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If something we did resulted in something good, just the anticipation of having that good thing again is an incentive to repeat the behavior.
Same goes with a negative experience. Just the possibility of a repeat of punishment makes us want to avoid similar situations in the future.
It is a problem for humans that we have a hard time turning down the pleasure of immediate gains,
For humans, we have to be careful though, to make sure minimizing our energy output increases our effectiveness and doesn’t lead to laziness.
Change is costly for most organisms. It can be easier to keep doing whatever has guaranteed their survival so far than to try something new that might fail and waste energy or endanger them.
The more unreliable the previous experience, such as by being too complex to identify true cause and effect or being based on too small a sample size, the more likely your heuristics aren’t going to be particularly useful.
anchoring, availability, and representativeness—were
Our brain goes to the emotional reaction because it takes less energy to figure out how we feel about something than it takes to do the work to have an informed perspective.
Often this is useful, as it lets us put minimal effort into decisions of little consequence, such as buying laundry detergent based on your love of its smell. Sometimes, however, we would increase our skills and knowledge if we put the effort into answering the harder question of what we think about something and not relying on the emotional shortcut.
corrections for the tendencies of heuristics: remember the base rates and pay attention to the quality of information.
Thinking that expends the least amount of energy possible is often what feels most natural. Sometimes though, we have to invest extra calories to get more relevant, useful results.
While most people assume that experience is the key to learning, the key is actually reflection.
