Kahneman is surprised by the ease with which intelligent people appear satisfied enough with their initial answer that they stop thinking. He is reluctant to use the word “lazy” to describe the lack of System 2 monitoring, but lazy is what it seems to be. Kahneman notes that we often say of people who give up on thinking, “He didn’t bother to check whether what he said made sense” or “Unfortunately, she tends to say the first thing that comes into her mind.” What we should be thinking, he says, is “Does he usually have a lazy System 2 or was he unusually tired?” Or, for the second example,
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