Thinking, Fast and Slow

Did the results surprise you? Very probably. Most of us think of ourselves as decent people who would rush to help in such a situation, and we expect other decent people to do the same. The point of the experiment, of course, was to show that this expectation is wrong. Even normal, decent people do not rush to help when they expect others to take o

The sunk-cost fallacy keeps people for too long in poor jobs, unhappy marriages, and unpromising research projects.

“They keep making the same mistake: predicting rare events from weak evidence. When the evidence is weak, one should stick with the base rates.”

less.” The tendency to see patterns in randomness is overwhelming—certainly more impressive than a guy making a study.

“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.”

My main aim here is to present a view of how the mind works that draws on recent developments in cognitive and social psychology.

affect heuristic, where judgments and decisions are guided directly by feelings of liking and disliking, with little deliberation or reasoning.

Many years ago I visited the chief investment officer of a large financial firm, who told me that he had just invested some tens of millions of dollars in the stock of Ford Motor Company. When I asked how he had made that decision, he replied that he had recently attended an automobile show and had been impressed. “Boy, do they know how to make a c

A concluding chapter explores, in reverse order, the implications of three distinctions drawn in the book: between the experiencing and the remembering selves, between the conception of agents in classical economics and in behavioral economics (which borrows from psychology), and between the automatic System 1 and the effortful System 2.

The two selves are the experiencing self, which does the living, and the remembering self, which keeps score and makes the choices.