Thinking, Fast and Slow

Except for the very poor, for whom income coincides with survival, the main motivators of money-seeking are not necessarily economic. For the billionaire looking for the extra billion, and indeed for the participant in an experimental economics project looking for the extra dollar, money is a proxy for points on a scale of self-regard and achieveme

when people believe a conclusion is true, they are also very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it, even when these arguments are unsound.

a sentence that is printed in a clear font, or has been repeated, or has been primed, will be fluently processed with cognitive ease. Hearing a speaker when you are in a good mood, or even when you have a pencil stuck crosswise in your mouth to make you “smile,” also induces cognitive ease. Conversely, you experience cognitive strain when you read

WYSIATI, which stands for what you see is all there is. System 1 is radically insensitive to both the quality and the quantity of the information that gives rise to impressions and intuitions.

It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern.

CHARACTERISTICS OF SYSTEM 1

affect heuristic in which people let their likes and dislikes determine their beliefs about the world.

To derive the most useful information from multiple sources of evidence, you should always try to make these sources independent of each other.

The general principle is that anything you can do to reduce cognitive strain will help, so you should first maximize legibility.