Of yourselves

Hearing a speaker when you are in a good mood, or even when you have a pencil stuck crosswise in your mouth to make you “smile,” also induces cognitive ease.

Pencil smile

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

Make believe

The general principle is that anything you can do to reduce cognitive strain will help, so you should first maximize legibility.

How to make seem true

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

Intuition when happy

He observes that “we perceive the world of objects as essentially separate from the world of minds, making it possible for us to envision soulless bodies and bodiless souls.” The two modes of causation that we are set to perceive make it natural for us to accept the two central beliefs of many religions: an immaterial divinity is the ultimate cause of the physical world, and immortal souls temporarily control our bodies while we live and leave them behind as we die. In Bloom’s view, the two concepts of causality were shaped separately by evolutionary forces, building the origins of religion into the structure of System 1.

Paul bloom on the soul and system 1

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.

Believe when tired

The principle of independent judgments (and decorrelated errors) has immediate applications for the conduct of meetings, an activity in which executives in organizations spend a great deal of their working days. 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.

How to conduct meetings

Furthermore, participants who saw one-sided evidence were more confident of their judgments than those who saw both sides. This is just what you would expect if the confidence that people experience is determined by the coherence of the story they manage to construct from available information. 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.

On less information leading to more confidence

“Evaluating people as attractive or not is a basic assessment. You do that automatically whether or not you want to, and it influences you.”

Hard to be objective

“Do we still remember the question we are trying to answer? Or have we substituted an easier one?”

Answering a different question

Priming calculation

The power of random anchors has been demonstrated in some unsettling ways. German judges with an average of more than fifteen years of experience on the bench first read a description of a woman who had been caught shoplifting, then rolled a pair of dice that were loaded so every roll resulted in either a 3 or a 9. As soon as the dice came to a stop, the judges were asked whether they would sentence the woman to a term in prison greater or lesser, in months, than the number showing on the dice. Finally, the judges were instructed to specify the exact prison sentence they would give to the shoplifter. On average, those who had rolled a 9 said they would sentence her to 8 months; those who rolled a 3 said they would sentence her to 5 months; the anchoring effect was 50%.

Anchoring demonstrated in judges

The psychologists Adam Galinsky and Thomas Mussweiler proposed more subtle ways to resist the anchoring effect in negotiations. They instructed negotiators to focus their attention and search their memory for arguments against the anchor. The instruction to activate System 2 was successful.

Resist anchoring

If the content of a screen saver on an irrelevant computer can affect your willingness to help strangers without your being aware of it, how free are you?

Free will

Run from negotiations

Availability heuristic

Here are some examples: A salient event that attracts your attention will be easily retrieved from memory. Divorces among Hollywood celebrities and sex scandals among politicians attract much attention, and instances will come easily to mind. You are therefore likely to exaggerate the frequency of both Hollywood divorces and political sex scandals. A dramatic event temporarily increases the availability of its category. A plane crash that attracts media coverage will temporarily alter your feelings about the safety of flying. Accidents are on your mind, for a while, after you see a car burning at the side of the road, and the world is for a while a more dangerous place. Personal experiences, pictures, and vivid examples are more available than incidents that happened to others, or mere words, or statistics. A judicial error that affects you will undermine your faith in the justice system more than a similar incident you read about in a newspaper. Resisting this large collection of potential availability biases is possible, but tiresome.

Sources of error

I am generally not optimistic about the potential for personal control of biases, but this is an exception.

Low chance to control bias

The contest yielded a clear-cut winner: people who had just listed twelve instances rated themselves as less assertive than people who had listed only six. Furthermore, participants who had been asked to list twelve cases in which they had not behaved assertively ended up thinking of themselves as quite assertive!

This is so counter intuitive

Harder if frown

if they are (or are made to feel) powerful I find the last finding particularly intriguing. The authors introduce their article with a famous quote: “I don’t spend a lot of time taking polls around the world to tell me what I think is the right way to act. I’ve just got to know how I feel” (George W. Bush, November 2002). They go on to show that reliance on intuition is only in part a personality trait. Merely reminding people of a time when they had power increases their apparent trust in their own intuition.

