Главная ограниченность человеческого разума состоит в том, что он почти не в состоянии вернуться в прошлое, занять прежнюю позицию, зная о будущих переменах. Чуть только вы построили новую картину мира или его части, старая стирается – вы уже не вспомните, как и во что верили раньше.

Ничто в жизни не важно настолько, насколько вам кажется, когда вы об этом думаете.

Social scientists in the 1970s broadly accepted two ideas about human nature. First, people are generally rational, and their thinking is normally sound. Second, emotions such as fear, affection, and hatred explain most of the occasions on which people depart from rationality. Our article challenged both assumptions…

Пол владеет акциями компании А. В прошлом году он собирался поменять их на долю в компании Б, но не стал этого делать. Теперь он знает, что имел бы на 1200 долларов больше, если бы взял акции Б. Джордж владел акциями компании Б. В прошлом году он решил поменять их на долю в компании А. Теперь он знает, что имел бы на 1200…

Столкнувшись с трудным вопросом, мы отвечаем на более легкий, обычно не замечая подмены.

A general limitation of the human mind is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past states of knowledge, or beliefs that have changed. Once you adopt a new view of the world (or of any part of it), you immediately lose much of your ability to recall what you used to believe before your mind changed.

The widespread misunderstanding of randomness sometimes has significant consequences. In our article on representativeness, Amos and I cited the statistician William Feller, who illustrated the ease with which people see patterns where none exists. During the intensive rocket bombing of London in World War II, it was…

In an enduring classic of psychology, Solomon Asch presented descriptions of two people and asked for comments on their personality. What do you think of Alan and Ben? Alan: intelligent—industrious—impulsive—critical—stubborn—envious Ben: envious—stubborn—critical—impulsive—industrious—intelligent If you are like most of…

A Bias to Believe and Confirm The psychologist Daniel Gilbert, widely known as the author of Stumbling to Happiness, once wrote an essay, titled “How Mental Systems Believe,” in which he developed a theory of believing and unbelieving that he traced to the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Gilbert proposed…

The evidence that we have about good feelings, cognitive ease, and the intuition of coherence is, as scientists say, correlational but not necessarily causal. Cognitive ease and smiling occur together, but do the good feelings actually lead to intuitions of coherence? Yes, they do. The proof comes from a clever…

The link between positive emotion and cognitive ease in System 1 has a long evolutionary history.

The lesson of figure 5 is that predictable illusions inevitably occur if a judgment is based on an impression of cognitive ease or strain. Anything that makes it easier for the associative machine to run smoothly will also bias beliefs. A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because…

The evidence of priming studies suggests that reminding people of their mortality increases the appeal of authoritarian ideas, which may become reassuring in the context of the terror of death. Other experiments have confirmed Freudian insights about the role of symbols and metaphors in unconscious associations.

Studies of priming effects have yielded discoveries that threaten our self-image as conscious and autonomous authors of our judgments and our choices. For instance, most of us think of voting as a deliberate act that reflects our values and our assessments of policies and is not influenced by irrelevancies. Our vote…

Исследователи сравнивали данные вскрытия пациентов, умерших в отделении интенсивной терапии, с диагнозами, поставленными им прижизненно лечащими врачами. По результатам опыта клиницисты, «абсолютно уверенные» в прижизненном диагнозе, ошибались в 40% случаев. В этой области пациент также поощряет непоколебимость эксперта:…