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biases of intuition.
role of resemblance in predictions.
simplifying heuristic
The reliance on the heuristic caused predictable biases
availability heuristic.
First, people are generally rational, and their thinking is normally sound. Second, emotions such as fear, affection, and hatred explain most of the occasions on which people depart from rationality.
Amos and I did not address accurate intuitions beyond the casual statement that judgment heuristics “are quite useful, but sometimes lead to severe and systematic errors.”
We can now draw a richer and more balanced picture, in which skill and heuristics are alternative sources of intuitive judgments and choices.
The executive’s decision would today be described as an example of the affect heuristic, where judgments and decisions are guided directly by feelings of liking and disliking, with little deliberation or reasoning.
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
System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.
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.
CONFLICT
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.
ILLUSIONS
cognitive illusions.
USEFUL FICTIONS
have a long personal history with the Add-1 task. Early in my career I spent a year at the University of Michigan, as a visitor in a laboratory that studied hypnosis. Casting about for a useful topic of research, I found an article in Scientific American in which the psychologist Eckhard Hess described the pupil of the eye as a window to the soul. I reread it recently and again found it inspiring. It begins with Hess reporting that his wife had noticed his pupils widening as he watched beautiful nature pictures, and it ends with two striking pictures of the same good-looking woman, who somehow
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for current is excessive, causing all devices on that circuit to lose power at once. In contrast, the response to mental overload is selective and precise: System 2 protects the most important activity, so it receives the attention it needs; “spare capacity” is allocated second by second to other tasks. In our version of the gorilla experiment, we instructed the participants to assign priority to the digit task. We know that they
THE BUSY AND DEPLETED SYSTEM 2
A bat and ball cost $1.10. The bat costs one dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
All roses are flowers. Some flowers fade quickly. Therefore some roses fade quickly.
Indeed, the average guess by people who were asked about Michigan is lower than the guesses of a similar group who were asked about the murder rate in Detroit. Blame for a failure to think of Detroit can be laid on both System 1 and System 2. Whether the city comes to mind when the state is mentioned depends in part on the automatic function of memory. People differ in this respect. The representation of the state of Michigan is very detailed in some people’s minds: residents of the state are more likely to retrieve many facts about it than people who live elsewhere; geography buffs will
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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.
his colleagues have spent decades studying differences among individuals in the kinds of problems with which this book is concerned. They have asked one basic question in many different ways: What makes some people more susceptible than others to biases of judgment? Stanovich published his conclusions in a book titled Rationality and the Reflective Mind, which offers a bold and distinctive approach to the topic of this chapter. He draws a sharp distinction between two parts of System 2—indeed, the distinction is so sharp that he calls them separate “minds.” One of these minds (he calls it
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indigestion. You would also be unusually ready to recognize words associated with other causes of the same unfortunate outcome. Furthermore, your System 1 noticed the fact that the juxtaposition of the two words is uncommon; you probably never encountered
associatively coherent
contiguity
This remarkable priming phenomenon—the influencing of an action by the idea—is known as the ideomotor effect. Although you surely were not aware of it, reading this paragraph primed you as well. If you had needed to stand up to get a glass of water, you would have been slightly slower than usual to rise from your chair—unless you happen to dislike the elderly, in which case research suggests that you might have been slightly faster than usual!
admonition
Strangers to Ourselves
tacit
Erudite
aphorisms,
“Mind at Ease Puts a Smile on the Face”
mere exposure effect
Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.
propensities.
mind, walking toward a building with tellers and secure vaults. But this plausible interpretation
confirmation bias
This is a pity, because the halo effect is a good name for a common bias that plays a large role in shaping our view of people and situations.
In an enduring classic of psychology, Solomon Asch presented descriptions of two people and asked for comments on their personality. What do you think of Alan and Ben? Alan: intelligent—industrious—impulsive—critical—stubborn—envious Ben: envious—stubborn—critical—impulsive—industrious—intelligent If you are like most of us, you viewed Alan much more favorably than Ben. The initial traits in the list change the very meaning of the traits that appear later. The stubbornness of an intelligent person is seen as likely to be justified and may actually evoke respect, but intelligence in an envious
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spurious;
As James Surowiecki explained in his best-selling The Wisdom of Crowds, this is the kind of task in which individuals do very poorly, but pools of individual judgments do remarkably well. Some individuals greatly overestimate the true number, others underestimate it, but when many judgments are averaged, the average tends to be quite accurate.
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
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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.
salient
The illusion of pattern affects our lives in many ways off the basketball court. How many good years should you wait before concluding that an investment adviser is unusually skilled? How many successful acquisitions should be needed for a board of directors to believe that the CEO has extraordinary flair for such deals? The simple answer to these questions is that if you follow your intuition, you will more often than not err by misclassifying a random event as systematic. We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random.
