Kahneman Flashcards
System 1
subconscious mind
automatic decision-making
- compares current situation with past experience
- generates feelings about what you should believe
- cannot be turned off; always active
- operates in stereotypes
- makes life easier
- alerts the conscious mind when faced with unfamiliar situation
- uses mental shortcuts
System 2
- deliberate
- slow
- tiring & unpleasant
- we tend to avoid it
Problems with System 1
- Does not seek additional information - develops intuitive answers to everything
- Oversimplifies - creates stereotypes, ignores facts, answers an easier question, influenced by intuitive feelings
- Ignores numerical data - stories are instead used to generalize from a single personal experience
- Suppresses doubt - causes intuitions to feel true, and makes us feel ill if we doubt them
- Does not consider quality of info - uses whatever is remembered most easily
The effect of practice
Advanced System 2 mental activities can become fast and automatic (System 1) through prolonged practice
Mental Overload
System 2 will focus on the most important activity/task; if there is a lack of spare capacity one becomes functionally blind to any other inputs - System 1 will have more influence on thoughts & actions
Cognitive Busyness
When focused on the main task, we may/may not be aware of other things that would otherwise be obvious
Mental Laziness
We accept suggestions from System 1 because it take less effort; we don’t give them a second thought because we are either distracted or don’t want to make the mental effort
How does System 2 play a role in self-control
Monitors and controls thoughts & actions suggested by System 1
When _________ is ‘busy’ ________ has more influence
System 2, System 1
Overconfidence
We tend to be overconfident about our intuitions; things seem so obvious that we don’t feel the need to double-check
Dunning-Kruger effect
The phenomenon that suggests that the less we know about a subject, the more confident we are in our knowledge of it (and vice versa)
Importance of objective observer
Our subconscious mind causes us to feel that our own intuitions are true, but does not create this same feeling about the actions or beliefs of others
What feeds a state of cognitive ease
- Repeated experience
- Ease of recognition
- Good mood
Effect of a state of cognitive ease on a situation
- Feels familiar
- Feels true
- Feels good
- Feels effortless
What feeds a state of cognitive strain?
- New experience
- Difficult to see
- Bad mood
Effect of a state of cognitive strain on a situation
- Feels unfamiliar
- Feels doubtful
- Feels bad
- Feels tiring
How does cognitive ease produce cognitive illusions
Assumes that things/events that have one quality associated with cognitive ease also share the others; subconscious confuses familiarity with truth and goodness
Cognitive Illusion
False beliefs that feel true; feeling of truth cannot be diminished by knowledge of the illusion
Ways System 1 confuse illusion with truth?
- Repetition
- Mere exposure
- Bolding a statement
- Rhyming
Mere exposure effect
System 1 links ease of recognition with familiarity; familiarity leaves a false sense of being knowledgeable about the person or object
Cognitive strain mobilizes System ___
2; puts us in engaged analytic mode
Cognitive ease mobilizes System ___
1; loosens the control of System 2 over performance - less vigilant and more prone to logical error
System that maintains and updates models of things in your personal world
System 1; uses associations between characteristics, events, actions & outcomes that co-occur with some regularity
System that sets expectations for the future
System 1; expecting new examples of things/events to be fairly similar to past instances - any violation (surprise) will trigger System 2
System that confuses things that fall into the same category and fail to alert us of an error?
System 1
System that finds a cause for every event, even when there is no known cause
System 1; assumes chronologically associated events are causally related (post hoc fallacy) + prefers a false explanation to no explanation at all
System that jumps to conclusions
System 1; helpful when conclusions are likely to be correct but risky in unfamiliar situations where stakes are high
System that tend to believe and confirm
System 1; reacts to claims by imagining what it would mean if the claim were true - System 2 decides whether to unbelieve it or not
System that builds confirmation bias
System 1; a suggestion will tend to be confirmed so long as we are prone to believe it and can fit memories to it - also dependent on how a question might be framed. Tends to exaggerate extreme/improbable events
System that creates a simple, coherent story
System 1; the source of many cognitive illusions such as familiarity with truth, good feeling with truth, etc. Generalizes properties wherever emotion (exaggerated emotional coherence) is involved. Represents the world as simpler than it truly is
Halo effect
aka “emotional exaggerated coherence”; produces intuitions in the presence of emotion and ignores contrary data, and is rather based on liking/disliking. Framing can influence the halo effect.
System that values consistency of information over completeness
System 1; knowing little often makes it easier to fit everything you know into a simple, coherent story - “what you see is all there is”
System that ignores numbers & base rates
System 1; cannot process base rate data and produces intuitions solely on chronology - each time an intervention is administered and the patient recovers, it is believed that the intervention cause the recovery
System that substitutes difficult question with easier one
System 1; tends to ask heuristic question rather than target question, yet unnoticeably leaves you feeling as though the difficult question has been answered
Affect heuristic
The influence of likes and dislikes (emotion) on what we believe
How does System 2 behave with beliefs we like?
While slow, careful, and self-critiquing - System 2 tends to become quickly selective in the search for evidence when emotional attachment is involved and any contrary evidence is ignored
Substitution & probability
System 1 actually judges something else, yet leaves you feeling as though you’ve judged probability
