Thinking, Fast and Slow

by Daniel Kahneman

it is much easier, as well as far more enjoyable, to identify and label the mistakes of others than to recognize our own.

improve the ability to identify and understand errors of judgment and choice, in others and eventually in ourselves, by providing a richer and more precise language to discuss them.

it is much easier to strive for perfection when you are never bored.

People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media.

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.

puzzling limitation of our mind: our excessive confidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we live in.

The often-used phrase “pay attention” is apt: you dispose of a limited budget of attention that you can allocate to activities, and if you try to go beyond your budget, you will fail.

You can do several things at once, but only if they are easy and undemanding.

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

System 1 continuously generates suggestions for System 2: impressions, intuitions, intentions, and feelings. If endorsed by System 2, impressions and intuitions turn into beliefs, and impulses turn into voluntary actions.

most of what you (your System 2) think and do originates in your System 1, but System 2 takes over when things get difficult, and it normally has the last word.

Not all illusions are visual. There are illusions of thought, which we call cognitive illusions

A general “law of least effort” applies to cognitive as well as physical exertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action.

Even in the absence of time pressure, maintaining a coherent train of thought requires discipline.

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

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.

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.

“His System 1 constructed a story, and his System 2 believed it. It happens to all of us.”

You can think of a cockpit, with a set of dials that indicate the current values of each of these essential variables. The assessments are carried out automatically by System 1, and one of their functions is to determine whether extra effort is required from System 2.

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

all of us live much of our life guided by the impressions of System 1—and we often do not know the source of these impressions.

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

“Her favorite position is beside herself, and her favorite sport is jumping to conclusions.”

Jumping to conclusions is efficient if the conclusions are likely to be correct and the costs of an occasional mistake acceptable, and if the jump saves much time and effort. Jumping to conclusions is risky when the situation is unfamiliar, the stakes are high, and there is no time to collect more information.

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

The normal state of your mind is that you have intuitive feelings and opinions about almost everything that comes your way. You like or dislike people long before you know much about them; you trust or distrust strangers without knowing why; you feel that an enterprise is bound to succeed without analyzing it.

George Pólya included substitution in his classic How to Solve It: “If you can’t solve a problem, then there is an easier problem you can solve: find it.”

We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random.

Insufficient adjustment is a failure of a weak or lazy System 2.

if you think the other side has made an outrageous proposal, you should not come back with an equally outrageous counteroffer, creating a gap that will be difficult to bridge in further negotiations.

Self-ratings were dominated by the ease with which examples had come to mind.