Quotes About Decision-making

In another experiment in the series, participants were told that they would shortly have a get-acquainted conversation with another person and were asked to set up two chairs while the experimenter left to retrieve that person. Participants primed by money chose to stay much farther apart than their nonprimed peers (118 vs. 80 centimeters). Money-primed undergraduates also showed a greater preference for being alone.

People adjust less (stay closer to the anchor) when their mental resources are depleted, either because their memory is loaded with digits or because they are slightly drunk.

I describe mental life by the metaphor of two agents, called System 1 and System 2, which respectively produce fast and slow thinking. I speak of the features of intuitive and deliberate thought as if they were traits and dispositions of two characters in your mind. In the picture that emerges from recent research, the intuitive System 1 is more influential than your experience tells you, and it is the secret author of many of the choices and judgments you make.

Most of this book is about the workings of System 1 and the mutual influences between it and System 2.

The principle of independent judgments (and decorrelated errors) has immediate applications for the conduct of meetings, an activity in which executives in organizations spend a great deal of their working days. A simple rule can help: before an issue is discussed, all members of the committee should be asked to write a very brief summary of their position.

How closely does System 2 monitor the suggestions of System 1? His reasoning was that we know a significant fact about anyone who says that the ball costs 10¢: that person did not actively check whether the answer was correct, and her System 2 endorsed an intuitive answer that it could have rejected with a small investment of effort.

The bat-and-ball problem is our first encounter with an observation that will be a recurrent theme of this book: many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions.

It is often the case that when you broaden the frame, you reach more reasonable decisions.

people who are simultaneously challenged by a demanding cognitive task and by a temptation are more likely to yield to the temptation.

but statistics requires thinking about many things at once, which is something that System 1 is not designed to do.

System 2 is sometimes busy, and often lazy. Indeed, there is evidence that people are more likely to be influenced by empty persuasive messages, such as commercials, when they are tired and depleted.

The premortem has two main advantages: it overcomes the groupthink that affects many teams once a decision appears to have been made, and it unleashes the imagination of knowledgeable individuals in a much-needed direction.

Dalle prove raccolte risulta che, quando la mente è carica di cifre, si è più propensi a scegliere l'allettante dolce alla cioccolata. Il sistema 1 influisce di più sul comportamento quando il sistema 2 è indaffarato, e ha un debole per i dolci.2

Overconfidence is fed by the illusory certainty of hindsigh

Recognize the signs that you are in a cognitive minefield, slow down, and ask for reinforcement of system 2.

your beliefs should be constrained by the logic of probability.

people tend to be risk averse in the domain of gains and risk seeking in the domain of losses.

All too often a company afflicted by sunk costs drives into the blizzard, throwing good money after bad rather than accepting the humiliation of closing the account of a costly failure.

Some judgments are biased; they are systematically off target. Other judgments are noisy, as people who are expected to agree end up at very different points around the target. Many organizations, unfortunately, are afflicted by both bias and noise.

The ideal of logical consistency, as this example shows, is not achievable by our limited mind. Because we are susceptible to WYSIATI and averse to mental effort, we tend to make decisions as problems arise, even when we are specifically instructed to consider them jointly. We have neither the inclination nor the mental resources to enforce consistency on our preferences, and our preferences are not magically set to be coherent, as they are in the rational-agent model.

System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective

Este pequeño ejemplo ilustra una gran historia: los seres humanos esperan tener reacciones emocionales más intensas (el arrepentimiento incluido) frente a un resultado producido por una acción que frente al mismo resultado producido por la inacción.

recurrent theme of this book: many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions.

The emotional tail wags the rational dog." The affect heuristic simplifies our lives by creating a world that is much tidier than reality.