Quotes About Cognition

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

Words that you have seen before become easier to see again

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.

This was a eureka moment: I realized that the tasks we had chosen for study were exceptionally effortful. An image came to mind: mental life—today I would speak of the life of System 2—is normally conducted at the pace of a comfortable walk, sometimes interrupted by episodes of jogging and on rare occasions by a frantic sprint. The Add-1 and Add-3 exercises are sprints, and casual chatting is a stroll.

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.

System 1 constructed a story, and his System 2 believed it. It happens to all of us.

The world in our heads is not a precise replica of reality;

To a psychologist, it is self-evident that people are neither fully rational nor completely selfish, and that their tastes are anything but stable.

In contrast, increasing effort is not an option when you must keep six digits in short-term memory while performing a task. Ego depletion is not the same mental state as cognitive busyness.

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

The bat-and-ball problem, the flowers syllogism, and the Michigan/Detroit problem have something in common. Failing these minitests appears to be, at least to some extent, a matter of insufficient motivation, not trying hard enough.

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?).

Can your System 1 distinguish degrees of belief? The principle of WYSIATI suggests that it cannot.

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.

System 1 has more influence on behavior when System 2 is busy, and it has a sweet tooth. People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations. Memorizing and repeating digits loosens the hold of System 2 on behavior, but of course cognitive load is not the only cause of weakened self-control.

Another way of saying this is that controlling thoughts and behaviors is one of the tasks that System 2 performs.

two important facts about our minds: we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.

Facts that we know do not always come to mind when we need them. People

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

when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.

Anything that makes it easier for the associative machine to run smoothly will also bias beliefs.

Inconsistencies reduce the ease of our thoughts and the clarity of our feelings.