About This Book

This book presents an understanding of judgment and decision making shaped by psychological discoveries. It discusses the limitations of our mind, such as excessive confidence and inability to acknowledge ignorance. It also looks at the effects of cognitive load, emotion, and intuition on decision making. It examines the connection between thinking and self-control, and how intelligence is not only the ability to reason, but also the ability to find relevant material in memory. Finally, it looks at how familiarity can lead to false beliefs and how mood affects our intuition.

Top Highlights

• The interaction of the two systems is a recurrent theme of the book, and a brief synopsis of the plot is in order. In the story I will tell, Systems 1 and 2 are both active whenever we are awake. System 1 runs automatically and System 2 is normally in a comfortable low-effort mode, in which only a fraction of its capacity is engaged. System 1 conti...
• The question that the executive faced (should I invest in Ford stock?) was difficult, but the answer to an easier and related question (do I like Ford cars?) came readily to his mind and determined his choice. This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without no...
• System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.
• 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. The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people’s mistakes than our own.
• “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.”