Quotes from Daniel Kahneman

the effects of ego depletion could be undone by ingesting glucose

A budget reserve is to contractors as red meat is to lions, and they will devour it.

The difficulties of statistical thinking contribute to the main theme of Part 3, which describes a 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. We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events.

Recall that the correlation between two measures—in the present case reading age and GPA—is equal to the proportion of shared factors among their determinants.

Frederick's findings suggest that the 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. We recognize related differences among individuals: some people are more like their System 2; others are closer to their System 1. This simple test has emerged

A general limitation of the human mind is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past states of knowledge, or beliefs that have changed.

As we have seen, rationality is generally served by broader and more comprehensive frames, and joint evaluation is obviously broader than single evaluation.

Familiarity breeds liking. This is a mere exposure effect.

Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk

Your inability to reconstruct past beliefs will inevitably cause you to underestimate the extent to which you were surprised by past events.

Social psychology comes into the picture here, because the answer that a truthful CFO would offer is plainly ridiculous. A CFO who informs his colleagues that "there is a good chance that the S&P returns will be between –10% and +30%" can expect to be laughed out of the room. The wide confidence interval is a confession of ignorance, which is not socially acceptable for someone who is paid to be knowledgeable in financial matters.

Statistics produce many observations that appear to beg for causal explanations but do not lend themselves to such explanations.

Part 2 updates the study of judgment heuristics and explores a major puzzle: Why is it so difficult for us to think statistically? We easily think associatively, we think metaphorically, we think causally, but statistics requires thinking about many things at once, which is something that System 1 is not designed to do.

As you become skilled in a task, its demand for energy diminishes. Studies of the brain have shown that the pattern of activity associated with an action changes as skill increases, with fewer brain regions involved. Talent has similar effects. Highly intelligent individuals need less effort to solve the same problems, as indicated by both pupil size and brain activity.

automatic search for causes shapes our thinking

when System 2 is otherwise engaged, we will believe almost anything.

Losses are weighted about twice as much as gains in several contexts:

The way to block errors that originate in System 1 is simple in principle: recognize the signs that you are in a cognitive minefield, slow down, and ask for reinforcement from System 2. This is how you will proceed when you next encounter the Müller-Lyer illusion. When you see lines with fins pointing in different directions, you will recognize the situation as one in which you should not trust your impressions of length.

I am generally not optimistic about the potential for personal control of biases, but this is an exception.

Intense focusing on a task can make people effectively blind, even to stimuli that

Your muscles tensed up, your blood pressure rose, and your heart rate increased. Someone looking closely at your eyes while you tackled this problem would have seen your pupils dilate.

As you can experience, the request to retrieve and say aloud your phone number or your spouse's birthday also requires a brief but significant effort, because the entire string must be held in memory as a response is organized.

But of course the main reason that decision theorists study simple gambles is that this is what other decision theorists do. The field had a theory, expected utility theory, which was the foundation of the rational-agent model and is to this day the most important theory in the social sciences.

What came quickly to my mind was an intuition from System 1. I'll have to start over and search my memory deliberately.