Part 1 Kahneman - Chapter 1 : Characters of the story What is the distinction between System 1 and - Studeersnel (2025)

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Boeken in lijstCognitionCognitive PsychologyThinking Fast and SlowThinking, Fast and SlowCognition, 9th Edition

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Chapter 1 : Characters of the story

What is the distinction between System 1 and System 2? – Chapter 1When looking at a picture of a blonde woman with an angry expression on her face, you immediatelynotice her having blonde hair and being angry. You get the feeling she is about to say somethingnegative in a loud voice. This premonition of her future behaviour arose effortlessly and automatically.This is an example of ‘fast thinking’.When looking at the mathematical problem 14 x 38, you quickly know it involves multiplication andyou have a vague intuitive idea about the possible outcome. You quickly knew the answer ends withthe number 2 and are sure 10 is not the right answer. However, the precise answer did notimmediately come to mind. Solving the problem requires some time and taking several steps. Youstart with collecting your knowledge about multiplication from your memory, as learned in the earlyschool years. Then you have to put this knowledge into practice, which takes some effort. This is anexample of ‘slow thinking’. The computation involves both mental and physical work: it also leads to ahigher blood pressure, an increased heart rate, tensed muscles and dilated pupils.The modes of thinking are given various labels by psychologists. Kahneman refers to ‘System 1’ and‘System 2’. System 1 operates fast, automatically, involuntary and without (hardly any) effort. System2 involves effortful mental work, which requires concentration, making choices and agency. Thefeelings and impressions that effortlessly originate from System 1 are the main sources of thedeliberate choices and explicit beliefs of System 2. Both systems have their own functions, abilitiesand limitations.Examples of events that occur automatically and effortlessly (System 1) are: - Answer to 1 + 1 =? - Hearing an unexpected sound: looking in the direction of the source. - Reacting to a threat before recognizing it.The abilities of System 1 include skills which we also see in animals, like recognizing things andorienting attention. Other quick and automatic mental activities are the result of prolonged practice.System 1 involves learned skills (how to behave socially, reading) and learned associations (capitalsof countries). Certain skills are acquired solely by specialized professionals. Learned skills requireknowledge, which is stored in memory and can be accessed effortlessly and unintentionally. Someresponses are entirely involuntary. You cannot stop yourself from knowing that 1 +1 = 2 or looking inthe direction of a sudden sound. Others can be controlled but are usually done automatically.Controlling attention is an activity that fits both systems. Orienting to a sudden noise happensinvoluntary (System 1), but turns quickly into voluntary attention (System 2). Even if you manage toresist looking at the source, your attention was drawn to it.The various operations of System 2 share one feature: they all require attention and are disruptedwhen the attention is moved away. Examples are: - Bracing yourself for fireworks going off. - Maintaining a faster walking pace than your natural walking pace. - Focusing on the voice of a specific person in a noisy and crowded setting.By programming the automatic functions of memory and attention, System 2 is somewhat able to alterthe way System 1 works. Doing something that does not come naturally requires effort, you need to‘pay attention’. Conducting several effortful activities at once is hard or impossible, because theyinterfere with each other. Solving a complex mathematical problem while crossing a busy road is verydifficult. Talking to your partner while walking in a quiet park is not, because these activities areundemanding and easy. We all have some awareness of the limited capacity of attention.

