Questioning what we believe and want is difficult. We can benefit from the informed opinions of others.

Systematic errors are known biases, and they recur predictably in particular circumstances

Having seen themselves fail, they became more likely to question the dogmatic assumption, prevalent at the time, that the human mind is rational and logical

Luck plays a large role in every story of success

Judgment heuristics 'are quite useful, but sometimes lead to severe and systematic errors.'

Expert intuition strikes us as magical, but it is not

'The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.'

The affect heuristic, where judgments and decisions are guided directly by feelings of liking and disliking, with little deliberation or reasoning

Intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution

The spontaneous search for ann intuitive solution sometimes fails. We often find ourselves switching to a slower, more deliberate and effortful form of thing.

Fast thinking includes both variants of intuitive thought—the expert and the heuristic

I describe mental life by the metaphor of two agents, called System 1 and System 2, which respectively produce fast and slow thinking

Features of intuitive and deliberate thought as if they were traits and dispositions of two characters in your mind

The intuitive System 1 is more influential than your experience tells you, and it is the secret author of many of the choices and judgments you make

Associative memory, the core of System 1, continually constructs a coherent interpretation of what is going on in our world at any instant

A puzzling limitation of our mind: our excessive confidence inn what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extend of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we live in. We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events.

Overconfidence is fed by the illusory certainty of hindsight

Two selves, the experiencing self and the remembering self, do not have the same interests

System 1 operated automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control

System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration

We identify with System 2, the conscious, reasoning self that has beliefs, makes choices, and decides what to think about and what to do

System 1 is the hero. Effortlessly originating impressions and feelings that we the main sources of the explicit beliefs and deliberate choices of System 2

Only the slower System 2 can construct thoughts in an orderly series of steps

System 2 takes over, overruling the freewheeling impulses and associations of System 1

The capabilities of System 1 include innate skills that we share with other animals. We are born prepared to perceive the world around us, recognize objects, orient attention, avoid losses

Mental activities become fast and automatic through prolonged practice

The knowledge is stored in memory and accessed without intention and without effor

Attention can be moved away from an unwanted focus primarily by focusing intently on another target

You must pay attention, and you will perform less well, or not at all, if you are not ready or if your attention is directed inappropriately

Intense focusing on a task can make people effectively blind, even to stimuli that normally attract attention

We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness

System 1 and 2 are both active whenever we are awake. System 1 runs automatically and System 2 is normally in a comfortable low-effort mode. System 1 continuously generates suggestions for System 2: impressions, intuitions, and feelings. If endorsed by System 2, impressions and intuitions turn into beliefs, and impulses turn into volunntary actions

When System 2 runs into difficulty, it calls on System 2 to support more detailed and specific processing that may solve the problem of the moment

Most of what you (your System 2) think and do originates in your System 1, but System 2 takes over when things get difficult, and it normally has the last word

The division of labor between System 1 and System 2 is highly efficient: it minimizes effort and optimizes performance

System 1 cannot be turned off

Conflict between an automatic reaction and an intention to control it is common in our lives

System 2 is in charge of self-control

System 1 operates automatically and cannot be turned off at will, errors of intuitive thought are often difficult to prevent. Biases cannot always be avoided, because System 2 may have no clue to the error. Even when cues to likely errors are available, errors can be prevented only by the enhanced monitoring and effortful activity of System 2. Continuous vigilance is not necessarily good, and it is certainly impractical. Constantly questioning our own thinking would be impossibly tedious, and System 2 is much too slow and inefficient to serve as a substitute for System 1 in making routine decisions. Learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high.

It is easier to recognize other people's mistakes than our own

Anything that occupies your working memory reduces your ability to think

System 2's operations are effortful, and one of its main characteristics is laziness, a reluctance to invest more effort than is strictly necessary. As a consequence, the thoughts and actions that System 2 believes it has chosen are often guided by the figure at the center of the story, System 1

The pupil of the eye as a window to the soul

When engaged in a mental sprint, may become effectively blind

The pupils offer an index of the current rate at which mental energy is used

System 2 protects the most important activity, so it receives the attention it needs; 'spare capacity' is allocated second by second to other tasks

Orienting and responding quickly to the gravest threats or most promising opportunities improved the chance of survival, and this capability is certainly not restricted to humans

