Quotes About Judgment

The bat-and-ball problem is our first encounter with an observation that will be a recurrent theme of this book: many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions.

It is often the case that when you broaden the frame, you reach more reasonable decisions.

Highly skilled people are less noisy, and they also show less bias.

The word fallacy is used, in general, when people fail to apply a logical rule that is obviously relevant.

The lesson of figure 5 is that predictable illusions inevitably occur if a judgment is based on an impression of cognitive ease or strain. Anything that makes it easier for the associative machine to run smoothly will also bias beliefs. 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.

Recognize the signs that you are in a cognitive minefield, slow down, and ask for reinforcement of system 2.

your beliefs should be constrained by the logic of probability.

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. Substitution of questions inevitably produces systematic errors.

Some judgments are biased; they are systematically off target. Other judgments are noisy, as people who are expected to agree end up at very different points around the target. Many organizations, unfortunately, are afflicted by both bias and noise.

When you say 'quite clever,' which reference group do you have in mind?

recurrent theme of this book: many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions.

Much of the discussion in this book is about biases of intuition.

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.

the idea that our minds are susceptible to systematic errors is now generally accepted.

Individuals who uncritically follow their intuitions about puzzles are also prone to accept other suggestions from System 1. In particular, they are impulsive, impatient, and keen to receive immediate gratification.

If it is the only one that comes to mind, it may be subjectively undistinguishable from valid judgments that you make with expert confidence. This is why subjective confidence is not a good diagnostic of accuracy: judgments that answer the wrong question can also be made with high confidence

As I had discovered from watching cadets on the obstacle field, subjective confidence of traders is a feeling, not a judgment. Our understanding of cognitive ease and associative coherence locates subjective confidence firmly in System 1.

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?).

When the handsome and confident speaker bounds onto the stage, for example, you can anticipate that the audience will judge his comments more favorably than he deserves.

Jumping to conclusions is a safer sport in the world of our imagination than it is in reality. Statistics

averaging several independent judgments (or measurements) yields a new judgment, which is less noisy, albeit not less biased, than the individual judgments.

The impression of familiarity is produced by System 1, and System 2 relies on that impression for a true/false judgment.

The phenomenon we were studying is so common and so important in the everyday world that you should know its name: it is an anchoring effect. It occurs when people consider a particular value for an unknown quantity before estimating that quantity. What happens is one of the most reliable and robust results of experimental psychology: the estimates stay close to the number that people considered—hence the image of an anchor.

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