Daniel Kahneman, 2011.
Causal thinking VS Statistical reasoning
Happiness let us be more intuitive, more creative, letting system I take the lead. Also, we are more prone to error, because of less vigilance
Surprise: When expecting something, something else happens or do not happens. Recurrence lower surprise effect.
Passive vs active expectation
Event appears normal if the pattern has already been seen before.
Moses illusion:
How many animals of each kind did Moses take into the ark ?
Not Moses, Noah. All are mentionend into the Old Testament, so it is not chocking
Inference between action and sub-consequences. Like a billard game.
Need for coherency: If two unrelated thing are on the headlines of the journal, you expect some kind of relationship between.
associative coherence Evoked stuff
impression of causality, that system I generate, which are not a reasoning about causation.
intentional causality: Heider and Simmuel: Associate triangle and circle to people.
Usualy, people takes the soul as the source and cause of the action. TOREAD: Paul Bloom, The Atlantic, 2005. Opposite view, separation between physical and intentional causalities.
Exemple: Ask to remember few digit. Make people read true and fake untrue sentences. With the remembering task, people are better at discerning true from untrue. System II is solicited by the remembering task. If not, System I will stay on place and make mistakes.
Because a people is good on some point, you assume it is good on other unverified point:
Independent jugement, error decorrelation to do
System II: Asked for a question, will look into the memory and search for answers. It direct his Attention.
System I: Monitor continuously what is going on the world and on the mind, and generate assessments about the situation.
basic assessments are substituted to difficult questions. Translation of values across dimensions.
How to interact with a stranger. First, you evaluate people dominancy, his trustworthiness, friendly or hostile. Shape of the face let you understand its intentions. Face reading is not perfect, but may help.
When speaking face to face to someone, it is easier to understand intention than in a phone call, than in a written format.
Ranking is easy. Relative Ranking. Giving a grade is less.
Some task are easy, but you need to pay attention: counting number of syllables. The control is imprecise, and “we compute much more than we want or need”: mental shotgun
Rely on evidence that you cannot explain nor defend.
How happy are you these days ?
VS
How many dates did you have last month. How happy are you these days ?
Alone, it is not an easy question. With context, no problem
Likes and dislike shape what we would like to hear / perceive.
System II slow down the thinking of I. Impose logical analysis, self criticism. But do not criticize emotion of I. Search informations and arguments
Small samples always lead to more frequent extrema appearance.
Random generation doesn’t mean equilibrated distribution. For \(p=1/2\), which is the more frequent:
Traders know about market product and ect. But they are still very bad at predicting the future. But less than newbies.
Individuals tends to be worse, lower thant average than traders.
Algorithm do not make error. They always predict the same. They are rigorous.
Intuition is nothing more and nothing else than recognition.
Experiments:
We remember spikes and ends
Remember interruption as a break in pleasurable activities.
Positive feelings:
Negative feelings:
Depend on the direct environment (being at the office, people, noise). More focused on the direct activities/event. Best if active than passive (better to do sports than watching TV)
Strong recurrent thoughts instead on direct events sometimes.
Ex: People eating in front of the TV doesn’t appreciate that much the meal.
Salary: There exist a threshold where an increase of salary doesn’t increase the Happiness (75000$ US), and depend on the living area
Experience sampling: Instead of asking to write all the details of your life about a point, a device (phone) vibrate randomly during the day to ask you so (in order to make you think to something else than fulfilling the task).
DRM DAy reconstruction method:
Mariage is an illusion.
Your happiness in life:
Goals make a large difference
People with goals are going further (in terms of salary if planed)
If you don’t reach your goal, you feel more unhappy, but if you achieve it, you feel happier than average.
Focusing illusion
Speed to answer to question about well being to take into account. Carefull examination ? Too quick answer is just an answer from heuristics, not a “true” one (you will think to recent bad luck event for instance, instead of judging carefully)
Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it
Also, when thinking about a group (people living in a country with bad weather, paraplegic people), you evaluate their condition. But as they are used to it (like having 2 hands), they don’t really care about.
miswanting When errors are done due to affective forecasting, ie due to current specific short term situation instead of thinking to long term place