Recognize the signs that you are in a cognitive minefield, slow down, and ask for reinforcement of system 2.
Money-primed people become more independent than they would be without the associative trigger. They persevered almost twice as long in trying to solve a very difficult problem before they asked the experimenter for help, a crisp demonstration of increased self-reliance. Money-primed people are also more selfish: they were much less willing to spend time helping another student who pretended to be confused about an experimental task.
I quoted Herbert Simon’s definition of intuition in the introduction, but it will make more sense when I repeat it now: “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.
You have now been introduced to that stranger in you, which may be in control of much of what you do, although you rarely have a glimpse of it.
Asked whether they would rather eat an organic or a commercially grown apple, most people prefer the “all natural” one. Even after being informed that the two apples taste the same, have identical nutritional value, and are equally healthful, a majority still prefer the organic fruit. Even the producers of beer have found that they can increase sales by putting “All Natural” or “No Preservatives” on the label.
In the absence of valid cues, intuitive “hits” are due either to luck or to lies. If you find this conclusion surprising, you still have a lingering belief that intuition is magic. Remember this rule: intuition cannot be trusted in the absence of stable regularities in the environment.
All too often a company afflicted by sunk costs drives into the blizzard, throwing good money after bad rather than accepting the humiliation of closing the account of a costly failure.
Little repetition is needed for learning.
The availability heuristic, like other heuristics of judgment, substitutes one question for another: you wish to estimate the size of a category or the frequency of an event, but you report an impression of the ease with which instances come to mind. Substitution of questions inevitably produces systematic errors.
Our understanding of cognitive ease and associative coherence locates subjective confidence firmly in System 1.
When you say ‘quite clever,’ which reference group do you have in mind?
The ideal of logical consistency, as this example shows, is not achievable by our limited mind. Because we are susceptible to WYSIATI and averse to mental effort, we tend to make decisions as problems arise, even when we are specifically instructed to consider them jointly. We have neither the inclination nor the mental resources to enforce consistency on our preferences, and our preferences are not magically set to be coherent, as they are in the rational-agent model.
Experiments have shown that six-month-old infants see the sequence of events as a cause-effect scenario, and they indicate surprise when the sequence is altered. We are evidently ready from birth to have impressions of causality, which do not depend on reasoning about patterns of causation.
You inability to reconstruct past beliefs will inevitably cause you to underestimate the extent to which you were surprised by past events.
Words that you have seen before become easier to see again.
The thought of accepting the large sure loss is too painful, and the hope of complete relief too enticing, to make the sensible decision that it is time to cut one’s losses.
For the billionaire looking for the extra billion, and indeed for the participant in an experimental economics project looking for the extra dollar, money is a proxy for points on a scale of self-regard and achievement. These rewards and punishments, promises and threats, are all in our heads.
The emotional tail wags the rational dog.” The affect heuristic simplifies our lives by creating a world that is much tidier than reality.
Too much concern about how well one is doing in a task sometimes disrupts performance by loading short-term memory with pointless anxious thoughts. The conclusion is straightforward: self-control requires attention and effort.
His observation was astute and correct: occasions on which he praised a performance were likely to be followed by a disappointing performance, and punishments were typically followed by an improvement. But the inference he had drawn about the efficacy of reward and punishment was completely off the mark. What he had observed is known as regression to the mean, which in that case was due to random fluctuations in the quality of performance.