Thinking, Fast and Slow

This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.

Overconfidence is fed by the illusory certainty of hindsight.

“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.”

People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media.

“The law of least effort is operating here. He will think as little as possible.” “She did not forget about the meeting. She was completely focused on something else when the meeting was set and she just didn’t hear you.” “What came quickly to my mind was an intuition from System 1. I’ll have to start over and search my memory deliberately.”

Speaking of Attention and Effort “I won’t try to solve this while driving. This is a pupil-dilating task. It requires mental effort!”

of attention predict performance of air traffic controllers and of Israeli Air Force pilots beyond the effects of intelligence.

However, the ability to control attention is not simply a measure of intelligence; measures of efficiency in the control

One of the significant discoveries of cognitive psychologists in recent decades is that switching from one task to another is effortful, especially under time pressure. The need for rapid switching is one of the reasons that Add-3 and mental multiplication are so difficult.