The book ‘The Invisible Gorilla’ demonstrates how focusing intensely on a task can result into beingblind to distractions. The writers instructed the participants to watch a clip of two teams passing a ball.One team was dressed in white, the other in black. The task was to count the amount of passesbetween the white players and paying no attention to the black team. After some time, a person in agorilla suit enters the court. The gorilla was visible for 9 seconds and out of the thousands viewers,approximately half of them did not notice the gorilla. The task of counting and ignoring a team madethem effectively blind. The viewers who did not notice the gorilla were sure it did not happen, theycould not imagine failing to spot a gorilla on a sport court. The study demonstrates two importantfindings about the mind: people can be blind to the obvious and people can be blind to their ownblindness.When we are awake, both Systems are active. System 1 runs automatically, System 2 is usually in alow-effort mode. System 1 continuously generates feelings, intuitions, intentions and impressions forSystem 2. System 2 turns intuitions and impressions into beliefs, and impulses into conscious actions.System 2 normally adopts the suggestions of System 1 without modification. In general, you believeyour impression and follow your feeling, which is fine in most cases. When System 1 encountersdifficulties and does not provide an answer, it relies on System 2 to tackle the problem and providethe right answer. Surprises can also activate System 2. The gorilla experiment shows that someconscious attention is needed for detecting surprising stimuli. The surprise then activates and orientsattention: staring and searching the memory for experiences that makes sense of the surprise.System 2 also monitors a person’s own behavior: the control that keeps people respectful when theyare furious and alert when they are driving in the dark.The division of mental work between System 1 and System 2 is very efficient: minimal effort andoptimal performance. Their interaction is mostly successful, because System 1 usually providesaccurate short-term pre 3 dictions and models of familiar situations, and its initial responses tochallenges are quick and normally appropriate. It has biases though: systematic errors that are likelyto be made in certain circumstances. System 1 occasionally answers an easier question than the realquestion and has a limited understanding of statistics and logic. Another limitation is that you cannotturn System 1 off.Conflicts between an intention of carrying out a task and an automatic (opposite) response occurregularly. You may remember a time when you tried not to stare at someone with an alternativehairstyle or when you forced your attention on boring homework. One task of System 2 is self-control:overcoming the impulses of System 1.What are illusions?The well-known Müller-Lyer illusion demonstrates the difference between an impression and a belief,as well as the autonomy of System 1. The two lines appear to be of different lengths, but have thesame length. When looking at the image, you believe what you see: lines of different lengths. Aftermeasuring them, you (or your System 2) believe something else: you know that the lines have thesame length, even though you still see a difference in length. You cannot turn System 1 off: youcannot decide to see two equal lines, despite knowing they are. Resisting the illusion requireslearning to mistrust your impressions of the length of horizontal lines with arrows at the ends. Thismeans recognizing the illusory pattern and remembering what the ‘catch’ is.Some illusions are visual, others are cognitive. You cannot control feeling sympathy for someone whoturns out to be a psychopath (System 1). This can be the automatic response to psychopathic charm.You can learn how to recognize the illusion and how to respond to it (System 2). Can cognitiveillusions be overcome? Errors of intuitive thoughts are generally hard to prevent, since System 1works automatically and turning it off is impossible. Some biases cannot be avoided, for instancewhen System 2 does not have a clue to the error. Even when a clue is available, preventing mistakesrequires a lot of effort and we cannot constantly question our thoughts. System 2 is not fast norefficient enough to replace System 1. The best option is learning to recognize circumstances in whichmistakes are likely to occur and trying harder to prevent making significant mistakes when there is alot at stake. However, recognizing our own mistakes is not easy.

