System 1 is automatic, fast, unconscious & effortless.
System 2 is deliberate, slow, conscious & effortfull.
The first accounts for around 95% of all our mental processing. The second, 5%.
The psychologist Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002.
His book Thinking Fast & Slow distills his work on human decision making. In doing so, it highlights both the brilliance & limitations of the human mind.
Here’s a summary.
🧵 Thread 🧵
System 1 is automatic, fast, unconscious & effortless.
System 2 is deliberate, slow, conscious & effortfull.
The first accounts for around 95% of all our mental processing. The second, 5%.
This creates imperfections in human decision making that economists, and their rational-agent perspective, rarely account for.
Here’s 12:
System 1 is an associative machine. When presented with a word such as “lime”, it will easily generate others, such as “green” or “sour”.
This makes us susceptible to priming, in which a common association is invoked to move us in a given direction.
System 1 welcomes information which is more easily processed.
Cognitive ease can arise from repetition and simplicity. Even falsehoods will be accepted if they are simple and familiar enough to be effortlessly processed.
When presented with a question that we find difficult to answer, our system 1 will search for similar questions that it finds easier to answer.
Our system 1 intuitively expects small samples to be more broadly representative than they are.
Whilst we know large sequences of trials will converge to an expected result, we apply undue meaning to coincidental sequences in a small number of trials.
If we are presented with one number and are then asked to estimate another our intuitive system 1 will use the initial figure, even if it’s entirely unrelated, and adjust its estimate up or down from this point.
We tend to give greater importance to information that our system 1 finds most readily available.
We apply greater weight to that which comes most easily to mind.
When assessing the chance that object A (e.g. James) belongs to class B (e.g. lawyers), our system 1 judges how closely A represents a stereotype of B rather than applying a more statistical approach (e.g. what percent of the population are lawyers).
People are more likely to retain an object they own than acquire that same object when they do not own it.
This effect bares similarity to loss aversion, which states people tend to prefer avoiding losses more than acquiring gains of an equivalent value.
Economists argue that costs that have already been incurred are not relevant to future rational decision-making.
Despite this, system 1 demonstrates a greater tendency to continue an endeavor if an investment in money, effort or time has been already made.
Imagine a court case. If you’ve a high chance of a big gain, or a low chance of a big loss, you will be risk averse & accept a settlement.
If you’ve a high chance of a big loss, or a low chance of a big gain, you will be risk seeking & reject a settlement.
People tend to give greater importance to the most recent in a series of events.
A vacation that starts badly but has a pleasant ending is likely to be remembered favorably.
We tend to judge an experience largely based on how we felt at its peak (the most intense point) and how we felt at its end (the most recent point).
We don’t judge experiences based on a rational average of every moment within them.
Pick yourself up a copy here:
https://t.co/zYsqKqTdnO
Highly recommended.
More from Psychology
V-day 💝. As promised, here are some 🔥 notes about psychotherapist @EstherPerel. We'll focus on the podcasts for now because her books deserve their own threads.
1-sentence summary: Esther is a modern-day relationship & love wizard. How does she do
Let's start by posing a question I love, one I heard Esther ask a couple who desperately wanted their relationship to survive,
"Are you prepared to mount a little inner revolution?"
So twitterers, are you?
The thread will be broken down into 5 sections:
• Why the Esther 😍?
• How to criticize
• How to argue
• How to listen when the body speaks (aka nonverbal communication)
• Skillful therapy (observations & Esther's commonly asked questions)
• Uncategorised quotes I love
Before we jump in, a quote from @interintellect_'s Esther salon 🔥
"Love is a form of information sharing. You create a circuit of information between a partner & you, + you keep digging in deeper layers. There is an infinite amount of beauty to discover in another person" -Anna
~ What's Fascinating About Perel?
Mostly, I want to be her.
Couples come to her when they're stuck. She unfreezes them, moving them from stagnant to flowing.
Why is she so good at it? That's the question I'm trying to answer & the reason I can't stop analysing her sessions
1-sentence summary: Esther is a modern-day relationship & love wizard. How does she do
Might mess around and make a thread of all my Esther Perel notes ahead of this salon.
— Nibrasness \u2022 in Lisbon \U0001f44b\U0001f3fd (@nibrasibn) January 8, 2021
A humble offering to the digital gods https://t.co/e5T9airZKn
Let's start by posing a question I love, one I heard Esther ask a couple who desperately wanted their relationship to survive,
"Are you prepared to mount a little inner revolution?"
So twitterers, are you?
The thread will be broken down into 5 sections:
• Why the Esther 😍?
• How to criticize
• How to argue
• How to listen when the body speaks (aka nonverbal communication)
• Skillful therapy (observations & Esther's commonly asked questions)
• Uncategorised quotes I love
Before we jump in, a quote from @interintellect_'s Esther salon 🔥
"Love is a form of information sharing. You create a circuit of information between a partner & you, + you keep digging in deeper layers. There is an infinite amount of beauty to discover in another person" -Anna
~ What's Fascinating About Perel?
Mostly, I want to be her.
Couples come to her when they're stuck. She unfreezes them, moving them from stagnant to flowing.
Why is she so good at it? That's the question I'm trying to answer & the reason I can't stop analysing her sessions
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I'm going to do two history threads on Ethiopia, one on its ancient history, one on its modern story (1800 to today). 🇪🇹
I'll begin with the ancient history ... and it goes way back. Because modern humans - and before that, the ancestors of humans - almost certainly originated in Ethiopia. 🇪🇹 (sub-thread):
The first likely historical reference to Ethiopia is ancient Egyptian records of trade expeditions to the "Land of Punt" in search of gold, ebony, ivory, incense, and wild animals, starting in c 2500 BC 🇪🇹
Ethiopians themselves believe that the Queen of Sheba, who visited Israel's King Solomon in the Bible (c 950 BC), came from Ethiopia (not Yemen, as others believe). Here she is meeting Solomon in a stain-glassed window in Addis Ababa's Holy Trinity Church. 🇪🇹
References to the Queen of Sheba are everywhere in Ethiopia. The national airline's frequent flier miles are even called "ShebaMiles". 🇪🇹
I'll begin with the ancient history ... and it goes way back. Because modern humans - and before that, the ancestors of humans - almost certainly originated in Ethiopia. 🇪🇹 (sub-thread):
The famous \u201cLucy\u201d, an early ancestor of modern humans (Australopithecus) that lived 3.2 million years ago, and was discovered in 1974 in Ethiopia, displayed in the national museum in Addis Ababa \U0001f1ea\U0001f1f9 pic.twitter.com/N3oWqk1SW2
— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec) November 9, 2018
The first likely historical reference to Ethiopia is ancient Egyptian records of trade expeditions to the "Land of Punt" in search of gold, ebony, ivory, incense, and wild animals, starting in c 2500 BC 🇪🇹
Ethiopians themselves believe that the Queen of Sheba, who visited Israel's King Solomon in the Bible (c 950 BC), came from Ethiopia (not Yemen, as others believe). Here she is meeting Solomon in a stain-glassed window in Addis Ababa's Holy Trinity Church. 🇪🇹
References to the Queen of Sheba are everywhere in Ethiopia. The national airline's frequent flier miles are even called "ShebaMiles". 🇪🇹