Thinking, Fast and Slow

by Daniel Kahneman

It is the departure from the default that produces regret.

The taboo tradeoff against accepting any increase in risk is not an efficient way to use the safety budget.

The dilemma between intensely loss-averse moral attitudes and efficient risk management does not have a simple and compelling solution.

My personal hindsight-avoiding policy is to be either very thorough or completely casual when making a decision with long-term consequences.

people generally anticipate more regret than they will actually experience, because they underestimate the efficacy of the psychological defenses they will deploy—which they label the “psychological immune system.” Their recommendation is that you should not put too much weight on regret; even if you have some, it will hurt less than you now think.

We normally experience life in the between-subjects mode, in which contrasting alternatives that might change your mind are absent, and of course WYSIATI. As a consequence, the beliefs that you endorse when you reflect about morality do not necessarily govern your emotional reactions, and the moral intuitions that come to your mind in different situations are not internally consistent.

The emotional reactions of System 1 are much more likely to determine single evaluation; the comparison that occurs in joint evaluation always involves a more careful and effortful assessment, which calls for System 2.

Judgments and preferences are coherent within categories but potentially incoherent when the objects that are evaluated belong to different categories.

you should be wary of joint evaluation when someone who controls what you see has a vested interest in what you choose. Salespeople quickly learn that manipulation of the context in which customers see a good can profoundly influence preferences.

“It is often the case that when you broaden the frame, you reach more reasonable decisions.”

In terms of the associations they bring to mind—how System 1 reacts to them—the two sentences really “mean” different things. The fact that logically equivalent statements evoke different reactions makes it impossible for Humans to be as reliably rational as Econs.

losses evokes stronger negative feelings than costs. Choices are not reality-bound because System 1 is not reality-bound.

Resisting the inclination of System 1 apparently involves conflict.

Reframing is effortful and System 2 is normally lazy. Unless there is an obvious reason to do otherwise, most of us passively accept decision problems as they are framed and therefore rarely have an opportunity to discover the extent to which our preferences are frame-bound rather than reality-bound.

Your moral feelings are attached to frames, to descriptions of reality rather than to reality itself.

The best single predictor of whether or not people will donate their organs is the designation of the default option that will be adopted without having to check a box.

Rational agents are expected to know their tastes, both present and future, and they are supposed to make good decisions that will maximize these interests.

The hedonimeter totals are computed by an observer from an individual’s report of the experience of moments.

the retrospective assessments are insensitive to duration and weight two singular moments, the peak and the end, much more than others.

think of this dilemma as a conflict of interests between two selves (which do not correspond to the two familiar systems). The experiencing self is the one that answers the question: “Does it hurt now?” The remembering self is the one that answers the question: “How was it, on the whole?”

Memories are all we get to keep from our experience of living, and the only perspective that we can adopt as we think about our lives is therefore that of the remembering self.

Confusing experience with the memory of it is a compelling cognitive illusion—and it is the substitution that makes us believe a past experience can be ruined. The experiencing self does not have a voice. The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keeps score and governs what we learn from living, and it is the one that makes decisions. What we learn from the past is to maximize the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experience.

For an objective observer evaluating the episode from the reports of the experiencing self, what counts is the “area under the curve” that integrates pain over time; it has the nature of a sum. The memory that the remembering self keeps, in contrast, is a representative moment, strongly influenced by the peak and the end.

Decisions that do not produce the best possible experience and erroneous forecasts of future feelings—both are bad news for believers in the rationality of choice. The cold-hand study showed that we cannot fully trust our preferences to reflect our interests, even if they are based on personal experience,

Tastes and decisions are shaped by memories, and the memories can be wrong.

A story is about significant events and memorable moments, not about time passing. Duration neglect is normal in a story, and the ending often defines its character. The same core features appear in the rules of narratives and in the memories of colonoscopies, vacations, and films. This is how the remembering self works: it composes stories and keeps them for future reference.

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

In intuitive evaluation of entire lives as well as brief episodes, peaks and ends matter but duration does not.

Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.

people who are able to retrieve a past situation in detail are also able to relive the feelings that accompanied it, even experiencing their earlier physiological indications of emotion.

Attention is key. Our emotional state is largely determined by what we attend to, and we are normally focused on our current activity and immediate environment. There are exceptions, where the quality of subjective experience is dominated by recurrent thoughts rather than by the events of the moment. When happily in love, we may feel joy even when caught in traffic, and if grieving, we may remain depressed when watching a funny movie.

we draw pleasure and pain from what is happening at the moment, if we attend to it. To get pleasure from eating, for example, you must notice that you are doing it.

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

Some aspects of life have more effect on the evaluation of one’s life than on the experience of living.

Life satisfaction is not a flawed measure of their experienced well-being, as I thought some years ago. It is something else entirely.

“The easiest way to increase happiness is to control your use of time. Can you find more time to do the things you enjoy doing?”

affective forecasting

A mood heuristic is one way to answer life-satisfaction questions.

Even when it is not influenced by completely irrelevant accidents such as the coin on the machine, the score that you quickly assign to your life is determined by a small sample of highly available ideas, not by a careful weighting of the domains of your life.

Experienced 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.

one recipe for a dissatisfied adulthood is setting goals that are especially difficult to attain.

the focusing illusion, which can be described in a single sentence: Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.

when you tried to rate how much you enjoyed your car, you actually answered a much narrower question: “How much pleasure do you get from your car when you think about it?” The substitution caused you to ignore the fact that you rarely think about your car, a form of duration neglect. The upshot is a focusing illusion.

The focusing illusion creates a bias in favor of goods and experiences that are initially exciting, even if they will eventually lose their appeal. Time is neglected, causing experiences that will retain their attention value in the long term to be appreciated less than they deserve to be.

The mind is good with stories, but it does not appear to be well designed for the processing of time.

We believe that duration is important, but our memory tells us it is not.

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. The mirror image of the same bias makes us fear a short period of intense but tolerable suffering more than we fear a much longer period of moderate pain.

Duration neglect also makes us prone to accept a long period of mild unpleasantness because the end will be better, and it favors giving up an opportunity for a long happy period if it is likely to have a poor ending.

The logic of duration weighting is compelling, but it cannot be considered a complete theory of well-being because individuals identify with their remembering self and care about their story. A theory of well-being that ignores what people want cannot be sustained. On the other hand, a theory that ignores what actually happens in people’s lives and focuses exclusively on what they think about their life is not tenable either. The remembering self and the experiencing self must both be considered, because their interests do not always coincide.

when we observe people acting in ways that seem odd, we should first examine the possibility that they have a good reason to do what they do.