Kahneman

Question 1

System 1

Answer 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

Question 2

System 2

Answer 2

• deliberate
• slow
• tiring & unpleasant
• we tend to avoid it

Question 3

Problems with System 1

Answer 3

1. Does not seek additional information - develops intuitive answers to everything
2. Oversimplifies - creates stereotypes, ignores facts, answers an easier question, influenced by intuitive feelings
3. Ignores numerical data - stories are instead used to generalize from a single personal experience
4. Suppresses doubt - causes intuitions to feel true, and makes us feel ill if we doubt them
5. Does not consider quality of info - uses whatever is remembered most easily

Question 4

The effect of practice

Answer 4

Advanced System 2 mental activities can become fast and automatic (System 1) through prolonged practice

Question 5

Mental Overload

Answer 5

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

Question 6

Cognitive Busyness

Answer 6

When focused on the main task, we may/may not be aware of other things that would otherwise be obvious

Question 7

Mental Laziness

Answer 7

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

Question 8

How does System 2 play a role in self-control

Answer 8

Monitors and controls thoughts & actions suggested by System 1

Question 9

When _________ is ‘busy’ ________ has more influence

Answer 9

System 2, System 1

Question 10

Overconfidence

Answer 10

We tend to be overconfident about our intuitions; things seem so obvious that we don’t feel the need to double-check

Question 11

Dunning-Kruger effect

Answer 11

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)

Question 12

Importance of objective observer

Answer 12

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

Question 13

What feeds a state of cognitive ease

Answer 13

• Repeated experience
• Ease of recognition
• Good mood

Question 14

Effect of a state of cognitive ease on a situation

Answer 14

• Feels familiar
• Feels true
• Feels good
• Feels effortless

Question 15

What feeds a state of cognitive strain?

Answer 15

• New experience
• Difficult to see
• Bad mood

Question 16

Effect of a state of cognitive strain on a situation

Answer 16

• Feels unfamiliar
• Feels doubtful
• Feels bad
• Feels tiring

Question 17

How does cognitive ease produce cognitive illusions

Answer 17

Assumes that things/events that have one quality associated with cognitive ease also share the others; subconscious confuses familiarity with truth and goodness

Question 18

Cognitive Illusion

Answer 18

False beliefs that feel true; feeling of truth cannot be diminished by knowledge of the illusion

Question 19

Ways System 1 confuse illusion with truth?

Answer 19

• Repetition
• Mere exposure
• Bolding a statement
• Rhyming

Question 20

Mere exposure effect

Answer 20

System 1 links ease of recognition with familiarity; familiarity leaves a false sense of being knowledgeable about the person or object

Question 21

Cognitive strain mobilizes System ___

Answer 21

2; puts us in engaged analytic mode

Question 22

Cognitive ease mobilizes System ___

Answer 22

1; loosens the control of System 2 over performance - less vigilant and more prone to logical error

Question 23

System that maintains and updates models of things in your personal world

Answer 23

System 1; uses associations between characteristics, events, actions & outcomes that co-occur with some regularity

Question 24

System that sets expectations for the future

Answer 24

System 1; expecting new examples of things/events to be fairly similar to past instances - any violation (surprise) will trigger System 2

Question 25

System that confuses things that fall into the same category and fail to alert us of an error?

Answer 25

System 1

Question 26

System that finds a cause for every event, even when there is no known cause

Answer 26

System 1; assumes chronologically associated events are causally related (post hoc fallacy) + prefers a false explanation to no explanation at all

Question 27

System that jumps to conclusions

Answer 27

System 1; helpful when conclusions are likely to be correct but risky in unfamiliar situations where stakes are high

Question 28

System that tend to believe and confirm

Answer 28

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

Question 29

System that builds confirmation bias

Answer 29

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

Question 30

System that creates a simple, coherent story

Answer 30

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

Question 31

Halo effect

Answer 31

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.

Question 32

System that values consistency of information over completeness

Answer 32

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”

Question 33

System that ignores numbers & base rates

Answer 33

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

Question 34

System that substitutes difficult question with easier one

Answer 34

System 1; tends to ask heuristic question rather than target question, yet unnoticeably leaves you feeling as though the difficult question has been answered

Question 35

Affect heuristic

Answer 35

The influence of likes and dislikes (emotion) on what we believe

Question 36

How does System 2 behave with beliefs we like?

Answer 36

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

Question 37

Substitution & probability

Answer 37

System 1 actually judges something else, yet leaves you feeling as though you’ve judged probability