System 1 takes over in emergencies and assigns total priority to self-protective actions

As you become skilled in a task, its demand for energy diminishes

Highly intelligent individuals need less effort to solve the same problem, as indicated by both pupil size and brain activity

If there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action

Effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature

System 2 is the only one that can follow rules, compare objects on several attributes and make deliberate choices between options

System 1 detects simple relations and excels at integrating information about one thing, but it does not deal with multiple distinct topics at once, nor is it adept at using purely statistical information

Prefrontal area of the brain involved in operations that we associate with intelligence

Switching from one task to another is effortful, especially under time pressure

We normally avoid mental overload by dividing our tasks into multiple easy steps, committing intermediate results to long-term memory or to paper rather than to an easily overloaded working memory

Self-control and deliberate thought apparently draw on the same limited budget of effort

Even in the absence of time pressure, maintaining a coherent train of thought requires discipline

In a state of flow. maintaining focused attention on these absorbing activities requires no exertion of self-control, thereby freeing resources to be directed to the task at hand

People who are simultaneously challenged by a demanding cognitive task and by a temptation are more likely to yield to the temptation

System 1 has more influence on behavior when System 2 is busy

People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations

The self-control of morning people is impaired at night

Too much concern about how well one is doing in a task sometimes disrupts performance by loading short-term memory with pointless anxious thoughts

Self-control requires attention and effort

Controlling thoughts and behaviors is one of the tasks that System 2 performs

All variants of voluntary effort—cognitive, emotional, or physical—draw at least partly on a shared pool of mental energy

An effort of will or self-control is tiring; if you have had to force yourself to do something, you are less willing or less able to exert self-control when the next challenge comes around

Ego-depleted people, therefore, succumb more quickly to the urge to quit

One of the main functions of System 2 is to monitor and control thoughts and actions 'suggested' by System 1

Many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions

Most people do not take the trouble to think though the problem

When people believe a conclusion is true, they are also very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it, even when these arguments are unsound

Facts that we know do not always come to mind when we need them

Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevannt material in memory and to deploy attention when we needed. Memory function is an attribute of System 1

Everyone has the ooption of slowing down to confuct an active search of memory for all possibly relevant facts

The extent of deliberate checking and search is a characteristic of System 2, whichc varies among individuals

Different 'personalities.' System 1 is impulsive; System 2 is capable of reasoning, and it is cautious, but at least for some people it is also lazy

Superficial or 'lazy' thinking is a flaw in the reflective mind, a failure of rationality

Associative activation: ideas that have been evoked trigger many other ideas, in a spreading cascade of activity in your brain

Each element is connected, and each supports and strengthens the others

System 1 treated the mere conjunction of two words as representations of reality. Your body reacted in an attenuated replica of a reactionn to the real thing, and the emotional response and physical recoil were part of the interpretation of the event

Cognition is embodied; you think with your body, not only with your brain

Principles of association resemblance, contiguity in time and place, and causality

You know far less about yourself than you feel you do

Your actions and your emotions can be primed by events of which you are not even aware

Simple, common gestures unconsciously influennce our thoughts and feelings

You are likely to be rewarded by actually feeling calm and kind

Money-primed people become more independent than they would be without the associative trigger

Money-primed people are also more selfish

Participants primed by money chose to stay much farther apart than their nonprimed peers. Money-primed undergraduates also showed a greater preference for being alone

The idea of money primes individualism: a reluctance to be involved with others, to depend on others or to accept demands from others

Living in a culture that surrounds us with reminders of money may shape our behavior and our attitudes in ways that we do not know about and of which we may not be proud

Reminding people of their mortality increases the appeal of authoritarian ideas, which may become reassuring in the context of the terror of death

Feeling that one's soul is stained appears to trigger a desire to cleanse one's body

A purely symbolic reminder of being watched prodded people into improved behavior

System 1 provides the impressions that often turn into your beliefs, and is the source of the impulses that often become your choices and your actions

System 1 is also the origin of many of the systematic errors in your intuitions

Assessments are carried out automatically by System 1, and one of their functions is to determine whether extra effort is required from System 2

Cognitive strain is affected by both the current level of effort and the presence of unmet demands

When you are in a state of cognitive ease, you are probably in a good mood, like what you see, believe what you hear, trust your intuitions, and feel that the current situation is comfortably familiar

