Thinking, Fast and Slow Quotes

“A disturbing demonstration of depletion effects in judgment was recently reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The unwitting participants in the study were eight parole judges in Israel. They spend entire days reviewing applications for parole. The cases are presented in random order, and the judges spend little time on each one, an average of 6 minutes. (The default decision is denial of parole; only 35% of requests are approved. The exact time of each decision is recorded, and the times of the judges’ three food breaks—morning break, lunch, and afternoon break—during the day are recorded as well.) The authors of the study plotted the proportion of approved requests against the time since the last food break. The proportion spikes after each meal, when about 65% of requests are granted. During the two hours or so until the judges’ next feeding, the approval rate drops steadily, to about zero just before the meal. As you might expect, this is an unwelcome result and the authors carefully checked many alternative explanations. The best possible account of the data provides bad news: tired and hungry judges tend to fall back on the easier default position of denying requests for parole. Both”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Little repetition is needed for learning.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Many people find the priming results unbelievable, because they do not correspond to subjective experience. Many others find the results upsetting, because they threaten the subjective sense of agency and autonomy. If the content of a screen saver on an irrelevant computer can affect your willingness to help strangers without your being aware of it, how free are you? Anchoring”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Contrary to the rules of philosophers of science, who advise testing hypotheses by trying to refute them, people (and scientists, quite often) seek data that are likely to be compatible with the beliefs they currently hold. The confirmatory bias of System 1 favors uncritical acceptance of suggestions and exaggeration of the likelihood of extreme and improbable events. If”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Characteristics of System 1:
• generates impressions, feelings, and inclinations; when endorsed by System 2 these become beliefs, attitudes, and intentions
• operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort, and no sense of voluntary control
• can be programmed by System 2 to mobilize attention when a particular pattern is detected (search)
• executes skilled responses and generates skilled intuitions, after adequate training
• creates a coherent pattern of activated ideas in associative memory
• links a sense of cognitive ease to illusions of truth, pleasant feelings, and reduced vigilance
• distinguishes the surprising from the normal
• infers and invents causes and intentions
• neglects ambiguity and suppresses doubt
• is biased to believe and confirm
• exaggerates emotional consistency (halo effect)
• focuses on existing evidence and ignores absent evidence (WYSIATI)
• generates a limited set of basic assessments
• represents sets by norms and prototypes, does not integrate
• matches intensities across scales (e.g., size to loudness)
• computes more than intended (mental shotgun)
• sometimes substitutes an easier question for a difficult one (heuristics)
• is more sensitive to changes than to states (prospect theory)*
• overweights low probabilities*
• shows diminishing sensitivity to quantity (psychophysics)*
• responds more strongly to losses than to gains (loss aversion)*
• frames decision problems narrowly, in isolation from one another*”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The halo effect helps keep explanatory narratives simple and coherent by exaggerating the consistency of evaluations: good people do only good things and bad people are all bad. The statement “Hitler loved dogs and little children” is shocking no matter how many times you hear it, because any trace of kindness in someone so evil violates the expectations set up by the halo effect. Inconsistencies reduce the ease of our thoughts and the clarity of our feelings.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Recognize the signs that you are in a cognitive minefield, slow down, and ask for reinforcement of system 2.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The technical definition of heuristic is a simple procedure that helps find adequate, though often imperfect, answers to difficult questions. The”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Self-control and deliberate thought apparently draw on the same limited budget of effort.... This is how the law of least effort comes to be a law. Even in the absence of time pressure, maintaining a coherent train of thought requires discipline.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“A deeper understanding of judgments and choices also requires a richer vocabulary than is available in everyday language. The hope”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“people form opinions and make choices that directly express their feelings and their basic tendency to approach or avoid, often without knowing that they are doing so. The”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The question that the executive faced (should I invest in Ford stock?) was difficult, but the answer to an easier and related question (do I like Ford cars?) came readily to his mind and determined his choice. 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.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“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. Memory”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“One of Hess’s findings especially captured my attention. He had noticed that the pupils are sensitive indicators of mental effort—they dilate substantially when people multiply two-digit numbers, and they dilate more if the problems are hard than if they are easy. His observations indicated that the response to mental effort is distinct from emotional arousal. Hess’s work did not have much to do with hypnosis, but I concluded that the idea of a visible indication of mental effort had promise as a research topic. A graduate student in the lab, Jackson Beatty, shared my enthusiasm and we got to work.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“an organization is a factory that manufactures judgments and decisions. Every factory must have ways to ensure the quality of its products in the initial design, in fabrication, and in final inspections. The corresponding stages in the production of decisions are the framing of the problem that is to be solved, the collection of relevant information leading to a decision, and reflection and review. An organization that seeks to improve its decision product should routinely look for efficiency improvements at each of these stages. The”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“In an experiment that became an instant classic, the psychologist John Bargh and his collaborators asked students at New York University—most aged eighteen to twenty-two—to assemble four-word sentences from a set of five words (for example, “finds he it yellow instantly”). For one group of students, half the scrambled sentences contained words associated with the elderly, such as Florida, forgetful, bald, gray, or wrinkle. When they had completed that task, the young participants were sent out to do another experiment in an office down the hall. That short walk was what the experiment was about. The researchers unobtrusively measured the time it took people to get from one end of the corridor to the other. As Bargh had predicted, the young people who had fashioned a sentence from words with an elderly theme walked down the hallway significantly more slowly than the others.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Changing one’s mind about human nature is hard work, and changing one’s mind for the worse about oneself is even harder. Nisbett”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Risk” does not exist “out there,” independent of our minds and culture, waiting to be measured. Human beings have invented the concept of “risk” to help them understand and cope with the dangers and uncertainties of life. Although these dangers are real, there is no such thing as “real risk” or “objective risk.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“One day over breakfast, a medical resident asked how Dr. Apgar would make a systematic assessment of a newborn. “That’s easy,” she replied. “You would do it like this.” Apgar jotted down five variables (heart rate, respiration, reflex, muscle tone, and color) and three scores (0, 1, or 2, depending on the robustness of each sign). Realizing that she might have made a breakthrough that any delivery room could implement, Apgar began rating infants by this rule one minute after they were born. A baby with a total score of 8 or above was likely to be pink, squirming, crying, grimacing, with a pulse of 100 or more—in good shape. A baby with a score of 4 or below was probably bluish, flaccid, passive, with a slow or weak pulse—in need of immediate intervention. Applying Apgar’s score, the staff in delivery rooms finally had consistent standards for determining which babies were in trouble, and the formula is credited for an important contribution to reducing infant mortality. The Apgar test is still used every day in every delivery room.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The illusion that one has understood the past feeds the further illusion that one can predict and control the future.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“How many animals of each kind did Moses take into the ark?”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Many activities can induce a sense of flow, from painting to racing motorcycles—and”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“rewards for improved performance work better than punishment of mistakes. This proposition is supported by much evidence from research on pigeons, rats, humans, and other animals.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Laziness is built deep into our nature.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“You can see why the common admonition to “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.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Our predilection for causal thinking exposes us to serious mistakes in evaluating the randomness of truly random events.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“For example, students of policy have noted that the availability heuristic helps explain why some issues are highly salient in the public’s mind while others are neglected. 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.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“You build the best possible story from the information available to you, and if it is a good story, you believe it. Paradoxically, it is easier to construct a coherent story when you know little, when there are fewer pieces to fit into the puzzle. Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“We are pattern seekers, believers in a coherent world, in which regularities (such as a sequence of six girls) appear not by accident but as a result of mechanical causality or of someone’s intention.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow