Quotes About Cognition

cognition is embodied; you think with your body, not only with your brain.

It is normally easy and actually quite pleasant to walk and think at the same time, but at the extremes these activities appear to compete for the limited resources of System 2. You can confirm this claim by a simple experiment. While walking comfortably with a friend, ask him to compute 23 × 78 in his head, and to do so immediately. He will almost certainly stop in his tracks.

Uncertainty and doubt are the domain of System 2.

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.

answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.

It appears to be a feature of System 1 that cognitive ease is associated with good feelings.

These findings add to the growing evidence that good mood, intuition, creativity, gullibility, and increased reliance on System 1 form a cluster.

Why call them System 1 and System 2 rather than the more descriptive "automatic system" and "effortful system"? The reason is simple: "Automatic system" takes longer to say than "System 1" and therefore takes more space in your working memory. This matters, because anything that occupies your working memory reduces your ability to think.

The familiarity of one phrase in the statement sufficed to make the whole statement feel familiar, and therefore true.

The spontaneous search for an intuitive solution sometimes fails—neither an expert solution nor a heuristic answer comes to mind. In such cases we often find ourselves switching to a slower, more deliberate and effortful form of thinking. This is the slow thinking of the title. Fast thinking includes both variants of intuitive

In another experiment in the series, participants were told that they would shortly have a get-acquainted conversation with another person and were asked to set up two chairs while the experimenter left to retrieve that person. Participants primed by money chose to stay much farther apart than their nonprimed peers (118 vs. 80 centimeters). Money-primed undergraduates also showed a greater preference for being alone.

People adjust less (stay closer to the anchor) when their mental resources are depleted, either because their memory is loaded with digits or because they are slightly drunk.

Cognitive ease is both a cause and a consequence of a pleasant feeling.

I describe mental life by the metaphor of two agents, called System 1 and System 2, which respectively produce fast and slow thinking. I speak of the features of intuitive and deliberate thought as if they were traits and dispositions of two characters in your mind. In the picture that emerges from recent research, the intuitive System 1 is more influential than your experience tells you, and it is the secret author of many of the choices and judgments you make.

your subjective experience consists largely of the story that your System 2 tells itself about what is going on.

Most of this book is about the workings of System 1 and the mutual influences between it and System 2.

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.

How closely does System 2 monitor the suggestions of System 1? His reasoning was that we know a significant fact about anyone who says that the ball costs 10¢: that person did not actively check whether the answer was correct, and her System 2 endorsed an intuitive answer that it could have rejected with a small investment of effort.

More than 50% of students at Harvard, MIT, and Princeton gave the intuitive—incorrect—answer.

They didn't want more information that might spoil their story. WYSIATI.

Indeed, the mere exposure effect is actually stronger for stimuli that the individual never consciously sees

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.

Nisbett and Borgida summarize the results in a memorable sentence: Subjects' unwillingness to deduce the particular from the general was matched only by their willingness to infer the general from the particular.

reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.