By Daniel Kahneman, 2011 ★★★★★ First read: Sept 2023 ** # Part 1 - Two Systems Traditionally it was thought, until roughly the 1970s that: 1. people are generally rational → this proved to be FALSE, ppl are prone to systematic thinking errors aka cognitive biases - our cognitive distortions (thousands documented now) 2. when ppl are not rational, their emotions are usually to blame → this was also proved to be FALSE, the errors are due to the design of the mind, rather than the corruption of thought by emotion (the implication being that if you get rid of emotions, you're all the better for it) At least the first idea (cognitive distortions) is now (2020-ish) generally accepted. Gave birth to the new field of behavioural economics. Some of the first documented distortions: - Availability heuristic - Affect heuristic - .... to be added Theories of emotion(s) are still under discussion. ### System 1 - is the hero - operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control - creates without any effort impressions and feelings that are the main source of the explicit beliefs and deliberate choices of System 2 - system-2’s effortful activities aka experience, skill, repetition builds System -1’s “intuition”  “Valid intuitions develop when experts learn to recognise familiar elements in a new situation and to act in the appropriate manner. Good intuitive judgments come to mind with the same immediacy as when a two-year old says “doggie” when seeing a dog.” (pg.11) ### System 2 - is a supporting character who thinks they’re the hero - effortful mental activities, including complex computations - operations often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice concentration - its operations need attention and are disrupted when attention is drawn away - is activated when an event contradicts System’s 1 model of the world ### On Attention - The control of attention is shared by the two systems - We dispose of a limited budget of attention that we can allocate to activities - Effortful activities interfere with each other, we can only multitask if the tasks are very easy / undemanding - Intense attention on a difficult task can make ppl effectively blind, even to stimuli that normally attract attention (see experiment with the gorilla) - Surprise activates and orients attention **