Thinking, Fast and Slow

by Daniel Kahneman

Why be concerned with gossip? Because it is much easier, as well as far more enjoyable, to identify and label the mistakes of others than to recognize our own.

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.

we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.

This matters, because anything that occupies your working memory reduces your ability to think.

“The law of least effort is operating here. He will think as little as possible.”

People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations.

Too much concern about how well one is doing in a task sometimes disrupts performance by loading short-term memory with pointless anxious thoughts.

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.

“act calm and kind regardless of how you feel” is very good advice: you are likely to be rewarded by actually feeling calm and kind.

The general theme of these findings is that the idea of money primes individualism: a reluctance to be involved with others, to depend on others, or to accept demands from others.

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

Cognitive strain, whatever its source, mobilizes System 2, which is more likely to reject the intuitive answer suggested by System 1.

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

but a statement that can explain two contradictory outcomes explains nothing at all.

“She can’t accept that she was just unlucky; she needs a causal story. She will end up thinking that someone intentionally sabotaged her work.”

when System 2 is otherwise engaged, we will believe almost anything.

System 1 understands sentences by trying to make them true,

You will occasionally do more than your share, but it is useful to know that you are likely to have that feeling even when each member of the team feels the same way.

“all heuristics are equal, but availability is more equal than the others.”

System 1 averages instead of adding,

students “quietly exempt themselves” (and their friends and acquaintances) from the conclusions of experiments that surprise them.

To teach students any psychology they did not know before, you must surprise them. But which surprise will do?

Subjects’ unwillingness to deduce the particular from the general was matched only by their willingness to infer the general from the particular.

People who are taught surprising statistical facts about human behavior may be impressed to the point of telling their friends about what they have heard, but this does not mean that their understanding of the world has really changed.

Because we tend to be nice to other people when they please us and nasty when they do not, we are statistically punished for being nice and rewarded for being nasty.

In another paper, titled “Boys Will Be Boys,” they showed that men acted on their useless ideas significantly more often than women, and that as a result women achieved better investment results than men.

I learned from this finding a lesson that I have never forgotten: intuition adds value even in the justly derided selection interview, but only after a disciplined collection of objective information and disciplined scoring of separate traits.

On the other hand, therapists do not have a chance to identify which general treatment approach is most suitable for different patients. The feedback they receive from their patients’ long-term outcomes is sparse, delayed, or (usually) nonexistent, and in any case too ambiguous to support learning from experience.

the proper way to elicit information from a group is not by starting with a public discussion but by confidentially collecting each person’s judgment.

Experts who acknowledge the full extent of their ignorance may expect to be replaced by more confident competitors, who are better able to gain the trust of clients. An unbiased appreciation of uncertainty is a cornerstone of rationality—but it is not what people and organizations want. Extreme uncertainty is paralyzing under dangerous circumstances, and the admission that one is merely guessing is especially unacceptable when the stakes are high. Acting on pretended knowledge is often the preferred solution.

I have yet to meet a successful scientist who lacks the ability to exaggerate the importance of what he or she is doing, and I believe that someone who lacks a delusional sense of significance will wilt in the face of repeated experiences of multiple small failures and rare successes, the fate of most researchers.

Richer and more realistic assumptions do not suffice to make a theory successful. Scientists use theories as a bag of working tools, and they will not take on the burden of a heavier bag unless the new tools are very useful.

Altruistic punishment could well be the glue that holds societies together. However, our brains are not designed to reward generosity as reliably as they punish meanness. Here again, we find a marked asymmetry between losses and gains.

Of course, what people acquire with a ticket is more than a chance to win; it is the right to dream pleasantly of winning.

This is where people who face very bad options take desperate gambles, accepting a high probability of making things worse in exchange for a small hope of avoiding a large loss. Risk taking of this kind often turns manageable failures into disasters. The thought of accepting the large sure loss is too painful, and the hope of complete relief too enticing, to make the sensible decision that it is time to cut one’s losses.

What we learn from the past is to maximize the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experience. This is the tyranny of the remembering self.

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.

The acquisition of skills requires a regular environment, an adequate opportunity to practice, and rapid and unequivocal feedback about the correctness of thoughts and actions.