Quotes About Decision-making

Much of the discussion in this book is about biases of intuition.

Individuals who uncritically follow their intuitions about puzzles are also prone to accept other suggestions from System 1. In particular, they are impulsive, impatient, and keen to receive immediate gratification.

To a psychologist, it is self-evident that people are neither fully rational nor completely selfish, and that their tastes are anything but stable.

If it is the only one that comes to mind, it may be subjectively undistinguishable from valid judgments that you make with expert confidence. This is why subjective confidence is not a good diagnostic of accuracy: judgments that answer the wrong question can also be made with high confidence

The premortem is not a panacea and does not provide complete protection against nasty surprises, but it goes some way toward reducing the damage of plans that are subject to the biases of WYSIATI and uncritical optimism.

The affect heuristic is an instance of substitution, in which the answer to an easy question (How do I feel about it?) serves as an answer to a much harder question (What do I think about it?).

Can your System 1 distinguish degrees of belief? The principle of WYSIATI suggests that it cannot.

asymmetric intensity of the motives to avoid losses and to achieve gains shows up almost everywhere.

In the standard rational model of economics, people take risks because the odds are favorable—they accept some probability of a costly failure because the probability of success is sufficient.

probably contributes to an explanation of why people litigate, why they start wars, and why they open small businesses.

Another way of saying this is that controlling thoughts and behaviors is one of the tasks that System 2 performs.

The implication is clear: as the psychologist Jonathan Haidt said in another context, "The emotional tail wags the rational dog

However, when the subjects were placed in a positive mood—induced by watching a five-minute video segment—they became three times more likely to say that they would push the man off the bridge. Whether we regard "Thou shalt not kill" as an absolute principle or are willing to kill one stranger to save five should reflect our deepest values. Yet our choice seems to depend on what video clip we have just watched.

Its cost is "sunk" and the Econ would not care whether he had bought the ticket to the game or got it from a friend (if Econs have friends).

A study of nearly seven hundred thousand primary care visits, for instance, showed that physicians are significantly more likely to prescribe opioids at the end of a long day.

Walter Mischel and his students exposed four-year-old children to a cruel dilemma. They were given a choice between a small reward (one Oreo), which they could have at any time, or a larger reward (two cookies) for which they had to wait 15 minutes under difficult conditions.

The impression of familiarity is produced by System 1, and System 2 relies on that impression for a true/false judgment.

The phenomenon we were studying is so common and so important in the everyday world that you should know its name: it is an anchoring effect. It occurs when people consider a particular value for an unknown quantity before estimating that quantity. What happens is one of the most reliable and robust results of experimental psychology: the estimates stay close to the number that people considered—hence the image of an anchor.

Inconsistencies reduce the ease of our thoughts and the clarity of our feelings.

Freedom has a cost, which is borne by individuals who make bad choices, and by a society that feels obligated to help them.

The automatic processes of the mental shotgun and intensity matching often make available one or more answers to easy questions that could be mapped onto the target question.

simple mechanical rules were generally superior to human judgment.

Intuitive predictions are almost completely insensitive to the actual predictive quality of the evidence.

The list of indications of depletion is also highly diverse: deviating from one's diet overspending on impulsive purchases reacting aggressively to provocation persisting less time in a handgrip task performing poorly in cognitive tasks and logical decision making