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. The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people’s mistakes than our own.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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 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.
Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.
A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.
This remarkable priming phenomenon—the influencing of an action by the idea—is known as the ideomotor effect.
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.
People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations.
One of the tasks of System 2 is to overcome the impulses of System 1. In other words, System 2 is in charge of self-control.
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.
Subjects’ unwillingness to deduce the particular from the general was matched only by their willingness to infer the general from the particular.
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.
If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will 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 by actually feeling calm and kind.
The highly diverse operations of System 2 have one feature in common: they require attention and are disrupted when attention is drawn away.
The world in our heads is not a precise replica of reality; our expectations about the frequency of events are distorted by the prevalence and emotional intensity of the messages to which we are exposed.