Chapter 3 : The Lazy Controller

System 2 has a natural pace. Having random thoughts and monitoring what happens around you isnot effortful. We make small decisions when we ride our bicycle, take in some information as wewatch the news and have low key conversations with our colleagues or partner. These actions takelittle effort and can be compared to a stroll. It is usually easy to be walking and thinking at the sametime, but in some cases they cause a mental overload. When you go on a walk with someone and youask that person to instantly solve the problem 32 x 64, he or she will stop walking. Walking faster thanyour natural pace worsens your thinking ability, as your attention shifts to maintaining a faster pace. Ifyou walk as fast as you can, it will be impossible to focus on anything else. Next to the psychicaleffort, it takes mental effort to fight the urge to slow down: self-control. Conscious thoughts and self-control fight over the same restricted budget of effort.Sometimes people are in a state of effortless concentration in which the maintenance of a coherenttrain of thoughts requires no willpower. Psychologist Csikszentmihalyi called this a ‘flow’. Examplesare car speeding, painting, playing chess, writing. Being in a flow state can make you lose your senseof yourself and time. Activities that induce this flow are called ‘optimal experiences’. These activitiestake considerable effort, but in a state of flow, the maintenance of focused attention on them requiresno discipline. 'Flow' separates the two forms of effort: the deliberate control of attention (self-control)and concentration on the task (cognitive effort).Psychological research has demonstrated that someone who is simultaneously challenged by atemptation and by a demanding mental task is more likely to give into the temptation. When you getthe task to remember a list of numbers for several minutes and at the same time have to choose whatyou want to eat: broccoli or pizza, you are more likely to go for the pizza. System 1 has moreinfluence on our behavior when System 2 is occupied. Someone who is cognitively busy is also morelikely to use sexist language, be superficially judgmental in social settings and make selfish decisions.A busy System 2 loses the hold on behavior, although mental load is not the only cause of depletedself-control. Other possible causes are a bad night of sleep, drinking alcohol or anxiety about the task.Conclusion: self-control requires effort and attention.Experiments conducted by psychologist Baumeister displayed that voluntary physical, emotional andcognitive effort all – partly – drain our tank of mental energy. His experiments involved successivetasks. Efforts of self-control or will are tiring: if we have had to force ourselves to do a task, we areless likely to exert self-control when starting the next task. This is called ‘ego depletion’. Participantswho had to suppress their emotional response did not do well in a later psychical test. Emotional efforthas a bad influence on your ability to endure muscle pains. An ego-depleted person is therefore morelikely to give up faster. In another experiment, participants who started with the task to eat healthyfood while resisting sweet treats later gave up quicker than usual when faced with a demandingmental task.Many tasks and situations lead to depletion of self-control. They all involve the need to suppress anatural urge and conflict. Examples are avoiding the thought of red cats, trying to impress someoneand responding friendly to your husband’s bad behavior. There are also many and various indicationsof depletion, for example reacting aggressively to someone provoking you or not doing well incognitive tasks.Highly demanding tasks require self-control, while the exertion of self-control is unpleasant anddepleting. Unlike mental load, ego depletion is a loss of motivation. It does not equal being cognitivelybusy.Baumeister also found that mental energy is not merely a metaphor. The nervous system is one of themost glucose consuming parts of the body, especially when you are carrying out demanding mentaltasks. Carrying out a cognitive activity that requires self-control results into a lower blood glucoselevel. This effect of ego depletion can be reversed by ingesting glucose. Only the participants who gota glucose drink before starting the second task were not depleted. Intuitive mistakes are usually morefrequent among ego-depleted individuals.

A recent study showed the effects of depletion on judgment. Judges had to review paroleapplications. The researchers found an increase in approved requests after every food break. In theperiod until the next break, the rate dropped to nearly zero just before their next eating moment. Thebest explication is that hungry and fatigued judges had the urge to go for the easier default decision:denial of parole.Monitoring and controlling actions and thoughts suggested by System 1 is one of the most importantfunctions of System 2. System 2 either allows, suppresses or modifies them. Read the followingpuzzle, what does your intuition tell you? “An ice cream and chocolate dip cost € 1. The ice creamcosts one euro more than the dip. What is the price of the dip?” You automatically answer € 0,which is wrong. If the price of the dip is € 0, then the total price will be € 1 (0 for the dip and1 for the ice cream). The right answer is € 0. Answering with € 0 means that you did notactively review your intuitive answer and your System 2 supported a wrong answer that it could haveprevented with little effort. Here we see the ‘law of least effort’ at work. Several thousand students atleading universities in the United States answered the puzzle and more than half of them gave thewrong answer. At lower ranked universities, 80% of the participating students failed to give the rightanswer. The ice cream – dip puzzle demonstrates that most people are overconfident: they are proneto put too much trust in their intuitions and avoid cognitive effort.Now read the following argument and decide as fast as you can if the conclusion drawn is correct. “Allapples are fruits. Some fruits are pink. Therefore some apples are pink.” Most college studentsagreed with the conclusion, but it is actually an invalid syllogism: it is possible that there are no pinkapples. Because a plausible answer comes to mind straight away, not many people are willing to puteffort into thinking it through. This is a problematic finding, because it indicates that when peoplebelieve a conclusion is valid, they also tend to believe the arguments are valid. System 1 focusesfirstly on the conclusion, the arguments follow later.Read the following question and rapidly give your best estimation. “How many homicides occur in thestate of Tennessee in 12 months?” This question challenges System 2. The trick is whether peoplewill remember that Memphis, a city with a very high crime rate, is in Tennessee. People from theUnited States know that Memphis is one of the biggest cities of Tennessee. The ones that rememberthat Memphis is in Tennessee give higher estimates. Most respondents who were asked this questiondid not think of the city when asked about the state and reported lower guesses than the respondentswho were asked about the number of homicides in Memphis. Failing to think of Memphis can be aflaw of both System 1 and System 2. Whether the city pops up in your mind depends partly on theautomatic function of memory. That is something people differ in. Some people, such as residents,have extensive knowledge about the state and are more likely to remember various facts about it. Italso depends on the interests of people and their intelligence. Intelligence is not solely aboutreasoning, but also about retrieving relevant facts from memory and deploying attention. Whilememory function is associated with System 1, taking your time for a conscious search of memory is afeature of System 2. The extent of this search varies among people.The ice cream – dip puzzle, the apples syllogism and the Memphis – Tennessee question have onething in common: giving the wrong answers seems to be caused by insufficient motivation, not makingenough effort. Students of high-ranked universities have the capability to provide the right answer.Without the temptation of accepting a plausible answer that automatically comes to mind, they cansolve much harder problems. It is troubling that they are so easily satisfied and stop thinking. TheirSystem 2 proved to be lazy. They should be less willing to accept tempting answers, more alert andintellectually active and have less confidence in their intuitions.Shane Frederick used his Cognitive Reflection Test to examine the characteristics of students whohad performed poorly and found that they are prone to answer with the first thought that comes tomind and are reluctant to make the effort of checking this intuition. They are also prone to believeother ideas from System 1. The students were particularly impatient, impulsive and wanted instantgratification. 63% of them preferred getting a smaller amount of money now than a larger amountafter a month. Only 37% of the students who had given the right answer to the puzzles went for thesmallest amount. The findings of Frederick indicate that System 1 and System 2 have different‘personalities’. System 1 is intuitive and impulse, System 2 is cautious and capable of reasoning, butcan also be lazy. The same goes for people: some are like System 1, others like System 2.

