Top highlights from Thinking, Fast and Slow
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.
Show this quote
Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it
Show this quote
Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.
Show this quote
If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.
Show this quote
Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed.
Show this quote
The psychologist, Paul Rozin, an expert on disgust, observed that a 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.
Show this quote
The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.
Show this quote
Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.
Show this quote
This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.
Show this quote
We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events.
Show this quote
A general law of least effort applies to cognitive as well as physicalexertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving thesame goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding courseof action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition ofskill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature.
Show this quote
The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little.
Show this quote
we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.
Show this quote
I have always believed that scientific research is another domain where a form of optimism is essential to success: I have yet to meet a successful scientist who lacks the ability to exaggerate the importance of what he or she is doing, and I believe that someone who lacks a delusional sense of significance will wilt in the face of repeated experiences of multiple small failures and rare successes, the fate of most researchers.
Show this quote
A reliable way of making people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.
Show this quote
The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.
Show this quote
The easiest way to increase happiness is to control your use of time. Can you find more time to do the things you enjoy doing?
Show this quote
You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general.
Show this quote
Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition. These findings add to the growing evidence that good mood, intuition, creativity, gullibility, and increased reliance on System 1 form a cluster. At the other pole, sadness, vigilance, suspicion, an analytic approach, and increased effort also go together. A happy mood loosens the control of System 2 over performance: when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors.
Show this quote
Familiarity breeds liking.
Show this quote
The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.
Show this quote
Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it. It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously, but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.
Show this quote
The test of learning psychology is whether your understanding of situations you encounter has changed, not whether you have learned a new fact.
Show this quote
Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.
Show this quote
acquisition of skills requires a regular environment, an adequate opportunity to practice, and rapid and unequivocal feedback about the correctness of thoughts and actions.
Show this quote
People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memoryand this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media. Frequently mentioned topics populate the mind even as others slip away from awareness. In turn, what the media choose to report corresponds to their view of what is currently on the publics mind. It is no accident that authoritarian regimes exert substantial pressure on independent media. Because public interest is most easily aroused by dramatic events and by celebrities, media feeding frenzies are common
Show this quote
Because we tend to be nice to other people when they please us and nasty when they do not, we are statistically punished for being nice and rewarded for being nasty.
Show this quote
The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other peoples mistakes than our own.
Show this quote
We focus on our goal, anchor on our plan, and neglect relevant base rates, exposing ourselves to the planning fallacy. We focus on what we want to do and can do, neglecting the plans and skills of others. Both in explaining the past and in predicting the future, we focus on the causal role of skill and neglect the role of luck. We are therefore prone to an illusion of control. We focus on what we know and neglect what we do not know, which makes us overly confident in our beliefs.
Show this quote
We are prone to blame decision makers for good decisions that worked out badly and to give them too little credit for successful moves that appear obvious only after the fact.
Show this quote
when people believe a conclusion is true, they are also very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it, even when these arguments are unsound.
Show this quote
Experts who acknowledge the full extent of their ignorance may expect to be replaced by more confident competitors, who are better able to gain the trust of clients. An unbiased appreciation of uncertainty is a cornerstone of rationalitybut it is not what people and organizations want.
Show this quote
a stable relationship requires that good interactions outnumber bad interactions by at least 5 to 1.
Show this quote
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. This procedure makes good use of the value of the diversity of knowledge and opinion in the group. The standard practice of open discussion gives too much weight to the opinions of those who speak early and assertively, causing others to line up behind them.
Show this quote
higher income is associated with a reduced ability to enjoy the small pleasures of life.
Show this quote
Jonathan Haidt said in another context, The emotional tail wags the rational dog.
Show this quote
Remember this rule: intuition cannot be trusted in the absence of stable regularities in the environment.
Show this quote
Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking of it.
Show this quote
To derive the most useful information from multiple sources of evidence, you should always try to make these sources independent of each other.
Show this quote
We have all heard such stories of expert intuition: the chess master who walks past a street game and announces White mates in three without stopping, or the physician who makes a complex diagnosis after a single glance at a patient. Expert intuition strikes us as magical, but it is not. Indeed, each of us performs feats of intuitive expertise many times each day. Most of us are pitch-perfect in detecting anger in the first word of a telephone call, recognize as we enter a room that we were the subject of the conversation, and quickly react to subtle signs that the driver of the car in the next lane is dangerous. Our everyday intuitive abilities are no less marvelous than the striking insights of an experienced firefighter or physicianonly more common. The psychology of accurate intuition involves no magic. Perhaps the best short statement of it is by the great Herbert Simon, who studied chess masters and showed that after thousands of hours of practice they come to see the pieces on the board differently from the rest of us. You can feel Simons impatience with the mythologizing of expert intuition when he writes: The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.
Show this quote
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.
Show this quote
The worse the consequence, the greater the hindsight bias.
Show this quote
I call it theory-induced blindness: once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws. If you come upon an observation that does not seem to fit the model, you assume that there must be a perfectly good explanation that you are somehow missing.
Show this quote
You can do several things at once, but only if they are easy and undemanding.
Show this quote
To be useful, your beliefs should be constrained by the logic of probability.
Show this quote
We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random.
Show this quote
However, optimism is highly valued, socially and in the market; people and firms reward the providers of dangerously misleading information more than they reward truth tellers. One of the lessons of the financial crisis that led to the Great Recession is that there are periods in which competition, among experts and among organizations, creates powerful forces that favor a collective blindness to risk and uncertainty.
Show this quote
If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do. My Princeton colleague Danny Oppenheimer refuted a myth prevalent among undergraduates about the vocabulary that professors find most impressive. In an article titled "Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly," he showed that couching familiar ideas in pretentious language is taken as a sign of poor intelligence and low credibility.
Show this quote
it is much easier to strive for perfection when you are never bored.
Show this quote
if you have had to force yourself to do something, you are less willing or less able to exert self-control when the next challenge comes around. The phenomenon has been named ego depletion.
Show this quote
The world in our heads is not a precise replica of reality; our expectations about the frequency of events are distorted by the prevalence and emotional intensity of the messages to which we are exposed.
Show this quote
Jumping to conclusions is efficient if the conclusions are likely to be correct and the costs of an occasional mistake acceptable. Jumping to conclusions is risky when the situation is unfamiliar, the stakes are high and there is no time to collect more information.
Show this quote
The experiencing self does not have a voice. The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keeps score and governs what we learn from living, and it is the one that makes decisions. What we learn from the past is to maximize the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experience. This is the tyranny of the remembering self.
Show this quote
The most effortful forms of slow thinking are those that require you to think fast.
Show this quote
A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.
Show this quote
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 call the operation of answering one question in place of another substitution.
Show this quote
Those who avoid the sin of intellectual sloth could be called engaged. They are more alert, more intellectually active, less willing to be satisfied with superficially attractive answers, more skeptical about their intuitions.
Show this quote
Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.
Show this quote
In a state of flow, however, maintaining focused attention on these absorbing activities requires no exertion of self-control, thereby freeing resources to be directed to the task at hand.
Show this quote
If you were allowed one wish for your child, seriously consider wishing him or her optimism.
Show this quote
