Thinking, Fast and Slow

The Lazy Controller I spend a few months each year in Berkeley, and one of my great pleasures there is a daily four-mile walk on ...

body rapidly along the path, a mental effort of self-control is needed to resist the urge to slow down. Self-control and deliber ...

desserts: a sinful chocolate cake and a virtuous fruit salad. The evidence suggests that you would be more likely to select the ...

making a series of choices that involve conflict trying to impress others responding kindly to a partner’s bad behavior interact ...

participating in a second task. The lemonade was sweetened with glucose for half of them and with Splenda for the others. Then a ...

A number came to your mind. The number, of course, is 10: 10¢. The distinctive mark of this easy puzzle is that it evokes an ans ...

plausible answer comes to mind immediately. Overriding it requires hard work—the insistent idea that “it’s true, it’s true!” mak ...

The bat-and-ball problem, the flowers syllogism, and the Michigan/Detroit problem have something in common. Failing these minite ...

who had resisted temptation and those who had not. The resisters had higher measures of executive control in cognitive tasks, an ...

individuals: some people are more like their System 2; others are closer to their System 1. This simple test has emerged as one ...

“He didn’t bother to check whether what he said made sense. Does he usually have a lazy System 2 or was he unusually tired?” “Un ...

The Associative Machine To begin your exploration of the surprising workings of System 1, look at the following words: Bananas V ...

facial expression and the avoidance motion intensify the feelings to which they are linked, and the feelings in turn reinforce c ...

many ideas, which in turn activate others. Furthermore, only a few of the activated ideas will register in consciousness; most o ...

yellow instantly”). For one group of students, half the scrambled sentences contained words associated with the elderly, such as ...

Gary Larson’s The Far Side while holding a pencil in their mouth. Those who were “smiling” (without any awareness of doing so) f ...

experiment were shown a list of five words from which they were required to construct a four-word phrase that had a money theme ...

fragments as WASH and SOAP and less likely to see WISH and SOUP. Furthermore, merely thinking about stabbing a coworker in the b ...

new decorations, but the contributions to the honesty box changed significantly. The posters and the amounts that people put int ...

with the recent past and with expectations about the near future. It contains the model of the world that instantly evaluates ev ...