Introduction

• There are distinctive patterns in the errors people make.
• Systematic errors are known as biases, and they recur predictable in particular circumstances.
• It is much easier to strive for perfection when you are never bored.
• Emotions such as fear, affection, hatred explain most of the occasions on which people depart from rationality.
• Public interest is most easily aroused by dramatic events and by celebrities, media feeding frenzies are common.

  Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.

Part 1 : Two Systems

The Characters of the story

• System 1
  • runs automatically and cannot be turned off.
  • System one might cause some illusions for you, to resist these illusions you have to learn to mistrust your impressions attached to the event.
    • Illusions can be visual, or non-visual that are called 'illusions of thought' or cognitive illusions
    • Constantly trying to mistrust our impressions is hectic. The best we can do is learn to recognise situations in which mistakes are likely to occur and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when their stakes are high.
    • It is easier to recognise other people's mistakes than our own!
  • When it goes into difficulty, it calls for system 2 to support for a more detailed and specific processing that may solve the problem of the moment.
  • Most of the times it is your system 1 talking. Slow down and let your system 2 take control.
  • More influence on behaviour when system 2 is busy. System 1 has a sweet tooth ;)
• System 2
  • Highly diverse set of operations
  • Require attention and are disrupted when attention is drawn away
  • Intense focusing on a task can make people effectively blind, even to stimuli that normally attract attention.
  • "We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to this blindness of ours."
  • Activates when an event is detected that violates the model of the world that System 1 maintains.
  • Anything that occupies your working memory reduces your ability to think.

Attention and Effort

Pupil of the eye is as a window in to the soul - The pupils offer an index of the current rate at which mental energy is used. - The response to mental overload is selective and precise. Thus, system 2 protects the most important activity, so it receives the attention it needs. - If there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. - Switching from one task to another is effortful, especially under time pressure.

The Lazy Controller

• It is normally easy to walk and think, but when you decide to walk faster and pace up it becomes harder.
• The transition to a faster walk brings about a sharp deterioration in the ability to think coherently.
• Flow described as a state of effortless concentration so deep that they lose their sense of time, of themselves, of their problems.
• Self control requires attention and effort. Effort of will or self-control is tiring.
  • If you have had to force yourself to do something, you are less willing or less able to exert self-control when the next challenge comes around.
• List of situations and tasks that are now known to deplete self-control is long and varied. All involve conflict and the need to suppress a natural tendency.
• Intuitive errors are much more frequent among ego-depleted people
• Ego-depletion -> A state of reduced self control that occurs after an initial act of self-control.
• Many people are over-confident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions
• When people believe a conclusion is true, they are also very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it, even when these arguments are unsound.
• What is Intelligence?
  • Not only the ability to reason but also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed.
• Those who avoid the sin of intellectual sloth could be called engaged. Others Lazy.

Associative Machine

• Our mind is an associative Machine, it associates ideas to create a flow that would make sense to us. If this flow breaks, control is given from System 1 to system 2.
• Ideas follow each other in our conscious mind in a fairly orderly way.
• Three Principles of association (of Ideas) : Resemblance, contiguity in time and place, and causality.
• One way we have advanced beyond Hume is that we no longer think of the mind as going through a sequence of conscious ideas, one at at time.
• You know far less about yourself than you feel you do.
• Priming Effect -> an Individual's exposure to a stimulus results in subconsciously influencing their response to subsequent stimulus.
  • When you think of EATING, SO_P -> you are more likely to think about SOUP, but when you think of WASHING, CLEANING SO_P -> SOAP is more likely.
• Florida Effect -> Two stages of priming are involved
  • Set of words primes thoughts of old age, though the word old is never mentioned.
  • These thoughts prime a behaviour
• Ideomotor Effect -> Influencing of an action by the idea
• Simple common gestures can also unconsciously influence our thoughts and feelings.
• Money primes individualism.
  • A reluctance to be involved with others, or to depend on others, or to accept demands from others.
  • Money-primed people are also more selfish: They were much less willing to spend time helping another student.

Cognitive Ease

• The experience of familiarity has a simple but powerful quality of 'pastness' that seems to indicate that it is a direct reflection of prior experience.

Illusions of Truth

• Anything that will make it easier for the associative machine to run smoothly will also bias beliefs.
• A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition.
• Familiarity is not easily distinguishable from truth.
• Familiarity of one phrase in the statement, was sufficient to make the entire statement feel familiar

How to write a persuasive message

• If your message is to be printed, use high-quality paper to maximise the contrast between characters and their background.

• System 1 can respond to impressions of events of which system 2 is unaware.

• Manipulations that increase cognitive ease (priming, a clear font, pre-exposing words) all increase the tendency to see the words as linked.
• Effect of Mood on intuitive performance -> Putting the participants in a good mood before the test by having them think happy thoughts more than doubled the accuracy .
• Unhappy subjects were completely incapable of performing the intuitive task accurately.

  When we are uncomfortable or unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.

• Bad fonts influence judgements of truth and improves cognitive performance.
• Familiarity breeds liking. This is a mere exposure effect.
• A good lighter mood makes System 2 is weaker than useful.

Norms, Surprises, and Causes

inprogress