Daniel Kahneman's work explores two systems of thinking: System 1, which operates quickly and instinctively, and System 2, which is slower and requires effort. He discusses cognitive biases, the influence of heuristics, and how our judgments are affected by factors like familiarity, language simplicity, and social cues. The document highlights various cognitive phenomena such as the halo effect, anchoring, and the impact of repetition on belief formation.

1. Daniel Kahneman

3. System 1 operates automatically and quickly,
with little or no effort
Our gut reaction,
how we react to sounds color and images,
Non prone to doubt.
FAST THINKING

4.  Orient to the source of a sudden sound.
 Complete the phrase “bread and…”
 Make a “disgust face” when shown a horrible picture.
 Detect hostility in a voice.
 Drive a car on an empty road.

6.  System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand
it, including complex computations.
 Your muscles tensed up, your blood pressure rose, and your heart rate
increased.
 Someone looking closely at your eyes while you tackled this problem would
have seen your pupils dilate.
 Your pupils contracted back to normal size as soon as you ended your
work— when you found the answer (which is 476, by the way) or when
you gave up.

7.  System 2 tries to avoid working as far as possible
 It is more accurate but lazy
Bat and Ball Puzzle:
A bat and ball cost $110.
The bat costs $100 more than the ball.
How much does the ball cost?

8.  Focus attention on the clowns in the circus.
 Focus on the voice of a particular person in a crowded and noisy room.
 Look for a woman with white hair.
 Search memory to identify a surprising sound.
 Maintain a faster walking speed than is natural for you.
 Monitor the appropriateness of your behavior in a social situation.
 Count the occurrences of the letter a in a page of text.
 Remember phone number.
 Park in a narrow space (for most people except garage attendants).
 Compare two washing machines for overall value.
 Fill out a tax form.

9. I won’t try to solve this while driving. This is a pupil-dilating
task. It requires mental effort!”
“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 Two Systems

11.  we are susceptible to priming, in which a common association is invoked to
move us in a particular direction or action. This is the basis for “nudges” and
advertising using positive imagery.
 There are different types of links: causes are linked to their effects (virus cold);
things to their properties (lime green); things to the categories to which they
belong (banana fruit)

12.  Wash
 So_p
 Mushroom
 So_p

14. “I made myself smile and I’m actually feeling better!”

15.  Whatever is easier for System 2 is more likely to be believed.
 Ease arises from idea repetition, clear display, a primed idea, and even
one’s own good mood.
 It turns out that even the repetition of a falsehood can lead people to
accept it, despite knowing it’s untrue, since the concept becomes familiar
and is cognitively easy to process.
 Cognitive Ease is a major reason why brand advertising exists. It’s why
companies spend so much money on celebrity endorsements, ad
campaigns and jingles.
 Familiarity = TRUTH IN MINDS

18.  The general principle is that anything you can do to reduce cognitive
strain will help, so you should first maximize legibility.
 Adolf Hitler was born in 1892
Adolf Hitler was born in 1897
 do not use complex language where simpler language will do.
 In addition to making your message simple, try to make it memorable.
Put your ideas in verse if you can(rhyme); they will be more likely to be taken as
truth.
 Finally, if you quote a source, choose one with a name that is easy to
pronounce. Pronounceable Names.
 High quality paper, bright colors, and rhyming or simple language

19. “Let’s not dismiss their business plan just because the font
makes it hard to read.”
Consanguineous Consanguineous
Trichotillomania Trichotillomania
“We must be inclined to believe it because it has been
repeated so often, but let’s think it through again.”
“Familiarity breeds liking. This is a mere exposure effect.”
“I’m in a very good mood today, and my System 2 is
weaker than usual. I should be extra careful.”

21.  The tendency to like (or dislike) everything
about a person—including things you have not
observed—is known as the halo effect.
 When one trait of person or thing is used to
make overall judgements
 Solomon Asch presented descriptions of two
people and asked for comments on their
personality. What do you think of Alan and
Ben?
Alan: Intelligent – industrious –impulsive –
critical – stubborn-envious
Ben: envious- stubborn-critical-impulsive-
industrious-intelligent
 grading exhibited a halo effect,

22.  WYSIATI is the tendency for System 1 to draw conclusions based on the
readily available, sometimes misleading information and then, once made,
to believe in those conclusions fervently.
 The measured impact of halo effects, confirmation bias, framing effects,
and base-rate neglect are aspects of jumping to conclusions in practice.
 Example: dog = terrifying
“Will Mindik be a good leader? She is
intelligent and strong…”
What if the next two adjectives were
corrupt and cruel?