recognize the word ‘tea’ when it is whispered or blurred out. In addition, you are primed for otherdrinking-related ideas (thirsty, water). These primed ideas can prime other ideas.Priming is not restricted to words and concepts. Our emotions and actions can be primed by eventsthat we are not aware of. The classic experiment of John Bargh showed how young students walkedsignificantly slower after finishing the task of constructing sentences with a set of words associatedwith old people (bald, wrinkle, gray, Florida). This experiment involved two stages of priming: 1) thewords prime thoughts of old people, although the word ‘old’ was not mentioned and 2) the thoughtsprime an action which is associated with the elderly (walking slowly). The students had not noticedthat the words had an elderly theme and insisted that none of their actions were influenced by thewords. Although they were not aware of the idea of old age, their behavior had changed nonetheless.This phenomenon is called the ‘ideomotor effect’. A reciprocal experiment evoked a coherentreaction: participants had to walk slower than usual and were afterwards quicker to recognize wordsassociated with the elderly. If people are primed to think of old age, they tend to act old, and actingold results into the thought of old age.Reciprocal links are common in the associative machinery. Being happy makes you smiles andsmiling tends to make you feel happy. Gestures can unconsciously influence feelings and thoughts.Nodding makes you more acceptive of something you hear and shaking your head results in thetendency of rejecting it. The advice to ‘act nice and calm, no matter how you feel’ is excellent,because you are likely to actually feeling nice and calm.These discoveries show that our choices and judgments are not as autonomous and conscious as wethink they are. We may see voting as a conscious act reflecting our values and judgments of policies,one that is not affected by irrelevant factors. However, a study demonstrated that the location ofpolling station can influence the voting pattern.Money primes evoke problematic effects. People who were shown words with a money theme orimages of money became more independent, self-reliant, selfish and preferred being alone. Theywaited longer before asking for help and were less willing to help others. The idea of money thusprimes individualism. These findings indicate that living in a money-driven society unconsciously andnegatively shapes our attitudes and behavior. In some societies, people are often reminded ofrespect, God or their national leader. The latter might result into reduced independent andspontaneous behavior.Most people are in disbelief when they are told about priming studies. This makes sense, becauseSystem 2 thinks it is in charge and cannot be manipulated. Priming is a phenomena arising in System1, which we have no conscious access to. System 1 produces impressions that frequently turn intobeliefs, which become choices, judgments and actions, without us being aware of it. In this light, it isno surprise that System 1 is also causing systematic errors in our intuition. We are not completelyinfluenced by random primes though, the effects are often small. Only voters in doubt will beinfluenced by the location of the polling station. They could, however, make the difference.

