Our society is built on the premise that human beings are more or less rational. We trust that our leaders, judges, scientists, and other experts are making fair and unbiased decisions, and that we ourselves are seeing the world as it is and making the best choices we can.

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You may think that your experiences (“I’m having fun!”) and your memories (“That was fun!”) are closely connected. But Daniel Kahneman points out that they can diverge drastically, and that has implications for the choices you make

Buying an expensive luxury item may give you a lot of actual joy in the moment. But with hindsight, the cost of the purchase may weigh on you, and you may decide it wasn’t worth it. So the next time you have a purchase to make, do you optimize for the in-the-moment experi...

“Reference dependence,” is what Kahneman calls our tendency to perceive the value of things and experiences relative to some status quo that we hold in mind—whether it’s our memory of how much a thing used to cost, or our neighbor’s fancy car that influen...

In fact, human thinking is riddled with biases, oversimplifications, and distortions. And these mistakes aren’t random, either. In Thinking, Fast and Slow , Nobel Prize-winning economist and psychologist Daniel Kahneman attempts to uncover the p...

You don’t have one mind. When it comes to thinking, Daniel Kahneman argues, you have two. While they go by many names, Kahneman prefers the terms System 1 and System 2.

This division of labor is highly efficient. For a mind that is constantly being bombarded with stimuli, it keeps effort to a minimum. System 1 can take care of a lot of basic tasks without any input from System 2. It is the one that works most of the time...

The planning fallacy is just one of dozens of mental distortions that Kahneman and his fellow researchers have identified, a devastating critique of the rational choice theory favored by many economists. By learning about these cognitive biases, we’re more likely t...

Broadly speaking, there are three stages to making a decision:

• Framing the problem
• Collecting the relevant data
• Reflecting on and reviewing the information

According to Kahneman, paying careful atten...

System 1 thinks quickly and automatically, with little to no effort and no sense of voluntary control. System 1 lets you immediately recognize that one person is farther away than another, for example, or lets you solve 2 + 2 without having to think about it.

System 1 is prone to biases, cognitive illusions, and overconfidence. We often fail to recognize these errors because they happen so quickly, before our conscious mind has even kicked into gear. By better understanding our two-system mind and how it opera...

Research has shown that when taking on risky projects or investments, decision-makers often fall victim to what Kahneman calls the “planning fallacy.” This is our tendency to make optimistic predictions based on what our fast-acting System 1 mind hopes will happen, rather than a ...

The “experiencing self” is rooted in System 1, which favors short periods of intense pleasure and dreads sharp pains. The System 2 “remembering self” tells a story about that experience, and that story changes over time. For example, patients undergoing brief but painful...

First published by Kahneman and his longtime collaborator Amos Tversky in 1979, prospect theory is a model of decision-making behavior informed by Systems 1 and 2. It was cited in the 2002 decision to award Kahneman the Nobel Prize in Economics.

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System 2 operates slowly, calculating and reasoning. It’s what we think of as our conscious, deliberate mind. System 2 is what lets you calculate just how far away that person is, or helps you solve a harder math problem like 16 x 43.