Thinking, Fast and Slow (56 page)
Read Thinking, Fast and Slow Online
Authors: Daniel Kahneman
increase cognitive ease
: Sascha Topolinski and Fritz Strack, “The Architecture of Intuition: Fluency and Affect Determine {ectition Intuitive Judgments of Semantic and Visual Coherence and Judgments of Grammaticality in Artificial Grammar Learning,”
Journal of Experimental Psychology—General
138 (2009): 39–63.
doubled accuracy
: Bolte, Goschke, and Kuhl, “Emotion and Intuition.”
form a cluster
: Barbara Fredrickson,
Positivity: Groundbreaking Research Reveals How to Embrace the Hidden Strength of Positive Emotions, Overcome Negativity, and Thrive
(New York: Random House, 2009). Joseph P. Forgas and Rebekah East, “On Being Happy and Gullible: Mood Effects on Skepticism and the Detection of Deception,”
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
44 (2008): 1362–67.
smiling reaction
: Sascha Topolinski et al., “The Face of Fluency: Semantic Coherence Automatically Elicits a Specific Pattern of Facial Muscle Reactions,”
Cognition and Emotion
23 (2009): 260–71.
“previous research…individuals”
: Sascha Topolinski and Fritz Strack, “The Analysis of Intuition: Processing Fluency and Affect in Judgments of Semantic Coherence,”
Cognition and Emotion
23 (2009): 1465–1503.
6: Norms, Surprises, and Causes
An observer
: Daniel Kahneman and Dale T. Miller, “Norm Theory: Comparing Reality to Its Alternatives,”
Psychological Review
93 (1986): 136–53.
“tattoo on my back”
: Jos J. A. Van Berkum, “Understanding Sentences in Context: What Brain Waves Can Tell Us,”
Current Directions in Psychological Science
17 (2008): 376–80.
the word
pickpocket: Ran R. Hassin, John A. Bargh, and James S. Uleman, “Spontaneous Causal Inferences,”
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
38 (2002): 515–22.
indicate surprise
: Albert Michotte,
The Perception of Causality
(Andover, MA: Methuen, 1963). Alan M. Leslie and Stephanie Keeble, “Do Six-Month-Old Infants Perceive Causality?”
Cognition
25 (1987): 265–88.
explosive finale
: Fritz Heider and Mary-Ann Simmel, “An Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior,”
American Journal of Psychology
13 (1944): 243–59.
identify bullies and victims
: Leslie and Keeble, “Do Six-Month-Old Infants Perceive Causality?”
as we die
: Paul Bloom, “Is God an Accident?”
Atlantic
, December 2005.
7: A Machine for Jumping to Conclusions
elegant experiment
: Daniel T. Gilbert, Douglas S. Krull, and Patrick S. Malone, “Unbelieving the Unbelievable: Some Problems in the Rejection of False Information,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
59 (1990): 601–13.
descriptions of two people
: Solomon E. Asch, “Forming {#823.
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychol
ogy 41 (1946): 258–90.
all six adjectives
: Ibid.
Wisdom of Crowds: James Surowiecki,
The Wisdom of Crowds
(New York: Anchor Books, 2005).
one-sided evidence
: Lyle A. Brenner, Derek J. Koehler, and Amos Tversky, “On the Evaluation of One-Sided Evidence,”
Journal of Behavioral Decision Making
9 (1996): 59–70.
8: How Judgments Happen
biological roots
: Alexander Todorov, Sean G. Baron, and Nikolaas N. Oosterhof, “Evaluating Face Trustworthiness: A Model-Based Approach,”
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
3 (2008): 119–27.
friendly or hostile
: Alexander Todorov, Chris P. Said, Andrew D. Engell, and Nikolaas N. Oosterhof, “Understanding Evaluation of Faces on Social Dimensions,”
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
12 (2008): 455–60.
may spell trouble
: Alexander Todorov, Manish Pakrashi, and Nikolaas N. Oosterhof, “Evaluating Faces on Trustworthiness After Minimal Time Exposure,”
Social Cognition
27 (2009): 813–33.
Australia, Germany, and Mexico
: Alexander Todorov et al., “Inference of Competence from Faces Predict Election Outcomes,”
Science
308 (2005): 1623–26. Charles C. Ballew and Alexander Todorov, “Predicting Political Elections from Rapid and Unreflective Face Judgments,”
PNAS
104 (2007): 17948–53. Christopher Y. Olivola and Alexander Todorov, “Elected in 100 Milliseconds: Appearance-Based Trait Inferences and Voting,”
Journal of Nonverbal Behavior
34 (2010): 83–110.
watch less television
: Gabriel Lenz and Chappell Lawson, “Looking the Part: Television Leads Less Informed Citizens to Vote Based on Candidates’ Appearance,”
American Journal of Political Science
(forthcoming).
absence of a specific task set
: Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Extensional Versus Intuitive Reasoning: The Conjunction Fallacy in Probability Judgment,”
Psychological Review
90 (1983): 293–315.
Exxon Valdez: William H. Desvousges et al., “Measuring Natural Resource Damages with Contingent Valuation: Tests of Validity and Reliability,” in
Contingent Valuation: A Critical Assessment
, ed. Jerry A. Hausman (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1993), 91–159.
sense of injustice
: Stanley S. Stevens,
Psychophysics
:
Introduction to Its Perceptual, Neural, and Social Prospect
(New York: Wiley, 1975).
detected that the words rhymed
: Mark S. Seidenberg and Michael K. Tanenhaus, “Orthographic Effects on Rhyme Monitoring,”
Journal of Experimental Psychology—Human Learning and Memory
5 (1979): 546–54.