Chapter 5 : Cognitve Ease

When we are conscious, several assessments take place in our brain, providing answers to importantquestions: Is something new happening? Are things going alright? Is there a threat? Should I redirectmy attention? System 1 carries out these assessments automatically. It determines whether System 2needs to put in more effort. ‘Cognitive ease’ is one of the variables being measured. On a scale ofeasy to strained, ‘easy’ means that things are going alright (no news, no threats, no redirecting ofattention needed) and ‘strained’ means that a problem occurred and System 2 has some work to do.‘Cognitive strain’ is affected by the presence of unmet demands and the current level of effort.Processing a clearly written sentence or listening to someone when you are happy induces cognitiveease. Reading a blurry manual or when you are frustrated induces cognitive strain. The causes ofstrain or ease have interchangeable effects. When you are in a state of strained ease, you areprobably suspicious, putting in more effort, feeling less comfortable but also less creative and intuitive.

When you feel at ease, you are probably in a positive mood, satisfied, feeling comfortable and rathercausal in your thinking.What are illusions of remembering?Thinking and memory are susceptible to illusions. Psychologist Jacoby first exemplified the memoryillusion in his article ‘Becoming famous overnight’. When you are shown a list of made-up names andfive minutes later you come across one of those names, you will remember where you saw it and thatit is not the name of a famous person. Three days later you are presented a long list of names,including semi-famous people and new unknown names. You have to identify all the celebrities in thelist. It is likely that you will identify the made-up name as a famous person. In case of very famouspeople, you have a mental file with extensive information. There is no information about someonewhose name you heard twice. You remember seeing the name before, but there is nothing more thana feeling of familiarity. Familiarity has a quality of ‘pastness’ that suggests that there is a directreflection of a past experience. This quality is an illusion. The made-up name looks familiar, becausewords you have seen earlier become easier to see again and quicker to read. Thus, seeing a wordyou have seen before induces cognitive ease, which results into the illusion of familiarity.What are illusions of truth?“Amsterdam is the capital of The Netherlands”. “You cannot drink seawater, because it is too salty”.“A duck has four legs”. After reading these statements, you instantly retrieved many related facts andquickly knew that the first two are correct and the third is incorrect. However, the statement “A duckhas three legs” is more clearly incorrect. The associative machine slows the assessment of the thirdstatement by providing the information that there are many four-legged animals. System 2 isresponsible for this.When the correct answer does not come to mind, we tend to go by the cognitive ease: we pick theanswer that feels familiar and assume it is true. Extreme and new answers are likely to get rejected.System 1 produces the impression of familiarity and System 2 provides a judgment (true or not)based on that impression. If a judgment is based on an impression of cognitive strain or ease, apredictable illusion will occur. If you want people to believe a false statement, you have to frequentlyrepeat it, because it is hard to distinguish the truth from familiarity. This is a well-known fact amongmarketers and authorities. It is not necessary to repeat the whole statement or idea, making peoplefamiliar with one phrase can make the whole statement appear true.How do you write a persuasive message?If you want to write a persuasive text, you should enlist cognitive ease and truth illusions. Even if yourstatement is true, you still need to convince people. In order to avoid cognitive strain, you should startwith maximizing legibility. Print the text on high-quality paper to emphasize the contrast betweenbackground and characters. A text printed in bright colors is more likely to be believed. If you want toappear intelligent and credible, avoid using complex and pretentious language. Try making yourstatement memorable, by putting it in verse. Rhyming aphorisms are considered to be more true. Ifquoting a source, avoid names that are difficult to pronounce. System 2 is lazy, minimal mental effortis preferred.Many decisions we make in our lives are guided by the impressions produced by System 1, of whichthe source is often unknown. Whether we believe a statement is true or not depends on feeling asense of cognitive ease: is there a link with logic or an association with other preferences or beliefsyou hold and does it come from a source you like and trust? The problem is that there could be othercauses of cognitive ease, like an attractive presentation of a text. It is not easy to overcome superficialfactors that evoke illusions of truth, as System 2 is lazy and usually backs the suggestions of System1.

