Quotes About Cognition

manipulations that increase cognitive ease (priming, a clear font, pre-exposing words) all increase the tendency to see the words as linked.

You may believe that you are subtler, more insightful, and more nuanced than the linear caricature of your thinking. But in fact, you are mostly noisier.

Amos liked the idea of an adjust-and-anchor heuristic as a strategy for estimating uncertain quantities: start from an anchoring number, assess whether it is too high or too low, and gradually adjust your estimate by mentally "moving" from the anchor. The adjustment typically ends prematurely, because people stop when they are no longer certain that they should move farther.

The core of his argument is that rationality should be distinguished from intelligence.

If you have recently seen or heard the word EAT, you are temporarily more likely to complete the word fragment SO_P as SOUP than as SOAP. The opposite would happen, of course, if you had just seen WASH. We call this a priming effect and say that the idea of EAT primes the idea of SOUP, and that WASH primes SOAP.

It is tempting to explain entrepreneurial optimism by wishful thinking, but emotion is only part of the story. Cognitive biases play an important role, notably the System 1 feature WYSIATI.

While your attention is focused on the digits, you are offered a choice between two desserts: a sinful chocolate cake and a virtuous fruit salad. The evidence suggests that you would be more likely to select the tempting chocolate cake when your mind is loaded with digits. System 1 has more influence on behavior when System 2 is busy, and it has a sweet tooth.

many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions.

One of the main functions of System 2 is to monitor and control thoughts and actions "suggested" by System 1, allowing some to be expressed directly in behavior and suppressing or modifying others.

the psychologist Jonathan Haidt said in another context, "The emotional tail wags the rational dog." The affect heuristic simplifies our lives by creating a world that is much tidier than reality.

Conscious doubt is not in the repertoire of System 1; it requires maintaining incompatible interpretations in mind at the same time, which demands mental effort. Uncertainty and doubt are the domain of System 2.

the person who acquires more knowledge develops an enhanced illusion of her skill and becomes unrealistically overconfident. "We reach the point of diminishing marginal predictive returns for knowledge disconcertingly quickly

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

judgment heuristics "are quite useful, but sometimes lead to severe and systematic errors.

People can overcome some of the superficial factors that produce illusions of truth when strongly motivated to do so.

An odd feature of what happened is that your System 1 treated the mere conjunction of two words as representations of reality. Your body acted in an attenuated replica of reaction to the real thing, and the emotional response and physical recoil were part of the interpretation of the event. As cognitive scientists have emphasised in recent years, cognition is embodied; you think with your body, not only with your brain.

When it comes to rare probabilities, our mind is not designed to get things quite right. For the residents of a planet that may be exposed to events no one has yet experienced, this is not good news.

Everyone has some awareness of the limited capacity of attention, and our social behaviour makes allowances for these limitations

Familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.

Regret, frustration, and self-satisfaction can also be affected by framing (Kahneman & Tversky, 1982). If

Daniel Kahneman

good judgments depend on what you know, how well you think, and how you think.

Los estudios sobre cognición humana atribuyen este exceso de optimismo a numerosos motivos. Uno de los más poderosos es la tendencia de los individuos a exagerar el propio talento, a creer que están por encima de la media en su asignación de características y habilidades positivas.

The interaction of the two systems is a recurrent theme of the book, and a brief synopsis of the plot is in order.