23.  “She knows nothing about this person’s management skills. All she is going by
is the halo effect from a good presentation.”
 “Let’s decor relate errors by obtaining separate judgments on the issue before
any discussion. We will get more information from independent assessments.”
 “They made that big decision on the basis of a good report from one
consultant. WYSIATI—what you see is all there is. They did not seem to realize
how little information they had.”
 “They didn’t want more information that might spoil their story. WYSIATI.”

24.  Often when dealing with a complex or difficult issue, we transform the question into an easier
one that we can answer.
 In other words, we use a heuristic; for example, when asked “How happy are you with life”, we
answer the question, “What is my mood now”.
The target question is the assessment you intend to produce.
The heuristic question is the simpler question that you answer instead
 While these heuristics can be useful, they often lead to incorrect conclusions.

25. Target Question and Heuristic Question
 How much would you contribute to save an endangered species?
How much emotion do I feel when I think of dying dolphins?
 How happy are you with your life these days?
What is my mood right now?
 How popular is the president right now?
How popular will the president be six months from now?
 How should financial advisers who prey on the elderly be punished?
How much anger do I feel when I think of financial predators?
 This woman is running for the primary. How far will she go in politics?
Does this woman look like a political winner

26.  “Do we still remember the question we are trying to answer? Or have we
substituted an easier one?”
 “The question we face is whether this candidate can succeed. The question we
seem to answer is whether she interviews well.
Let’s not substitute.”
 “He likes the project, so he thinks its costs are low and its benefits are high.
Nice example of the affect heuristic.”
 “We are using last year’s performance as a heuristic to predict the value of the
firm several years from now. Is this heuristic good enough? What other
information do we need?

28.  Anchoring is a form of priming the mind with
an expectation.
 An example are the questions: “Is the height
of the tallest redwood more or less
than x feet? What is your best guess about the
height of the tallest redwood?”
 When x was 1200, answers to the second
question was 844; when x was 180, the
answer was 282(average).
 Was Gandhi more or less than 144 years old
when he died?
How old was Gandhi when he died?

29. On average, those who had rolled a 9 said they would sentence her to 8
months; those who rolled a 3 said they would sentence her to 5 months;
the anchoring effect was 50%.

30. “The firm we want to acquire sent us their business plan, with the
revenue they expect. We shouldn’t let that number influence our
thinking. Set it aside.”
“Plans are best-case scenarios. Let’s avoid anchoring on plans
when we forecast actual outcomes. Thinking about ways the plan
could go wrong is one way to do it.”
“Our aim in the negotiation is to get them anchored on this
number.”
“The defendant’s lawyers put in a frivolous reference in which
they mentioned a ridiculously low amount of damages, and they
got the judge anchored on it!”

32. “Oh well, I might as well just finish it”
“I can’t stop now, I have to get my money’s worth”
“I don’t care, I’m going to get it done, no matter what”

33.  “Linda is thirty-one years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in
philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and
social justice, and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.
 Linda is a bank teller.
 Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement
“This is a trap for forecasters and their clients: adding detail to scenarios makes them
more persuasive, but less likely to come true.”

34. people will consider a rare event as more likely to occur if it’s
expressed in terms of relative frequency rather than as a
statistical probability.

35. Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are
thinking about it”
“If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do
not use complex language where simpler language will do.”
“The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends
mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what
they see, even if they see little.”
"A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is
frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily
distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and
marketers have always known this fact."
"We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our
blindness."
Daniel Kahneman (/ˈkɑːnəmən/; Hebrew: ‫כהנמן‬ ‫דניאל‬ ;
born March 5, 1934) is an Israeli psychologist and
economist notable for his work on the psychology of
judgment and decision-making, as well as behavioral
economics, for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel
Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bnnmWYI0lM

36.  Daniel Kahneman (October 25, 2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Macmillan. .
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow
 https://medium.com/@marklooi/summary-of-kahnemans-thinking-fast-and-slow-3d1c2ea0e6a
 https://themarketingstudent.com/thinking-fast-and-slow/
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqXVAo7dVRU