These are some quotes I took while reading “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Nobel Memorial Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, who passed away earlier this year.
1. Introduction
I hope to enrich the vocabulary that people use when they talk about the judgments and choices of others, the company’s new policies, or a colleague’s investment decisions.
Systematic errors are known as biases, and they recur predictably in particular circumstances.
Social scientists in the 1970s broadly accepted two ideas about human nature. First, people are generally rational, and their thinking is normally sound. Second, emotions such as fear, affection, and hatred explain most of the occasions on which people depart from rationality.
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.
It is no accident that authoritarian regimes exert substantial pressure on independent media.
My main aim here is to present a view of how the mind works that draws on recent developments in cognitive and social psychology.
Expert intuition strikes us as magical, but it is not. Indeed, each of us performs feats of intuitive expertise many times each day.
An important advance is that emotion now looms much larger in our understanding of intuitive judgments and choices than it did in the past.
The spontaneous search for an intuitive solution sometimes fails–neither an expert solution nor a heuristic answer comes to mind. In such cases we often find ourselves switching to a slower, more deliberate and effortful form of thinking. This is the slow thinking of the title.
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.
2. Attention and Effort
System 1 operates automatically and quickly
System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it
When we think of ourselves, we identify with System 2, the conscious, reasoning self that has beliefs, makes choices, and decides what to think about and what to do.
the automatic System 1 is the hero of the book.
The gorilla study illustrates two important facts about our minds: we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.
If endorsed by System 2, impressions and intuitions turn into beliefs, and impulses turn into voluntary actions.
System 2 is also credited with the continuous monitoring of your own behavior–the control that keeps you polite when you are angry, and alert when you are driving at night.
3. The Lazy Controller
In the unlikely event of this book being made into film, System 2 would be a supporting character who believes herself to be the hero.
Eckhard Hess described the pupil of the eye as a window to the soul.
Much like the electricity meter outside your house of apartment, the pupils offer an index of the current rate at which mental energy is used.
One of the significant discoveries of cognitive psychologists in recent decades is that switching from one task to another is effortful, especially under time pressure.
4. The Associative Machine
The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced six-cent-mihaly) has done more than anyone else to study this state of effortless attending, and the name he proposed for it, flow, has become part of the language.
people who are simultaneously challenged by a demanding cognitive task and by a temptation are more likely to yield to the temptation.
Too much concern abou thow well one is doing in a task sometimes disrupts performance by loading short-term memory with pointless anxious thoughts.
activities that impose high demands on System 2 require self-control, and the exertion of self-control is depleting and unpleasant.
The most surprising discovery made by Baumeister’s group shows, as he puts it, that the idea of mental energy is more than a mere metaphor. The nervous system consumes more glucose than most other parts of the body, and effortful mental activity appears to be especially expensive in the currency of glucose.
many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions.
It suggests that then people believe a conclusion is true, they are also very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it, even when these arguments are unsound.
characters of our psychodrama have different “personalities.” System 1 is impulsive and intuitive; System 2 is capable of reasoning, and it is cautious, but at least for some people it is also lazy.
rationality should be distinguished from intelligence.
5. Cognitive Ease
The notion that we have limited access to the workings of our minds is difficult to accept because, naturally, it is alien to our experience, but it is true: you know far less about yourself than you feel you do.
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
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.
The idea you should focus on, however, is that disbelief is not an option. The results are not made up, nor are they statistical flukes. You have no choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these studies are true.
6. Norms, Surprises, and Causes
predicatble illusions inevitably occur if a judgment is based on an impression of cognitive ease or strain.
A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.
The results tell a clear story: 90% of the students who saw the CRT in normal font made at least one mistake in the test, but the proportion dropped to 35% when the font was barely legible. You read this correctly: performance was better with the bad font.
A study conducted in Switzerland found that investors believe that stocks with fluent names like Emmi, Swissfirst, and Comet will earn higher returns than those with clunky labels like Geberit and Ypsomed.
The mere exposure effect does not depend on the conscious experience of familiarity. In fact, the effect does not depend on consciousness at all: it occurs even when the repeated words or pictures are shown so quickly that the observers never become aware of having seen them.
Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition. These findings add to the growing evidence that good mood, intuition, creativity, gullibility, and increased reliance on System 1 form a cluster. At the other pole, sadness, vigilance, suspicion, an analytic approach, and increased effort also go together.
Much of what we now know would have sounded like science fiction thirty or forty years ago. It was beyond imagining that bad font influences judgments of truth and improves cognitive performance.