Quotes About Cognition

People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations.

Do we still remember the question we are trying to answer? Or have we substituted an easier one?

To understand error in judgment, we must understand both bias and noise.

System 1 continuously generates suggestions for System 2: impressions, intuitions, intentions, and feelings. If endorsed by System 2, impressions and intuitions turn into beliefs, and impulses turn into voluntary actions. When all goes smoothly, which is most of the time, System 2 adopts the suggestions of System 1 with little or no modification.

Amos and I introduced the idea of a conjunction fallacy, which people commit when they judge a conjunction of two events (here, bank teller and feminist) to be more probable than one of the events (bank teller) in a direct comparison.

you know far less about yourself than you feel you do.

System 1 is radically insensitive to both the quality and the quantity of the information that gives rise to impressions and intuitions.

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. But

creativity is associative memory that works exceptionally well.

There is at least one source of occasion noise that we have all noticed: mood.

The only test of rationality is not whether a person's beliefs and preferences are reasonable, but whether they are internally consistent.

Not all illusions are visual. There are illusions of thought, which we call cognitive illusions.

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 short, you experience greater cognitive ease in perceiving a word you have seen earlier, and it is this sense of ease that gives you the impression of familiarity.

Claims for correct intuitions in an unpredictable situation are self-delusional at best, sometimes worse.

What you see is all there is

My goal is to make the viewer a little bit smarter.

But Steven Bochco was smart; he knew that viewers were smart.

We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking - watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives.

The brain is the cornerstone of virtually every facet of our lives. I wish we knew more.

I used to think consciousness itself was a virtue, so I tried to keep it all in my head at the same time: past, future, etc.

All there is to thinking is seeing something noticeable, which makes you see something you weren't noticing, which makes you see something that isn't even visible.

We humans invented literacy, which means it doesn't come for free with our genes like speech and vision. Every brain has to learn it afresh.

Color is just in a small area of our vision, and the rest we add with the mind.

Stress makes us prone to tunnel vision, less likely to take in the information we need. Anxiety makes us more risk-averse than we would be regularly and more deferential.