## Metadata - Author: [[Daniel Kahneman]] - Full Title: Thinking, Fast and Slow - Category: #books ## Highlights - Many activities can induce a sense of flow, from painting to racing motorcycles—and for some fortunate authors I know, even writing a book is often an optimal experience. Flow neatly separates the two forms of effort: concentration on the task and the deliberate control of attention. Riding a motorcycle at 150 miles an hour and playing a competitive game of chess are certainly very effortful. In a state of flow, however, maintaining focused attention on these absorbing activities requires no exertion of self-control, thereby freeing resources to be directed to the task at hand. ([Location 716](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=716)) - It is now a well-established proposition that both self-control and cognitive effort are forms of mental work. Several psychological studies have shown that people who are simultaneously challenged by a demanding cognitive task and by a temptation are more likely to yield to the temptation. ([Location 722](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=722)) - People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations. ([Location 727](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=727)) - A series of surprising experiments by the psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues has shown conclusively that all variants of voluntary effort—cognitive, emotional, or physical—draw at least partly on a shared pool of mental energy. ([Location 733](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=733)) - Baumeister’s group has repeatedly found that 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. ([Location 736](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=736)) - more intelligent individuals are more likely than others to have rich representations of most things. 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. ([Location 828](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=828)) - 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. ([Location 1012](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=1012)) - A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. ([Location 1129](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=1129)) - How do you know that a statement is true? If it is strongly linked by logic or association to other beliefs or preferences you hold, or comes from a source you trust and like, you will feel a sense of cognitive ease. The trouble is that there may be other causes for your feeling of ease—including the quality of the font and the appealing rhythm of the prose—and you have no simple way of tracing your feelings to their source. ([Location 1169](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=1169)) - The link between positive emotion and cognitive ease in System 1 has a long evolutionary history. ([Location 1234](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=1234)) - System 1 does not keep track of alternatives that it rejects, or even of the fact that there were alternatives. Conscious doubt is not in the repertoire of System 1; it requires maintaining incompatible interpretations in mind at the same time, which demands mental effort. Uncertainty and doubt are the domain of System 2. ([Location 1461](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=1461)) - when System 2 is otherwise engaged, we will believe almost anything. 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. ([Location 1476](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=1476)) - The sequence in which we observe characteristics of a person is often determined by chance. Sequence matters, however, because the halo effect increases the weight of first impressions, sometimes to the point that subsequent information is mostly wasted. ([Location 1512](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=1512)) - before an issue is discussed, all members of the committee should be asked to write a very brief summary of their position. This procedure makes good use of the value of the diversity of knowledge and opinion in the group. The standard practice of open discussion gives too much weight to the opinions of those who speak early and assertively, causing others to line up behind them. ([Location 1550](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=1550)) - The measure of success for System 1 is the coherence of the story it manages to create. The amount and quality of the data on which the story is based are largely irrelevant. When information is scarce, which is a common occurrence, System 1 operates as a machine for jumping to conclusions. ([Location 1562](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=1562)) - If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 will find a related question that is easier and will answer it. I call the operation of answering one question in place of another substitution. ([Location 1776](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=1776)) - 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 ([Location 1913](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=1913)) - We defined the availability heuristic as the process of judging frequency by “the ease with which instances come to mind.” ([Location 2338](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=2338)) - The availability heuristic, like other heuristics of judgment, substitutes one question for another: you wish to estimate the size of a category or the frequency of an event, but you report an impression of the ease with which instances come to mind. ([Location 2349](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=2349)) - Slovic eventually developed the notion of an affect heuristic, in which people make judgments and decisions by consulting their emotions: Do I like it? Do I hate it? How strongly do I feel about it? ([Location 2503](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=2503)) - The affect heuristic is an instance of substitution, in which the answer to an easy question (How do I feel about it?) serves as an answer to a much harder question (What do I think about it?). ([Location 2506](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=2506)) - An availability cascade is a self-sustaining chain of events, which may start from media reports of a relatively minor event and lead up to public panic and large-scale government action. ([Location 2570](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=2570)) - I share Sunstein’s discomfort with the influence of irrational fears and availability cascades on public policy in the domain of risk. However, I also share Slovic’s belief that widespread fears, even if they are unreasonable, should not be ignored by policy makers. Rational or not, fear is painful and debilitating, and policy makers must endeavor to protect the public from fear, not only from real dangers. ([Location 2617](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=2617)) - Democracy is inevitably messy, in part because the availability and affect heuristics that guide citizens’ beliefs and attitudes are inevitably biased, even if they generally point in the right direction. Psychology should inform the design of risk policies that combine the experts’ knowledge with the public’s emotions and intuitions. ([Location 2623](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=2623)) - there is some truth to the stereotypes that govern judgments of representativeness, and predictions that follow this heuristic may be accurate. In other situations, the stereotypes are false and the representativeness heuristic will mislead, especially if it causes people to neglect base-rate information that points in another direction. ([Location 2738](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=2738)) - Frowning, as we have