Chapter 6 : Norms, Surprises and Causes

The main function of System 1 is maintaining and updating a model of your personal world, whichrepresents normality. This model is constructed by associations that connect ideas of events,circumstances, outcomes and actions that regularly occur. The formed connections become a patternof associated ideas, which represents the structure of events in your life. It determines how youinterpret the present and your future expectations.Surprises are crucial elements of our mental life, they are the most sensitive indication of ourunderstanding of the world and our expectations from it. Surprises can be divided into two varieties:conscious and active surprises, and passive surprises. Around dinner time, you expect your partner toreturn home from work. When you hear car doors slamming, you expect to see his face. It would be asurprise if someone else walks in. In case of a passive event you do not wait for it, but you are alsonot surprised when it happens. Although not actively expected, it is normal in that situation.One event can make a recurrence less surprising. Imagine you run into your old friend Kim whileholidaying far away from home. A few weeks later, you see her at a concert in Amsterdam. Thesecond meeting is a more remarkable coincidence, but you are less surprised to meet her. The firstone changed the idea of Kim in your mind. While System 2 knows it is an absurd idea, System 1made it seem normal to meet Kim in unusual places. You would have been more surprised if you metanother old friend at the concert, even though meeting Kim was statistically no more likely than anyother old friend.Passive expectations sometimes turn active. Imagine you are driving on the highway and spot a carwith a flat tire. Exactly one week later, you see another person stranded with a flat tire, at the samelocation. You will be less surprised the second time, because you consider that location as the ‘placewhere people strand with flat tires’. Because the circumstances were similar, the second eventevoked an active expectation: you will be reminded of stranded cars every time you pass that locationfor a long time and are prepared to spot another unlucky driver.

How does our mind assess normality?

How incidents come to be perceived as abnormal or normal can be explained by the ‘norm theory’. Ifyou witness two abnormal events, the second event will retrieve the first one from memory andtogether they will make sense. An example is the ‘Moses illusion’: “How many animals of each kinddid Moses take into the ark?” Very few people realize that it was Noah who took them into the ark.The thought of animals in an ark creates a biblical context, in which Moses is normal. Hearing orreading his name did not come as a surprise. The (unconscious) associative coherence makes youaccept the question. Replace Moses with Bill Gates and there would have been no illusion, becausehis name is abnormal in the context. The brain quickly detects deviations of normality. It immediatelyresponds when you hear a guy say “My belly hurts, it must be menstrual cramps”. Our worldknowledge instantly recognizes the abnormality and is why we can communicate with each other: weuse the same words. We have ‘norms’ for lots of categories, which provide the background for theinstant detection of abnormalities (such as menstruating guys).The role of norms in communication can be explained by the following example. “The big ant climbedon the neck of the tiny giraffe”. We are likely to have similar norms for the size of giraffes and ants.We both will not picture the ant larger than the giraffe. System 1 has access to norms of categories,specifying the range of possible values and the most typical cases.

How does our mind find causal connections?

“Jane’s husband was late. His parents could arrive any minute. Jane was irritated.” Irritation (effect)and being late (possible cause) are linked in your network of associations. You instantly found thecause of Jane’s irritation, it was not linked to his parents coming over. Searching for causalconnections, an automatic operation of System 1, is a component of understanding a story. Your(conscious) System 2 accepted the causal interpretation it was offered. When there is little information

about what happened, System 1 starts searching for a coherent causal story that brings the fragmentsof information together.People have impressions of causality from birth. Our minds are from an early age ready to identifyagents, assign them personality traits and certain intentions. Before the age of one, we are preparedto identify victims and bullies. People have the tendency to apply causal thinking when the situationactually requires statistical thinking. Statistical reasoning derives conclusions about individual casesfrom ensembles and categories, which System 1 is not capable of. System 2 is able to reasonstatistically, but this requires training (which most people do not receive).

