Thinking, Fast and Slow

he gorilla study illustrates two important facts about our minds: we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.

You can do several things at once, but only if they are easy and undemanding

Different groups of participants stated their willingness to pay to save 2,000, 20,000, or 200,000 birds. If saving birds is an economic good it should be a sum-like variable: saving 200,000 birds should be worth much more than saving 2,000 birds. In fact, the average contributions of the three groups were $80, $78, and $88 respectively. The number of birds made very little difference. What the participants reacted to, in all three groups, was a prototype—the awful image of a helpless bird drowning, its feathers soaked in thick oil. The almost complete neglect of quantity in such emotional contexts has been confirmed many times.

Why be concerned with gossip? Because it is much easier, as well as far more enjoyable, to identify and label the mistakes of others than to recognize our own. Questioning what we believe and want is difficult at the best of times, and especially difficult when we most need to do it, but we can benefit from the informed opinions of others. Many of us spontaneously anticipate how friends and colleagues will evaluate our choices; the quality and content of these anticipated judgments therefore matters.

availability cascade: a nonevent that is inflated by the media and

the public until it fills our TV screens and becomes all anyone is talking about.”

He likes the project, so he thinks its costs are low and its benefits are high. Nice example of the affect heuristic.

Evaluating people as attractive or not is a basic assessment. You do that automatically whether or not you want to, and it influences you.”

even sophisticated researchers have poor intuitions and a wobbly understanding of sampling effects.

a single glance at a stranger’s face, two potentially crucial facts about that person: how dominant (and therefore potentially threatening) he is, and how trustworthy he is, whether his intentions are more likely to be friendly or hostile. The shape of the face provides the cues for assessing dominance: a “strong” square chin is one such cue. Facial expression (smile or frown) provides the cues for assessing the stranger’s intentions.