Quotes About Interpretation

When uncertain, System 1 bets on an answer, and the bets are guided by experience. The rules of the betting are intelligent: recent events and the current context have the most weight in determining an interpretation. When no recent event comes to mind, more distant memories govern.

Matters of judgment, including professional judgments, occupy a space between questions of fact or computation on the one hand and matters of taste or opinion on the other. They are defined by the expectation of bounded disagreement.

single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches.

The same sound will be experienced as very loud or quite faint, depending on whether it was preceded by a whisper or by a roar.

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

A matter of judgment is one with some uncertainty about the answer and where we allow for the possibility that reasonable and competent people might disagree.

dilate. Your pupils contracted back to normal size as soon as

Subjects' unwillingness to deduce the particular from the general was matched only by their willingness to infer the general from the particular.

Good stories provide a simple and coherent account of people's actions and intentions. You are always ready to interpret behavior as a manifestation of general propensities and personality traits—causes that you can readily match to effects. The halo effect discussed earlier contributes to coherence, because it inclines us to match our view of all the qualities of a person to our judgment of one attribute that is particularly significant.

understanding a statement must begin with an attempt to believe it: you must first know what the idea would mean if it were true.

But the cadet was probably just lucky on that particular attempt and therefore likely to deteriorate regardless of whether or not he was praised. Similarly, the instructor would shout into a cadet's earphones only when the cadet's performance was unusually bad and therefore likely to improve regardless of what the instructor did. The instructor had attached a causal interpretation to the inevitable fluctuations of a random process.

Now suppose that at the end of the page you get another instruction: count all the commas in the next page. This will be harder, because you will have to overcome the newly acquired tendency to focus attention on the letter f.

Experienced radiologists who evaluate chest X-rays as "normal" or "abnormal" contradict themselves 20% of the time when they see the same picture on separate occasions

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

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

Happiness does not have a simple meaning and should not be used as if it does.

We will not learn to understand regression from experience. Even when a regression is identified, as we saw in the story of the flight instructors, it will be given a causal interpretation that is almost always wrong.

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.

we quickly realized that we were just as risk seeking in the domain of losses as we were risk averse in the domain of gains. We were not the first to observe risk seeking with negative prospects—at least two authors had reported that fact, but they had not made much of it. However, we were fortunate to have a framework that made the finding of risk seeking easy to interpret, and that was a milestone in our thinking. Indeed, we identified two reasons for this effect.

We are pattern seekers, believers in a coherent world, in which regularities (such as a sequence of six girls) appear not by accident but as a result of mechanical causality or of someone's intention. We

Our answer was that when called upon to judge probability, people actually judge something else and believe they have judged probability.

It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern. WYSIATI

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.

Something is still missing from this story: the answers need to be fitted to the original questions.