Chapter 7 : A Machine for Jumping to Conclusions

One of the characteristics of System 1 is jumping to conclusions. Jumping to a conclusion is efficient ifthe conclusion is likely to be true, the costs of a potential mistake are acceptable and it saves a fairamount of effort and time. It is risky when the stakes are high, the situation is unfamiliar and there is alack of time for collecting further information. In this case, it is likely to make an intuitive error, unlessSystem 2 intervenes.If you read a list of letters, including the number ‘13’ in the same shape as the letters, you tend to readit as the letter ‘B’. Would it be the letter ‘B’ in a list of numbers, you tend to read the number ‘13’. Thisis explained by the fact that the context affects the interpretation of each character. You jump to aconclusion and fail to detect the deviation. When there is no explicit context, System 1 produces aplausible context. When the situation is uncertain, System 1 takes a bet, which is guided byexperience. The current context and recent events strongly influence the interpretation. When you donot remember recent events, you rely on older memories (like singing the alphabet). The B/13-example shows that a definite choice was made without you being aware of it. System 1 did notconsider alternatives: it does not know conscious doubt. Doubt and uncertainty are typical for System2.What is the confirmation bias?Psychologist Gilbert came up with the theory of believing and unbelieving. He argued thatunderstanding an idea starts with attempting to believe it. What would it mean if it were true? The firstattempt to believe is an automatic process of System 1, which constructs the most plausibleinterpretation of the situation. Even a foolish idea (“birds drink wine”) will initially be believed due tothe automatic process of associative memory searching for connections between both ideas thatwould make sense of it.Unbelieving is according to Gilbert a process of System 2. When System 2 is engaged, we tend tobelieve most things. We are more likely to be persuaded by commercials when we are depleted andfatigued.The operations of associative memory are linked to ‘confirmation bias’. The question ‘Is Naomi nice?’evokes different memories than the question ‘Is Naomi rude?’. System 2 tests a hypothesis byconscious searching for confirming facts. It is a rule of science to test a hypothesis by trying to refuteit, but people (even scientists) tend to search for evidence that supports their beliefs. The confirmationbias of System 1 is guilty of uncritically accepting suggestions and exaggerating the probability ofunlikely events.What is the halo effect?If you like someone’s views and opinions, you are likely to also like his/her appearance and voice.The tendency to like or dislike everything about someone, including the unobserved things, is calledthe ‘halo effect’. This common bias plays a significant role in the way we shape our view of situationsand people. It represents the worlds more coherent than it is in reality.

Chapter 8 : How do Judgements Happen?

System 2 deals with both questions from someone else (“Did you like the food?”) and from your ownmind (“Do I really need to buy this?”). Both answers come from directing your attention and searchingyour memory. That is not how System 1 operates. It constantly monitors what is happening inside andoutside our mind. It unintentionally and effortlessly assesses the elements of the situation. These‘basic assessments’ affect our intuitive judgment, because they are easily replaced with harderquestions. Two other characteristics of System 1 supporting the replacement of one judgment withanother are the ability to translate values across dimensions (“If Chloe were as heavy as she is smart,how heavy would she be?”) and triggering other computations, like basic assessments.An example of a ‘basic assessment’ is the ability to distinguish between an enemy and a friend in theblink of an eye. System 1 rapidly provides the judgment whether it is safe or not to interact with astranger. In one glance at someone’s face, we can evaluate how trustworthy and dominant (thusthreatening) that person is and whether we expect his/her intentions to be hostile or friendly.Dominance is assessed by looking at the shape of the face (square chin) and intentions are predictedthrough facial expressions. Face reading is not 100% reliable, a stranger with a round chin and a(fake) smile can still have bad intentions. In today’s society, this evolutionary ability is used toinfluence the voting behavior of people. Participants were shown campaign portraits of politicians andasked to rate their competence and likability based on their faces. The winner of the election turnedout to be the person with the highest competence rating. Ratings of likability were less predictive ofthe voting result. Competence was judged by combining trustworthiness and strength. However, facialfeatures are not predictive of how well someone will perform. Rejecting a candidate is based on thelack of attributes we consider important. Studies of the brain show that losing politicians evoked agreater negative emotional response, which is an example of a ‘judgment heuristic’.The influence of System 1 on voting varies among people. Research shows that politically uninformedand television-prone voters are more likely to fall back on the automatic and quickly formedpreferences of System 1. The effect of facial competence on their voting behavior is three timesgreater in comparison to informed voters who watch less television.What is intensity matching?Questions about one’s popularity, happiness or suitable punishments have one thing in common: theyrefer to an underlying dimension of amount or intensity. It is linked to using the word ‘more’ (morepopular, more happy, more severe). This regards another ability of System 1: matching acrossvarious dimensions. An example is the following. “Richard read fluently when he was five years old.What is your prediction of his future GPA?” You will answer by translating from one scale to anotherscale and choose the matching GPA. Predicting by matching is a natural operation of System 1 andSystem 2 usually accepts it, but it is statistically wrong.What does Kahneman mean with ‘mental shotgun’?System 1 is constantly monitoring what is going on around you and unintentionally carries out multipleroutine assessments at the same time. Other assessments are carried out only when needed. Thesejudgments are voluntary: they occur by choice. Our control over intended judgments is not precisethough, we usually assess much more than needed or wanted. This excess computation is called the‘mental shotgun’. Similar to a shotgun causing scattering pellets when aiming at one specific target, itis impossible for System 1 not to do more than System 2 demands it to do.Consider the following example. Participants had to listen to pairs of words and were asked to hit abutton as soon as they noticed the words rhyming. The pairs both contain rhyming words:BOAT – NOTENOTE – MOTE

