Quotes About Thinking

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.

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

the mystery of knowing without knowing is not a distinctive feature of intuition; it is the norm of mental life.

The word fallacy is used, in general, when people fail to apply a logical rule that is obviously relevant.

The prominence of causal intuitions is a recurrent theme in this book because people are prone to apply causal thinking inappropriately, to situations that require statistical reasoning. Statistical thinking derives conclusions about individual cases from properties of categories and ensembles. Unfortunately, System 1 does not have the capability for this mode of reasoning; System 2 can learn to think statistically, but few people receive the necessary training.

If you wish to experience your System 2 working at full tilt, the following exercise will do; it should bring you to the limits of your cognitive abilities within 5 seconds. To start, make up several strings of 4 digits, all different, and write each string on an index card.

your beliefs should be constrained by the logic of probability.

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

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

This was a eureka moment: I realized that the tasks we had chosen for study were exceptionally effortful. An image came to mind: mental life—today I would speak of the life of System 2—is normally conducted at the pace of a comfortable walk, sometimes interrupted by episodes of jogging and on rare occasions by a frantic sprint. The Add-1 and Add-3 exercises are sprints, and casual chatting is a stroll.

the idea that our minds are susceptible to systematic errors is now generally accepted.

As you can guess, this is a test of the readers' vulnerability to stereotypes: do people rate the essay more favorably when it is attributed to a middle-aged man than they do when they believe that a young woman wrote it? They do, of course. But importantly, the difference is larger in the good-mood condition. People who are in a good mood are more likely to let their biases affect their thinking.

Why are experts inferior to algorithms? One reason, which Meehl suspected, is that experts try to be clever, think outside the box, and consider complex combinations of features in making their predictions. Complexity may work in the odd case, but more often than not it reduces validity. Simple combinations of features are better.

Statistical results with a causal interpretation have a stronger effect on our thinking than non-causal information. But even compelling causal statistics will not change long-held beliefs or beliefs rooted in personal experience.

Researchers have applied diverse methods to examine the connection between thinking and self-control. Some have addressed it by asking the correlation question: If people were ranked by their self-control and by their cognitive aptitude, would individuals have similar positions in the two rankings?

I propose a simple account of how we generate intuitive opinions on complex matters. If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 will find a related question that is easier and will answer it.

When System 1 runs into difficulty, it calls on System 2 to support more detailed and specific processing that may solve the problem of the moment. System 2 is mobilized when a question arises for which System 1 does not offer an answer, as probably happened to you when you encountered the multiplication problem 17 × 24. You can also feel a surge of conscious attention whenever you are surprised.

The law of least effort is operating here. He will think as little as possible.

once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws.

Because System 1 operates automatically and cannot be turned off at will, errors of intuitive thought are often difficult to prevent. Biases cannot always be avoided, because System 2 may have no clue to the error.

Systematic errors are known as biases

If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 will find a related question that is easier and will answer it. I

The evidence presents a profound challenge to the idea that humans have consistent preferences and know how to maximize them, a cornerstone of the rational-agent model. An inconsistency is built into the design of our minds.

Social scientists in the 1970s broadly accepted two ideas about human nature. First, people are generally rational, and their thinking is normally sound. Second, emotions such as fear, affection, and hatred explain most of the occasions on which people depart from rationality. Our article challenged both assumptions without discussing them directly.