Sublime

It is that many of the characteristics of human reasoning which behavioural economics describes as biases are in fact adaptive – beneficial to success – in the large real worlds in which people live, even if they are sometimes misleading in the small worlds created for the purposes of economic modelling and experimental psychology. It is an account

Kahneman emphasizes that often we engage System 2 not to make a decision but instead to rationalize a conclusion reached by System 1.

Kahneman and Tversky focus on changes because changes are the way Humans experience life.

He went on to study the characteristics of students who score very low on this test—the supervisory function of System 2 is weak in these people—and found that they are prone to answer questions with the first idea that comes to mind and unwilling to invest the effort needed to check their intuitions. Individuals who uncritically follow their intui

The fundamental ideas of prospect theory are that reference points exist, and that losses loom larger than corresponding gains.

The emotional reactions of System 1 are much more likely to determine single evaluation; the comparison that occurs in joint evaluation always involves a more careful and effortful assessment, which calls for System 2.

The division of labor between System 1 and System 2 is highly efficient: it minimizes effort and optimizes performance.

The second discovery of psychologists (including the Nobel Prize-winning Daniel Kahneman) is that people are often surprisingly bad judges of what will make them happy.14

Much of the discussion in this book is about biases of intuition. However, the focus on error does not denigrate human intelligence, any more than the attention to diseases in medical texts denies good health.