Thinking, Fast and Slow

by Daniel Kahneman

The expectation of intelligent gossip is a powerful motive for serious self-criticism, more powerful than New Year resolutions to improve one’s decision making at work and at home.

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.

When System 1 runs into difficulty, it calls on System 2 to support more detailed and specific processing that may solve the problem of the moment. System 2 is mobilized when a question arises for which System 1 does not offer an answer,

One of the tasks of System 2 is to overcome the impulses of System 1. In other words, System 2 is in charge of self-control.

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,

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

when people believe a conclusion is true, they are also very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it, even when these arguments are unsound. If System 1 is involved, the conclusion comes first and the arguments follow.

we no longer think of the mind as going through a sequence of conscious ideas, one at a time. In the current view of how associative memory works, a great deal happens at once. An idea that has been activated does not merely evoke one other idea. It activates many ideas, which in turn activate others. Furthermore, only a few of the activated ideas will register in consciousness; most of the work of associative thinking is silent, hidden from our conscious selves.

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

“I made myself smile and I’m actually feeling better!”

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

The familiarity of one phrase in the statement sufficed to make the whole statement feel familiar, and therefore true.

“Let’s not dismiss their business plan just because the font makes it hard to read.” “We must be inclined to believe it because it has been repeated so often, but let’s think it through again.” “Familiarity breeds liking. This is a mere exposure effect.” “I’m in a very good mood today, and my System 2 is weaker than usual. I should be extra careful.”

Experiments have shown that six-month-old infants see the sequence of events as a cause-effect scenario, and they indicate surprise when the sequence is altered. We are evidently ready from birth to have impressions of causality, which do not depend on reasoning about patterns of causation. They are products of System 1.