Quotes About Cognition

people who are simultaneously challenged by a demanding cognitive task and by a temptation are more likely to yield to the temptation.

people believe a conclusion is true, they are also very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it, even when these arguments are unsound.

but statistics requires thinking about many things at once, which is something that System 1 is not designed to do.

Earlier I traced people's confidence in a belief to two related impressions: cognitive ease and coherence. We are confident when the story we tell ourselves comes easily to mind, with no contradiction and no competing scenario. But ease and coherence do not guarantee that a belief held with confidence is true.

the mystery of knowing without knowing is not a distinctive feature of intuition; it is the norm of mental life.

System 2 is sometimes busy, and often lazy. Indeed, there is evidence that people are more likely to be influenced by empty persuasive messages, such as commercials, when they are tired and depleted.

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

The main function of System 1 is to maintain and update a model of your personal world, which represents what is normal in it. The model is constructed by associations that link ideas of circumstances, events, actions, and outcomes that co-occur with some regularity, either at the same time or within a relatively short interval.

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.

The experience of familiarity has a simple but powerful quality of 'pastness' that seems to indicate that it is a direct reflection of prior experience'. This quality of pastness is an illusion.

Dalle prove raccolte risulta che, quando la mente è carica di cifre, si è più propensi a scegliere l'allettante dolce alla cioccolata. Il sistema 1 influisce di più sul comportamento quando il sistema 2 è indaffarato, e ha un debole per i dolci.2

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

when people believe a conclusion is true, they are also very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it

If you wish to experience your System 2 working at full tilt, the following exercise will do; it should bring you to the limits of your cognitive abilities within 5 seconds. To start, make up several strings of 4 digits, all different, and write each string on an index card.

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.

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

The primed ideas have some ability to prime other ideas, although more weakly. Like ripples on a pond, activation spreads through a small part of the vast network of associated ideas.

What you learned about the Müller-Lyer illusion did not change the way you see the lines, but it changed your behavior. You now know that you cannot trust your impression of the length of lines that have fins appended to them, and you also know that in the standard Müller-Lyer display you cannot trust what you see. When asked about the length of the lines, you will report your informed belief, not the illusion that you continue to see.

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.

Our understanding of cognitive ease and associative coherence locates subjective confidence firmly in System 1.

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

We marvel at the story of the firefighter who has a sudden urge to escape a burning house just before it collapses, because the firefighter knows the danger intuitively, "without knowing how he knows." However, we also do not know how we immediately know that a person we see as we enter a room is our friend Peter.

The ideal of logical consistency, as this example shows, is not achievable by our limited mind. Because we are susceptible to WYSIATI and averse to mental effort, we tend to make decisions as problems arise, even when we are specifically instructed to consider them jointly. We have neither the inclination nor the mental resources to enforce consistency on our preferences, and our preferences are not magically set to be coherent, as they are in the rational-agent model.

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