Snap judgments

We fail to anticipate how little information we (and others) use when making decisions.

The immediacy of human judgment generally surprises people: we are startled by how quickly we make judgments and how little information we use doing so.

Misunderstanding how much information we actually use to make our judgments has important implications beyond making good or bad decisions.

An example could be our tendency to rely on stereotypes when judging other people: we may believe we'll consider information from all the ang...

They are mental shortcuts we use, which generally help us make quick decisions, but don’t always work out for the best. 

Our brains were never wired to be truly rational because there is way too much information in the world for us to process. We evolved instead to make decisio...