Empower people to be less critical

Depressed children treated with an energy drink improve significantly over a three-month period. I made up this newspaper headline, but the fact it reports is true: if you treated a group of depressed children for some time with an energy drink, they would show a clinically significant improvement. It is also the case that depressed children who spend some time standing on their head or hug a cat for twenty minutes a day will also show improvement. Most readers of such headlines will automatically infer that the energy drink or the cat hugging caused an improvement, but this conclusion is completely unjustified. Depressed children are an extreme group, they are more depressed than most other children—and extreme groups regress to the mean over time.

Lol. Great exploitation on regression to mean

Here are the directions for how to get there in four simple steps: Start with an estimate of average GPA. Determine the GPA that matches your impression of the evidence. Estimate the correlation between your evidence and GPA. If the correlation is .30, move 30% of the distance from the average to the matching GPA. Step 1 gets you the baseline, the GPA you would have predicted if you were told nothing about Julie beyond the fact that she is a graduating senior. In the absence of information, you would have predicted the average. (This is similar to assigning the base-rate probability of business administration graduates when you are told nothing about Tom W.) Step 2 is your intuitive prediction, which matches your evaluation of the evidence. Step 3 moves you from the baseline toward your intuition, but the distance you are allowed to move depends on your estimate of the correlation. You end up, at step 4, with a prediction that is influenced by your intuition but is far more moderate.

How to make estimates

The Halo Effect, Philip Rosenzweig,

To read

Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras’s Built to Last.

Bout coomniea to read

The most potent psychological cause of the illusion is certainly that the people who pick stocks are exercising high-level skills.

About stocks

The idea that large historical events are determined by luck is profoundly shocking, although it is demonstrably true. It is hard to think of the history of the twentieth century, including its large social movements, without bringing in the role of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao Zedong. But there was a moment in time, just before an egg was fertilized, when there was a fifty-fifty chance that the embryo that became Hitler could have been a female. Compounding the three events, there was a probability of one-eighth of a twentieth century without any of the three great villains and it is impossible to argue that history would have been roughly the same in their absence. The fertilization of these three eggs had momentous consequences, and it makes a joke of the idea that long-term developments are predictable.

12,5% different 20 century

The line that separates the possibly predictable future from the unpredictable distant future is yet to be drawn.

What is unpredictable?

The Apgar test is still used every day in every delivery room. Atul Gawande’s recent A Checklist Manifesto provides many other examples of the virtues of checklists and simple rules.

Apgar test

MEEHL

To read

Suppose that you need to hire a sales representative for your firm. If you are serious about hiring the best possible person for the job, this is what you should do. First, select a few traits that are prerequisites for success in this position (technical proficiency, engaging personality, reliability, and so on). Don’t overdo it—six dimensions is a good number. The traits you choose should be as independent as possible from each other, and you should feel that you can assess them reliably by asking a few factual questions. Next, make a list of those questions for each trait and think about how you will score it, say on a 1–5 scale. You should have an idea of what you will call “very weak” or “very strong.” These preparations should take you half an hour or so, a small investment that can make a significant difference in the quality of the people you hire. To avoid halo effects, you must collect the information on one trait at a time, scoring each before you move on to the next one. Do not skip around. To evaluate each candidate, add up the six scores. Because you are in charge of the final decision, you should not do a “close your eyes.” Firmly resolve that you will hire the candidate whose final score is the highest, even if there is another one whom you like better—try to resist your wish to invent broken legs to change the ranking.

How to interview

“Conditions for Intuitive Expertise: A Failure to Disagree.”

About intuition to read

Remember this rule: intuition cannot be trusted in the absence of stable regularities in the environment.

ABout intuition

The unrecognized limits of professional skill help explain why experts are often overconfident.