The aristocratic Belgian psychologist Albert Michotte published a book in 1945 (translated into English in 1963) that overturned centuries of thinking about causality, going back at least to Hume’s examination of the association of ideas. The commonly accepted wisdom was that we infer physical causality from repeated observations of correlations am

experience greater cognitive ease in perceiving a word you have seen earlier, and it is this sense of ease that gives you the impression of familiarity.

Regret is an emotion, and it is also a punishment that we administer to ourselves. The fear of regret is a factor in many of the decisions that people make

when System 2 is otherwise engaged, we will believe almost anything.

One of the lessons of the financial crisis that led to the Great Recession is that there are periods in which competition, among experts and among organizations, creates powerful forces that favor a collective blindness to risk and uncertainty.

The problem is that regret theories make few striking predictions that would distinguish them from prospect theory,

Two Systems Psychologists have been intensely interested for several decades in the two modes of thinking evoked by the picture of the angry woman and by the multiplication problem, and have offered many labels for them. I adopt terms originally proposed by the psychologists Keith Stanovich and Richard West, and will refer to two systems in the min

Disappointment and the anticipation of disappointment are real, however, and the failure to acknowledge them is as obvious a flaw as the counterexamples that I invoked to criticize

the proper way to elicit information from a group is not by starting with a public discussion but by confidentially collecting each person’s judgment.