95–96
sentence was literally true
: Sam Glucksberg, Patricia Gildea, and Howard G. Boo {How>
21 (1982): 85–98.
9: Answering an Easier Question
an intuitive answer to it came readily to mind
: An alternative approach to judgment heuristics has been proposed by Gerd Gigerenzer, Peter M. Todd, and the ABC Research Group, in
Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). They describe “fast and frugal” formal procedures such as “Take the best [cue],” which under some circumstances generate quite accurate judgments on the basis of little information. As Gigerenzer has emphasized, his heuristics are different from those that Amos and I studied, and he has stressed their accuracy rather than the biases to which they inevitably lead. Much of the research that supports fast and frugal heuristic uses statistical simulations to show that they
could
work in some real-life situations, but the evidence for the psychological reality of these heuristics remains thin and contested. The most memorable discovery associated with this approach is the recognition heuristic, illustrated by an example that has become well-known: a subject who is asked which of two cities is larger and recognizes one of them should guess that the one she recognizes is larger. The recognition heuristic works fairly well if the subject knows that the city she recognizes is large; if she knows it to be small, however, she will quite reasonably guess that the unknown city is larger. Contrary to the theory, the subjects use more than the recognition cue: Daniel M. Oppenheimer, “Not So Fast! (and Not So Frugal!): Rethinking the Recognition Heuristic,”
Cognition
90 (2003): B1–B9. A weakness of the theory is that, from what we know of the mind, there is no need for heuristics to be frugal. The brain processes vast amounts of information in parallel, and the mind can be fast and accurate without ignoring information. Furthermore, it has been known since the early days of research on chess masters that skill need not consist of learning to use less information. On the contrary, skill is more often an ability to deal with large amounts of information quickly and efficiently.
best examples of substitution
: Fritz Strack, Leonard L. Martin, and Norbert Schwarz, “Priming and Communication: Social Determinants of Information Use in Judgments of Life Satisfaction,”
European Journal of Social Psychology
18 (1988): 429–42.
correlations between psychological measures
: The correlation was .66.
dominates happiness reports
: Other substitution topics include marital satisfaction, job satisfaction, and leisure time satisfaction: Norbert Schwarz, Fritz Strack, and Hans-Peter Mai, “Assimilation and Contrast Effects in Part-Whole Question Sequences: A Conversational Logic Analysis,”
Public Opinion Quarterly
55 (1991): 3–23.
evaluate their happiness
: A telephone survey conducted in Germany included a question about general happiness. When the self-reports of happiness were correlated with the local weather at the time of the interview, a pronounced correlation was found. Mood is known to vary with the weather, and substitution explains the effect on reported happiness. However, another version of the telephone survey yielded a somewhat different result. These respondents were asked about the current weather before they were asked the happiness quest {ppiournal ofion. For them, weather had no effect at all on reported happiness! The explicit priming of weather provided them with an explanation of their mood, undermining the connection that would normally be made between current mood and overall happiness.
view of the benefits
: Melissa L. Finucane et al., “The Affect Heuristic in Judgments of Risks and Benefits,”
Journal of Behavioral Decision Making
13 (2000): 1–17.
10: The Law of Small Numbers
“It is both…without additives”
: Howard Wainer and Harris L. Zwerling, “Evidence That Smaller Schools Do Not Improve Student Achievement,”
Phi Delta Kappan
88 (2006): 300–303. The example was discussed by Andrew Gelman and Deborah Nolan,
Teaching Statistics: A Bag of Tricks
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
50% risk of failing
: Jacob Cohen, “The Statistical Power of Abnormal-Social Psychological Research: A Review,”
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology
65 (1962): 145–53.
“Belief in the Law of Small Numbers”
: Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Belief in the Law of Small Numbers,”
Psychological Bulletin
76 (1971): 105–10.
“statistical intuitions…whenever possible”
: The contrast that we drew between intuition and computation seems to foreshadow the distinction between Systems 1 and 2, but we were a long way from the perspective of this book. We used
intuition
to cover anything but a computation, any informal way to reach a conclusion.
German spies
: William Feller,
Introduction to Probability Theory and Its Applications
(New York: Wiley, 1950).
randomness in basketball
: Thomas Gilovich, Robert Vallone, and Amos Tversky, “The Hot Hand in Basketball: On the Misperception of Random Sequences,”
Cognitive Psychology
17 (1985): 295–314.
11: Anchors
“‘reasonable’ volume”
: Robyn Le Boeuf and Eldar Shafir, “The Long and Short of It: Physical Anchoring Effects,”
Journal of Behavioral Decision Making
19 (2006): 393–406.
nod their head
: Nicholas Epley and Thomas Gilovich, “Putting Adjustment Back in the Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic: Differential Processing of Self-Generated and Experimenter-Provided Anchors,”
Psychological Science
12 (2001): 391–96.
stay closer to the anchor
: Epley and Gilovich, “The Anchoring-and-Adjustment Heuristic.”
associative coherence
: Thomas Mussweiler, “The Use of Category and Exemplar Knowledge in the Solution of Anchoring Tasks,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
78 (2000): 1038–52.
San Francisco Exploratorium
: Karen E. Jacowitz and Daniel Kahneman, “Measures of Anchoring in Estimation Tasks,”
Person {pantion ality and Social Psychology Bulletin
21 (1995): 1161–66.
substantially lower
: Gregory B. Northcraft and Margaret A. Neale, “Experts, Amateurs, and Real Estate: An Anchoring-and-Adjustment Perspective on Property Pricing Decisions,”
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes
39 (1987): 84–97. The high anchor was 12% above the listed price, the low anchor was 12% below that price.