Mental Shortcuts

Question 1

Mental Overload

Answer 1

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 2

Mental Laziness

Answer 2

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 3

Cognitive Busyness

Answer 3

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

Question 4

Overconfidence

Answer 4

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

Question 5

Dunning-Kruger effect

Answer 5

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 6

Cognitive Illusion

Answer 6

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

Question 7

Halo effect

Answer 7

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 8

Substitution

Answer 8

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 9

Ignoring numbers & base rates

Answer 9

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 causes the recovery

Question 10

Maintains and updates models of things in your personal world

Answer 10

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

Question 11

Mere exposure effect

Answer 11

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

Question 12

Set expectations for the future

Answer 12

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

Question 13

Confusion

Answer 13

System 1 confuses things that fall into the same category and fails to alert us of an error.

Question 14

Jumping to conclusions

Answer 14

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

Question 15

Believe and confirm

Answer 15

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 16

Finding a cause for every event, even when there is no known cause

Answer 16

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

Question 17

Builds confirmation bias

Answer 17

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 18

Substitution & probability

Answer 18

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