Introduction
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.
A deeper understanding of judgments and choices also requires a richer vocabulary than is available in everyday language.
Most impressions and thoughts arise in your conscious experience without your knowing how they got there.
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.
He was also blessed with a perfect memory for jokes and an exceptional ability to use them to make a point.
We were sufficiently similar to understand each other easily, and sufficiently different to surprise each other.
when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.
Part 1: TWO SYSTEMS
System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.
System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.
Detecting the similarity of a personality sketch to an occupational stereotype requires broad knowledge of the language and the culture, which most of us possess.
The highly diverse operations of System 2 have one feature in common: they require attention and are disrupted when attention is drawn away.
When all goes smoothly, which is most of the time, System 2 adopts the suggestions of System 1 with little or no modification.
System 2 is activated when an event is detected that violates the model of the world that System 1 maintains.
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.
One further limitation of System 1 is that it cannot be turned off.
System 2 is in charge of self-control.
The best we can do is a compromise: learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high.
System 2 is intended as a description, not an explanation.
anything that occupies your working memory reduces your ability to think.
This is your System 1 talking. Slow down and let your System 2 take control.
mental effort is distinct from emotional arousal.
people, when engaged in a mental sprint, may become effectively blind.
the pupil was a good measure of the physical arousal that accompanies mental effort, and we could go ahead and use it to understand how the mind works.
we decide what to do, but we have limited control over the effort of doing it.
As you become skilled in a task, its demand for energy diminishes.
In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature.
switching from one task to another is effortful, especially under time pressure.
the maintenance of a coherent train of thought and the occasional engagement in effortful thinking also require self-control.
People who experience flow describe it as “a state of effortless concentration so deep that they lose their sense of time, of themselves, of their problems,”
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.
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. The phenomenon has been named ego depletion.
All involve conflict and the need to suppress a natural tendency. They include:avoiding the thought of white bears inhibiting the emotional response to a stirring film making a series of choices that involve conflict trying to impress others responding kindly to a partner’s bad behavior interacting with a person of a different race (for prejudiced individuals) The list of indications of depletion is also highly diverse: deviating from one’s diet overspending on impulsive purchases reacting aggressively to provocation persisting less time in a handgrip task performing poorly in cognitive tasks and logical decision making
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.
when 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.
If System 1 is involved, the conclusion comes first and the arguments follow.
The resisters had higher measures of executive control in cognitive tasks, and especially the ability to reallocate their attention effectively.
He went on to study the characteristics of students who score very low on this test—the supervisory function of System 2 is weak in these people—and found that they are prone to answer questions with the first idea that comes to mind and unwilling to invest the effort needed to check their intuitions.
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
cognition is embodied; you think with your body, not only with your brain.
you know far less about yourself than you feel you do.
if you were primed to think of old age, you would tend to act old, and acting old would reinforce the thought of old age.
Money-primed people become more independent than they would be without the associative trigger.
System 2 believes that it is in charge and that it knows the reasons for its choices.
Priming phenomena arise in System 1, and you have no conscious access to them.
System 1 provides the impressions that often turn into your beliefs, and is the source of the impulses that often become your choices and your actions.
A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.
couching familiar ideas in pretentious language is taken as a sign of poor intelligence and low credibility.
making your message simple, try to make it memorable.
Put your ideas in verse if you can; they will be more likely to be taken as truth.
The aphorisms were judged more insightful when they rhymed than when they did not.
if you quote a source, choose one with a name that is easy to pronounce.
System 2 is lazy and that mental effort is aversive.
The psychologists who do these experiments do not believe that people are stupid or infinitely gullible.
Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.
happy mood loosens the control of System 2 over performance: when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors.
A good mood is a signal that things are generally going well, the environment is safe, and it is all right to let one’s guard down.
Cognitive ease is both a cause and a consequence of a pleasant feeling.
We must be inclined to believe it because it has been repeated so often, but let’s think it through again.
We are able to communicate with each other because our knowledge of the world and our use of words are largely shared.
The commonly accepted wisdom was that we infer physical causality from repeated observations of correlations among events.
recent events and the current context have the most weight in determining an interpretation.
System 1 is gullible and biased to believe, System 2 is in charge of doubting and unbelieving, but System 2 is sometimes busy, and often lazy.
people are more likely to be influenced by empty persuasive messages, such as commercials, when they are tired and depleted.
