Failures of detection followed the same inverted-V pattern as the dilating pupil. The similarity was reassuring: the pupil was a good measure of the physical arousal that accompanies mental effort, and we could go ahead and use it to understand how the mind works.
System 2 is much too slow and inefficient to serve as a substitute for System 1 in making routine decisions. The best we can do is a compromise: learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high.
When forecasting the outcomes of risky projects, executives too easily fall victim to the planning fallacy. In its grip, they make decisions based on delusional optimism rather than on a rational weighting of gains, losses, and probabilities. They overestimate benefits and underestimate costs. They spin scenarios of success while overlooking the potential for mistakes and miscalculations.
It is difficult to imagine people lining up at airport bookstores to buy a book that enthusiastically describes the practices of business leaders who, on average, do somewhat better than chance. Consumers have a hunger for a clear message about the determinants of success and failure in business, and they need stories that offer a sense of understanding, however illusory.
We often fail to allow for the possibility that evidence that should be critical to our judgment is missing – what we see is all there is.
Our predilection for causal thinking exposes us to serious mistakes in evaluating the randomness of truly random events.
The initial enthusiasm for the idea in the Ministry of Education had waned by the time the text was delivered and it was never used.
Systematic errors are known as biases, and they recur predictably in particular circumstances.
To get pleasure from eating, for example, you must notice that you are doing it. We found that French and American women spent about the same amount of time eating, but for Frenchwomen, eating was twice as likely to be focal as it was for American women. The Americans were far more prone to combine eating with other activities, and their pleasure from eating was correspondingly diluted.
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.
They keep making the same mistake: predicting rare events from weak evidence. When the evidence is weak, one should stick with the base rates.
The question we face is whether this candidate can succeed. The question we seem to answer is whether she interviews well. Let’s not substitute.
Thoughts of any aspect of life are more likely to be salient if a contrasting alternative is highly available.
As you become skilled in a task, its demand for energy diminishes. Studies of the brain have shown that the pattern of activity associated with an action changes as skill increases, with fewer brain regions involved.
Adaptation to a new situation, whether good or bad, consists in large part of thinking less and less about it.
The mistake that people make in the focusing illusion involves attention to selected moments and neglect of what happens at other times.
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.
The laziness of System 2 is an important fact of life, and the observation that representativeness can block the application of an obvious logical rule is also of some interest.
As you become skilled in a task, its demand for energy diminishes.
In most situations, a direct comparison makes people more careful and more logical. But not always. Sometimes intuition beats logic even when the correct answer stares you in the face.