Chronique littéraire 12.1
Daniel Kahneman – Thinking, fast & slow
The book is rather a challenging read but I highly recommended it if you're interested in why human beings behave the way they behave. A reference in the field of behavioural economics & psychology, it's the kind of book that will make you say : 'oh, so that's why we're so dumb'. A LOT.
As a Product Manager, it helped me several times understand or anticipate how users acted or were going to act. I invite you to check further concepts if needed : they are all very well documented online. As the book is very dense, I split this chronique littéraire in 2 parts.
“The common admonition to 'act calm and kind regardless of how you feel' is a very good advice: you are likely to be rewarded by actually feeling calm and kind.”
“Money-primed people become more independent than they would be without the associative trigger. They persevered almost twice as long in trying to solve a very difficult problem before they asked the experimenter for help […]. Money-primed people are also more selfish.”
“If the answer was familiar, I assumed that it was probably true. […] the impression of familiarity is produced by System 1, and System 2 relies on that impression for a true/false judgement a reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.”
“If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do. My Princeton colleague Danny Oppenheimer refuted a myth prevalent among undergraduates about the vocabulary that professors find the most impressive. In an article titled “consequences of erudite vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity : problems with using long words needlessly”, he showed that couching familiar ideas in pretentious language is taken as a sign poor intelligence and low credibility. In addition to making your message simple, try to make it memorable. Put your ideas in verse if you can; they will be more likely to be taken as truth.”
“System 2 is lazy and mental effort is aversive.”
“90% of students who took the test in normal font at least one mistake in the test, but the proportion dropped to 35% when the font was barely legible. You read this correctly. Performance was better with bad font. Cognitive strain, whatever its source, mobilizes system 2, which is more likely to reject the intuitive answer suggested by system 1”
“I'm in a very good mood today, and my system 2 is weaker than usual. I should be extra careful.”
“The main function of system 1 is to maintain and update a model of your personal world, which represents what is normal in it.”
“Jumping to conclusions is efficient if the conclusions are likely to be correct and the costs of an occasional mistake acceptable, and if the jump saves much time and effort. Jumping to conclusions is risky when the situation is unfamiliar, the stakes are high, and there is no time to collect more information.”
“[in a test with a legal case] Participants who heard only one side could easily have generated the argument for the other side. Nevertheless, the presentation of one-sided evidence had a prnounced effect on judgements. Furthermore, participants who one-sided evidence were more confident of their judgments thatn those who saw both sides; […] It is the consistency of the the information that pmatters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern.”
“System 1 is highly adept in one form of thinking – it automatically and effortlessly identifies causal connections between events, sometimes even when the connection is spurious.”
“Extreme outcomes are most likely to be found in sparsely populated countries. […] the results of large samples deserve more trust than smaller samples. Large samples are more precise than small samples = Small samples yield extreme results more often than large samples do“
“Because of the coincidence of two planes crashing last month, she now prefers to take the train. That's silly. The risk hasn't really change, it is an availability bias”
“Protective actions […] are usually designed to be adequate to the worst disaster actually experienced [e.g.] assuming that floods will not rise higher than the existing high-water-mark. Images of a worse disaster do not come easily to mind.”
“You surely understand in principle that worthless information should not be treated differently from a complete lack of information, but WYSIATI makes it very difficult to apply that principle. Unless you decide immediately to reject evidence, your system 1 will automatically process the information available as if it were true.”
“The idea of conjuncture fallacy, which people commit when they judge a conjunction of two events (here being a bank teller and a feminist) to be more probable than one of the event (bank teller) in a direct comparison [...] When you specify a possible event in greater detail you can only lower its probability”
“The laziness of System 2 is part of the story. If their next vacation depended on it, and if they had been given indefinite time and told to follow logic and not answer until they were sure of their answer, I believe that most of our subjects would have avoided the conjunction fallacy.”