The operations of associative memory contribute to a general confirmation bias.
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.
The tendency to like (or dislike) everything about a person—including things you have not observed—is known as the halo effect.
To derive the most useful information from multiple sources of evidence, you should always try to make these sources independent of each other.
When information is scarce, which is a common occurrence, System 1 operates as a machine for jumping to conclusions.
participants who saw one-sided evidence were more confident of their judgments than those who saw both sides.
you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern.
They didn’t want more information that might spoil their story. WYSIATI.
System 1 has been shaped by evolution to provide a continuous assessment of the main problems that an organism must solve to survive: How are things going?
System 1 represents categories by a prototype or a set of typical exemplars, it deals well with averages but poorly with sums.
If you can’t solve a problem, then there is an easier problem you can solve: find it.
He likes the project, so he thinks its costs are low and its benefits are high. Nice example of the affect heuristic.”
Part 2: HEURISTICS AND BIASES
The message about the poll contains information of two kinds: the story and the source of the story. Naturally, you focus on the story rather than on the reliability of the results.
people who are instructed to shake their head when they hear the anchor, as if they rejected it, move farther from the anchor, and people who nod their head show enhanced anchoring.
System 2 works on data that is retrieved from memory, in an automatic and involuntary operation of System 1.
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.
Editors cannot ignore the public’s demands that certain topics and viewpoints receive extensive coverage.
The Alar tale illustrates a basic limitation in the ability of our mind to deal with small risks: we either ignore them altogether or give them far too much weight—nothing in between.
The question about probability (likelihood) was difficult, but the question about similarity was easier
let your judgments of probability stay close to the base rate.
base rates matter, even in the presence of evidence about the case at hand.
intuitive impressions of the diagnosticity of evidence are often exaggerated.
Anchor your judgment of the probability of an outcome on a plausible base rate.
Question the diagnosticity of your evidence.
probability judgments were higher for the richer and more detailed scenario, contrary to logic. This is a trap for forecasters
Some stereotypes are perniciously wrong, and hostile stereotyping can have dreadful consequences
The experiment shows that individuals feel relieved of responsibility when they know that others have heard the same request for help.
DEFENSE
Part 3: OVERCONFIDENCE
our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.
Once you adopt a new view of the world (or of any part of it), you immediately lose much of your ability to recall what you used to believe before your mind changed.
The worse the consequence, the greater the hindsight bias.
For some of our most important beliefs we have no evidence at all, except that people we love and trust hold these beliefs.
In highly efficient markets, however, educated guesses are no more accurate than blind guesses.
Cognitive illusions can be more stubborn than visual illusions.
the person who acquires more knowledge develops an enhanced illusion of her skill and becomes unrealistically overconfident.
The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.
the confidence that people have in their intuitions is not a reliable guide to their validity.
intuition cannot be trusted in the absence of stable regularities in the environment.
a survey of founders of small businesses concluded that entrepreneurs are more sanguine than midlevel managers about life in general.
Part 4: CHOICES
He suffers from extreme loss aversion, which makes him turn down very favorable opportunities.
He weighs losses about twice as much as gains, which is normal.
the more income you have, the less you care for an extra dollar, and the amount you are willing to give up for an extra day of leisure increases.
Bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones
long-term success of a relationship depends far more on avoiding the negative than on seeking the positive.
we are driven more strongly to avoid losses than to achieve gains.
People overestimate the probabilities of unlikely events.
People overweight unlikely events in their decisions.
Our mind has a useful capability to focus spontaneously on whatever is odd, different, or unusual.
people expect to have stronger emotional reactions (including regret) to an outcome that is produced by action than to the same outcome when it is produced by inaction.
regret and hindsight bias will come together, so anything you can do to preclude hindsight is likely to be helpful.
COSTS ARE NOT LOSSES
Let’s reframe the problem by changing the reference point. Imagine we did not own it; how much would we think it is worth?
They ask you to check the box to opt out of their mailing list. Their list would shrink if they asked you to check a box to opt in!
Part 5: TWO SELVES
Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.
Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you.On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?
The easiest way to increase happiness is to control your use of time. Can you find more time to do the things you enjoy doing?
Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.
The mind is good with stories, but it does not appear to be well designed for the processing of time.