Quotes About Cognition

System 1 operates as a machine for jumping to conclusions.

System 2 is activated when an event is detected that violates the model of the world that System 1

El mundo que imaginamos no es una réplica precisa de la realidad;

We already knew that people are good intuitive grammarians: at age four a child effortlessly conforms to the rules of grammar as she speaks, although she has no idea that such rules exist.

Your mind is ready and even eager to identify agents, assign them personality traits and specific intentions, and view their actions as expressing individual propensities. Here

There is essentially no evidence of situations in which people do very poorly and models do very well with the same information.

The Affect Heuristic The dominance of conclusions over arguments is most pronounced where emotions are involved.

the decision weights that people assign to outcomes are not identical to the probabilities of these outcomes

One of the tasks of System 2 is to overcome the impulses of System 1. In other words, System 2 is in charge of self-control.

judgments of similarity and probability are not constrained by the same logical rules. It is entirely acceptable for judgments of similarity to be unaffected by base rates and also by the possibility that the description was inaccurate, but anyone who ignores base rates and the quality of evidence in probability assessments will certainly make mistakes.

Observers are less cognitively busy and more open to information than actors.

System 1 does not keep track of alternatives that it rejects, or even of the fact that there were alternatives.

the strong conclusion that simple mechanical rules were generally superior to human judgment

sympathy we would feel for the patient would not be under our control; it would arise from System 1.

System 2 is much too slow and inefficient to serve as a substitute for System 1 in making routine decisions. The best we can do is a compromise: learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high.

They found that putting the participants in a good mood before the test by having them think happy thoughts more than doubled accuracy. An even more striking result is that unhappy subjects were completely incapable of performing the intuitive task accurately; their guesses were no better than random. Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.

The truth is, as Jacoby and many followers have shown, that the name David Stenbill will look familiar when you see it because you will see it more clearly. Words that you have seen before become easier to see again—you can identify them better than other words when they are shown very briefly or masked by noise, and you will be quicker (by a few hundredths of a second) to read them than to read other words. In

can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.

The technical definition of heuristic is a simple procedure that helps find adequate, though often imperfect, answers to difficult questions.

The moral is significant: when System 2 is otherwise engaged, we will believe almost anything. 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. Indeed

Errors are bound to occur when a judgment of similarity is substituted for a judgment of probability

The main obstacle is that subjective confidence is determined by the coherence of the story one has constructed, not by the quality and amount of the information that supports it.

The psychologist Paul Slovic has proposed an affect heuristic in which people let their likes and dislikes determine their beliefs about the world.

judgment, there is noise—and more of it than we think.