seen, generally increases the vigilance of System 2 and reduces both overconfidence and the reliance on intuition. The students who puffed out their cheeks (an emotionally neutral expression) replicated the original results: they relied exclusively on representativeness and ignored the base rates. As the authors had predicted, however, the frowners did show some sensitivity to the base rates. ([Location 2761](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=2761)) - When an incorrect intuitive judgment is made, System 1 and System 2 should both be indicted. System 1 suggested the incorrect intuition, and System 2 endorsed it and expressed it in a judgment. However, there are two possible reasons for the failure of System 2—ignorance or laziness. Some people ignore base rates because they believe them to be irrelevant in the presence of individual information. Others make the same mistake because they are not focused on the task. If frowning makes a difference, laziness seems to be the proper explanation of base-rate neglect, at least among Harvard undergrads. Their System 2 “knows” that base rates are relevant even when they are not explicitly mentioned, but applies that knowledge only when it invests special effort in the task. ([Location 2765](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=2765)) - The word fallacy is used, in general, when people fail to apply a logical rule that is obviously relevant. Amos and I introduced the idea of a conjunction fallacy, which people commit when they judge a conjunction of two events (here, bank teller and feminist) to be more probable than one of the events (bank teller) in a direct comparison. ([Location 2871](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=2871)) - The most coherent stories are not necessarily the most probable, but they are plausible, and the notions of coherence, plausibility, and probability are easily confused by the unwary. ([Location 2887](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=2887)) - As expected, probability judgments were higher for the richer and more detailed scenario, contrary to logic. This is a trap for forecasters and their clients: adding detail to scenarios makes them more persuasive, but less likely to come true. ([Location 2895](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=2895)) - To teach students any psychology they did not know before, you must surprise them. But which surprise will do? Nisbett and Borgida found that when they presented their students with a surprising statistical fact, the students managed to learn nothing at all. But when the students were surprised by individual cases—two nice people who had not helped—they immediately made the generalization and inferred that helping is more difficult than they had thought. ([Location 3167](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=3167)) - 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. ([Location 3639](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=3639)) - A general limitation of the human mind is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past states of knowledge, or beliefs that have changed. 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. ([Location 3662](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=3662)) - It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously, but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true. ([Location 3847](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=3847)) - Those who know more forecast very slightly better than those who know less. But those with the most knowledge are often less reliable. The reason is that the person who acquires more knowledge develops an enhanced illusion of her skill and becomes unrealistically overconfident. ([Location 3984](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=3984)) - Why are experts inferior to algorithms? One reason, which Meehl suspected, is that experts try to be clever, think outside the box, and consider complex combinations of features in making their predictions. Complexity may work in the odd case, but more often than not it reduces validity. Simple combinations of features are better. ([Location 4070](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=4070)) - marital stability is well predicted by a formula: frequency of lovemaking minus frequency of quarrels ([Location 4111](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=4111)) - Remember this rule: intuition cannot be trusted in the absence of stable regularities in the environment. ([Location 4390](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=4390)) - the proper way to elicit information from a group is not by starting with a public discussion but by confidentially collecting each person’s judgment. This procedure makes better use of the knowledge available to members of the group than the common practice of open discussion. ([Location 4469](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=4469)) - My request for the outside view surprised all of us, including me! This is a common pattern: people who have information about an individual case rarely feel the need to know the statistics of the class to which the case belongs. ([Location 4538](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=4538)) - “Pallid” statistical information is routinely discarded when it is incompatible with one’s personal impressions of a case. In the competition with the inside view, the outside view doesn’t stand a chance. ([Location 4543](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=4543)) - The effects of high optimism on decision making are, at best, a mixed blessing, but the contribution of optimism to good implementation is certainly positive. The main benefit of optimism is resilience in the face of setbacks. ([Location 4806](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=4806)) - Simple gambles (such as “40% chance to win $300”) are to students of decision making what the fruit fly is to geneticists. Choices between such gambles provide a simple model that shares important features with the more complex decisions that researchers actually aim to understand. ([Location 4866](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=4866)) - The fundamental ideas of prospect theory are that reference points exist, and that losses loom larger than corresponding gains. ([Location 5374](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=5374)) - The brains of humans and other animals contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news. By shaving a few hundredths of a second from the time needed to detect a predator, this circuit improves the animal’s odds of living long enough to reproduce. ([Location 5444](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=5444)) - John Gottman, the well-known expert in marital relations, who observed that the long-term success of a relationship depends far more on avoiding the negative than on seeking the positive. Gottman estimated that a stable relationship requires that good interactions outnumber bad interactions by at least 5 to 1. ([Location 5461](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=5461)) - Negotiations over a shrinking pie are especially difficult, because they require an allocation of losses. People tend to be much more easygoing when they bargain over an expanding pie. ([Location 5508](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=5508)) - Loss aversion is a powerful conservative force that favors minimal changes from the status quo in the lives of both institutions and individuals. This conservatism helps keep us stable in our neighborhood, our marriage, and our job; it is the gravitational force that holds our life together near the reference point. ([Location 5523](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00555X8OA&location=5523))