Thinking, Fast and Slow

individuals feel relieved of responsibility when they know that others have heard the same request for help.

we hold in memory a representation of one or more “normal” members of each of these categories. When the categories are social, these representations are called stereotypes.

Statistical base rates are facts about a population to which a case belongs, but they are not relevant to the individual case. Causal base rates change your view of how the individual case came to be. The two types of base-rate information are treated differently:

“This is an availability cascade: a nonevent that is inflated by the media and the public until it fills our TV screens and becomes all anyone is talking about.

The Alar tale illustrates a basic limitation in the ability of our mind to deal with small risks: we either ignore them altogether or give them far too much weight—nothing in between.

An availability cascade is a self-sustaining chain of events, which may start from media reports of a relatively minor event and lead up to public panic and large-scale government action. On some occasions, a media story about a risk catches the attention of a segment of the public, which becomes aroused and worried. This emotional reaction becomes

The implication is clear: as the psychologist Jonathan Haidt said in another context, “The emotional tail wags the rational dog.

The best part of the experiment came next. After completing the initial survey, the respondents read brief passages with arguments in favor of various technologies. Some were given arguments that focused on the numerous benefits of a technology; others, arguments that stressed the low risks. These messages were effective in changing the emotional a

In many domains of life, Slovic said, people form opinions and make choices that directly express their feelings and their basic tendency to approach or avoid, often without knowing that they are doing so.