Thinking, Fast and Slow

The gap between Sellers and Choosers is remarkable, because they actually face the same choice! If you are a Seller you can go home with either a mug or money, and if you are a Chooser you have exactly the same two options. The long-term effects of the decision are identical for the two groups.

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

The idea that fluency, vividness, and the ease of imagining contribute to decision weights gains support from many other observations.

“If you can’t solve a problem, then there is an easier problem you can solve: find it.”

As Allais had anticipated, the sophisticated participants at the meeting did not notice that their preferences violated utility theory until he drew their attention to that fact as the meeting was about to end.

A simple rule can help: before an issue is discussed, all members of the committee should be asked to write a very brief summary of their position. This procedure makes good use of the value of the diversity of knowledge and opinion in the group. The standard practice of open discussion gives too much weight to the opinions of those who speak early

This embarrassing episode remains one of the most instructive experiences of my professional life. I eventually learned three lessons from it. The first was immediately apparent: I had stumbled onto a distinction between two profoundly different approaches to forecasting, which Amos and I later labeled the inside view and the outside view. The seco

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.

We know from studies of priming that unnoticed stimuli in our environment have a substantial influence on our thoughts and actions.