Thinking, Fast and Slow

for people to “unbelieve” false sentences. In a later test of memory, the depleted par muumbling toticipants ended up thinking t ...

retrieve the feeling of liking her when you think of her. You also like generosity and generous people. By association, you are ...

scored had a disproportionate effect on the overall grade. The mechanism was simple: if I had given a high score to the first es ...

pennies and are challenged to estimate the number of pennies in each jar. As James Surowiecki explained in his best-selling The ...

teacher had meant by that phrase never became clear to me (or to Amos, I believe), but Amos’s jokes always maht=cipde a point. H ...

impressions and intuitions. Amos, with two of his graduate students at Stanford, reported a study that bears directly on WYSIATI ...

will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern. WY SIATI facilitates the ...

“She knows nothing about this person’s management skills. All she is going by is the halo effect from a good presentation.” “Let ...

How Judgments Happen There is no limit to the number of questions you can answer, whether they are questions someone else asks o ...

of survival in a dangerous world, and such a specialized capability has indeed evolved. Alex Todorov, my colleague at Princeton, ...

is made quickly and automatically and is available when System 2 must make its decision. Political scientists followed up on Tod ...

Figure 7 Sets and Prototypes For another example, consider the question: What is the average length of the lines in figure 8? Fi ...

deals well with averages but poorly with sums. The size of the category, the number of instances it contains, tends to be ignore ...

Now match Julie’s reading prowess as a child to the following intensity scales: How tall is a man who is as tall as Julie was pr ...

than we want or need. I call this excess computation the mental shotgun. It is impossible to aim at a single point with a shotgu ...

“Evaluating people as attractive or not is a basic assessment. You do that automatically whether or not you want to, and it infl ...

Answering an Easier Question A remarkable aspect of your mental life is that you are rarely stumped. True, you occasionally face ...

How to Solve It : “If you can’t solve a problem, then there is an easier problem you can solve: find it.” Pólya’s heuristics are ...

right-hand counterpart of each of the left-hand questions is very likely to be evoked and very easily answered. Your feelings ab ...

Figure 9 As printed on the page, is the figure on the right larger than the figure on the left? The obvious answer comes quickly ...