Thinking Fast and Slow
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Central theme in the book is the difference between 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.
The effects of Priming is discussed. Priming can influence decisions in major ways.
Decisions are also influence in a major way by how easy examples come to mind, e.g. Cognitive ease, and its range is between “Easy” and “Strained.” Examples that come 'easy' to mind, have a stronger influence on our decisions.
Our minds have an habit to jump to conclusions based on System 1. Here are the most important ones:
- Confirmation Bias, we like to agree with people & statements presented to us
- Halo effect, we have a tendency to create a consistent overall impression of a person, company, brand, or product.
- WYSIATI, What You See Is All There is...: when presented a decision based on a limitted information set, System 1 is tempted to decide rather than to elaborate.
- "She knows nothing about this person’s management skills. All she is going by is the halo effect from a good presentation."
- “Let’s decorrelate errors by obtaining separate judgments on the issue before any discussion. We will get more information from ** independent assessments.”
- “They made that big decision on the basis of a good report from one consultant. WYSIATI—what you see is all there is. They did not seem to realize how little information they had.”
- “They didn’t want more information that might spoil their story. WYSIATI"
When faced with a too difficult question, we used Substituting Questions, e.g. we replace a complex question with a simpler one we can answer. We use the Affect Heuristic and overweight advantages and positive traits of people or projects we like.
- “Do we still remember the question we are trying to answer? Or have we substituted an easier one?”
- The question we face is whether this candidate can succeed. The question we seem to answer is whether she interviews well. Let’s not substitute.”
- “He likes the project, so he thinks its costs are low and its benefits are high. Nice example of the affect heuristic.”
