Thinking, Fast and Slow

by Daniel Kahneman

“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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

To derive the most useful information from multiple sources of evidence, you should always try to make these sources independent of each other.

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.