Quotes About Cognition

Although Humans are not irrational, they often need help to make more accurate judgments and better decisions, and in some cases policies and institutions can provide that help.

Social scientists in the 1970s broadly accepted two ideas about human nature. First, people are generally rational, and their thinking is normally sound. Second, emotions such as fear, affection, and hatred explain most of the occasions on which people depart from rationality.

He weighs losses about twice as much as gains, which is normal.

framing effects: the large changes of preferences that are sometimes caused by inconsequential variations in the wording of a choice problem.

Surprise then activates and orients your attention: you will stare, and you will search your memory for a story that makes sense of the surprising event.

The procedure I adopted to tame the halo effect conforms to a general principle: decorrelate error!

The "Florida effect" involves two stages of priming. First, the set of words primes thoughts of old age, though the word old is never mentioned; second, these thoughts prime a behavior, walking slowly, which is associated with old age. All this happens without any awareness.

more intelligent individuals are more likely than others to have rich representations of most things.

The conclusion is that the ease with which instances come to mind is a System 1 heuristic, which is replaced by a focus on content when System 2 is more engaged. Multiple lines of evidence converge on the conclusion that people who let themselves be guided by System 1 are more strongly susceptible to availability biases than others who are in a state of higher vigilance. The

We called this reliance on the ease of memory search the availability heuristic.

anything that occupies your working memory reduces your ability to think.

SPEAKING OF COGNITIVE EASE "Let's not dismiss their business plan just because the font makes it hard to read." "We must be inclined to believe it because it has been repeated so often, but let's think it through again." "Familiarity breeds liking. This is a mere exposure effect." "I'm in a very good mood today, and my System 2 is weaker than usual. I should be extra careful.

When uncertain, System 1 bets on an answer, and the bets are guided by experience. The rules of the betting are intelligent: recent events and the current context have the most weight in determining an interpretation. When no recent event comes to mind, more distant memories govern.

When the question is difficult and a skilled solution is not available, intuition still has a shot: an answer may come to mind quickly—but it is not an answer to the original question.

But your subjective experience consists largely of the story that your System 2 tells itself about what is going on. Priming phenomena arise in System 1, and you have no conscious access to them.

the effects of ego depletion could be undone by ingesting glucose

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

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

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.

automatic search for causes shapes our thinking

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

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.

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

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.