The participants did not see the words, but they were also influenced by the difference in spelling.They took longer to detect the words rhyme if their spelling was different. The task was to onlycompare the pronunciation, but they also compared the spelling. The intention to answer one questioninduced a pointless second question. The combination of intensity matching and a mental shotgunexplains having intuitive judgments.

Chapter 9 : Answering an Easier Question

Our minds have intuitive opinions and feelings about nearly everything, only in rare cases we faceproblems to which no solution comes spontaneously to mind. We dislike or fancy someone before weknow much about him/her and we distrust a stranger without knowing why. We have answers toquestions we don’t fully understand, based on evidence we can’t defend or explain.How do we generate an intuitive opinion on a complex problem? If System 1 can’t find an adequateanswer to a difficult question fast enough, it will seek for an easier, related question and answer thatone instead. This operation is called ‘substitution’, the intended question the ‘target question’ and theeasier question the ‘heuristic question’. ‘Heuristic’ is defined as the simple procedure that helps findan adequate but not perfect answer to a difficult question.Substitution can be useful when you have to solve difficult problems. This strategy is consciouslyimplemented by System 2. Other heuristics are the result of the mental shotgun, which are notchosen. Consider the following questions: “How satisfied are you with your current life?” “How popularwill this politician be three months from now?” Before you are able to give an adequate answer, youmust consider other questions. What is the definition of satisfaction? What political developments doyou expect in the next three months? Taking all these questions into consideration would beimpractical. Instead of providing an optimally reasoned answer, you can go for the heuristicalternative. Sometimes this works well and sometimes it results into a major error. Easily answered(heuristic) questions could be: “Am I satisfied right now?’ and “How popular is the politician currently?”The automatic processes of intensity matching and the mental shotgun normally produce answers tosimple questions that are related to the main question. The lazy system 2 tends to endorse a heuristicanswer, although it could reject or modify it after retrieving more information. You probably won’t evennotice how difficult the target question was, because an intuitive answer easily came to mind.What is the mood heuristic for happiness?A good example of substitution is the following experiment, in which participants were asked thequestions: “How happy have you been lately?” “On how many dates did you go last month?” Thereturned out to be no correlation between the answers. Dating did not immediately came to mind whenasked to rate happiness. Other participants also got both questions, but in reverse order. Theoutcome was totally different: the correlation was very high. Their lives did not revolve around dating(as the first experiment showed no correlation with happiness), but they experienced an emotionalresponse when asked to think about their love life. The participants with the most dates werereminded of happy moments, while those who did not date experienced sadness. The happinessinduced by the dating-question was still lingering when the happiness-question was asked. The lastquestion requires hard thinking, but got substituted by an easy-to-answer question instead. Anyemotion-inducing question that influences someone’s mood will have this effect. WYSITA. Our currentmood has a big influence on the evaluation of our happiness.What is the affect heuristic?We tend to let our dislikes and likes shape our beliefs about the world. How convincing we findarguments is determined by our political preferences. If you favor a certain policy, you believe thebenefits are greater than those of the alternatives. If you dislike things (bungee jumping or tattoos forinstance), you are prone to believe they are very risky and have no benefits. Conclusions aredominant over arguments, but the mind is not completely immune to sensible reasoning and

Part 1 Kahneman - Chapter 1 : Characters of the story What is the distinction between System 1 and - Studeersnel (2025)
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