thinking, fast and slow.

About the Author

Daniel Kahneman is an Israeli-American psychologist and economist notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, as well as behavioral economics, for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

With Amos Tversky and others, Kahneman established a cognitive basis for common human errors that arise from heuristics and biases, and developed prospect theory, which gave birth to the book Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Literature Notes

In the begnning of the book, Daniel introduces the idea of our brain divided in 2 distinct systems:

• System 1: Operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.
• System 2: Allocated attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations.

These 2 systems become “characters” in the book, which make them relatable, and easier to connect the further information.

Our thoughts can be primed.

• Give a person a set of words, and their heads will start down a thought process.
• You can’t dictate what they’re going to think, but you can manipulate the path their thoughts go.
• Like in the movie Inception, where you can’t place an idea in someone’s head.

Cognitive Ease

Whenever we’re conscious, our brain keeps constantly analyzing our state, answering questions like “is anything new going on? Is there any effort needed for the task at hand? Should attention be redirected?”

These assessments happen in “System 1”, and one of their function is to determine if “System 2” needs to take action.

— Page 59, “Cognitive Ease”

• Cognitive Ease: things are going well, no threats, no major news, or attention shifts.
  • You experience cognitive ease when you’re in a good mood, like what you see, believe what you hear, trust your intuitions, and feel like your current situation is familiar.
  • You’re also more likely to be causal and superficial in your thinking.
• Cognitive Strain: affected by the level of effort and presence of unmet demands.
  • When you feel strained, you’re more likely to be vigilant and suspicious, invest more effort into what you’re doing, feel less comfortable, and make fewer errors.
  • But you’re also less intuitive and creative than usual.

Anything that makes it easy for the associative machine to run smoothly will also bias beliefs.

“A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition. Because familiarity is not distinguished from the truth.”

— Page 62

People are more prone to making mistakes when they’re at cognitive ease — when they’re comfortable. That’s because “System 1” is more in charge.