Thinking, Fast and Slow

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

A concluding chapter explores, in reverse order, the implications of three distinctions drawn in the book: between the experiencing and the remembering selves, between the conception of agents in classical economics and in behavioral economics (which borrows from psychology), and between the automatic System 1 and the effortful System 2.

My main aim here is to present a view of how the mind works that draws on recent developments in cognitive and social psychology.

The statement “I had a premonition that the marriage would not last, but I was wrong” sounds odd, as does any sentence about an intuition that turned out to be false. To think clearly about the future, we need to clean up the language that we use in labeling the beliefs we had in the past.

“In most situations, a direct comparison makes people more careful and more logical. But not always. Sometimes intuition beats logic even when the correct answer stares you in the face.”

“They keep making the same mistake: predicting rare events from weak evidence. When the evidence is weak, one should stick with the base rates.”

of the water

The sunk-cost fallacy keeps people for too long in poor jobs, unhappy marriages, and unpromising research projects.

it is much easier, as well as far more enjoyable, to identify and label the mistakes of others than to recognize our own.