When you feel strained, you are more likely to be vigilant and suspicious, invest more effort in what you are doing, feel less comfortable, and make fewer errors, but you also are less intuitive and less creative than usual

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 familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth

If your message is to be printed, use high-quality paper to maximize the contrast between characters and their background. If you use color, you are more likely to be believed if your text is printed in bright blue or red than in middling shades of green, yellow, or pale blue

If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do

In addition to making your message simple, try to make it memorable. Put your ideas in verse if you can; they will be more likely to be taken as truth

If you quote a source, choose one with a name that is easy to pronounce

System 2 is lazy and that mental effort is aversive

The lazy System 2 will adopt the suggestions of System 1 and march on

The experience of cognitive strain, tends to mobilize System 2, shifting people's approach to problems from a casual intuitive mode to a more engaged and analytic mode

Cognitive strain mobilizes System 2, which is more likely to reject the intuitive answer suggested by System 1

We have some ability to control the search of memory, and also to program it so that the detection of an event in the environment can attract attention

The main function of System 1 is to maintain nand update a model of your personal world, which represents what is normal in it. The model is constructed by associations that link ideas of circumstances, events, actions, and outcomes that co-occur with some regularity, either at the same time or within a relatively short interval

The pattern of associated ideas comes to represent the structure of events in your life, and it determines your interpretation of the present as well as your expectations of the future

Understanding a statement must begin with an attempt to believe it: you must first know what the idea would mean if it were true. Only then can you decide whether or not to unbelieve it. The initial attempt to believe is an automatic operation of System 1, which involves the construction of the best possible interpretation of the situation

The tendency to like (or dislike) everything about a person—including things you have not observed—is known as the halo effect

To derive the most useful information from multiple sources of evidence, you should always try to make these sources independent of each other

System 1 excels at constructing the best possible story that incorporates ideas currently activated, but it does not allow for information it does not have

The combination of a coherence-seeking System 1 with a lazy System 2 implies that System 2 will endorse many intuitive beliefs, which closely reflect the impressions generated by System 1

What you see is all there is. System 1 is radically insensitive to both the quality and the quantity of the information that gives rise to impressions and intuitions

The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little

System 2 receives questions or generates them: in either case it directs attention and searches memory to find the answers

We are endowed with an ability to evaluate, in a single glance at a stranger's face, how dominant he is, and how trustworthy he is

The normal state of your mind is that you have intuitive feelings and opinions about almost everything that comes your way. You like or dislike people long before you know much about them; you trust or distrust strangers without knowing why

Heuristic is a simple procedure that helps find adequate, though often imperfect, answers to difficult questions

System 2 is ultimately in charge, with the ability to resist the suggestions of System 1, slow things down, and impose logical analysis. Self-criticism is one of the functions of System 2. In the context of attitudes System 2 is more of an apologist for the emotions of System 1 than a critic of those emotions—an endorser rather than an enforcer

The operation of System 2 depended on the facts and suggestoins retrieved from associative memory

Extreme outcomes (both high and low) are more likely to be found in small than in large samples

Results of large samples deserve more trust than smaller samples

Large samples are more precise than small samples

Small samples yield extreme results more often than large samples do

System 1 is not prone to doubt. It suppresses ambiguity and spontaneously constructs stories that are as coherent as possible

System 2 is capable of doubt, because it can maintain incompatible possibilities at the same tinme. Sustaining doubt is harder work than sliding into certainty

We are prone to exaggerate the consistency and coherence of what we see

We are patten seekers, believers in a coherent world, in which regularities appear not by accident but as a result of mechanical causality or of someone's intention

To the untrained eye randomness appears as regularity or tendency to cluster

We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random

Small schools are not better on average; they are simply more variable

We pay more attention to the content of messages than to information about their reliability, and as a result end up with a view of the world around us that is simpler and more coherent than the data justify

Anchoring effect is when people consider a particular value for ann unknown quantity before estimating that quantity

Suggestion is a priming effect, which selectively evokes compatible evidence

System 1 understands sentences by trying to make them true

System 1 tries its best to construct a world in which the anchor is the true nature

Anchoring effects are everywhere

A strategy of deliberately 'thinking the opposite' may be a good defense against anchoring effects, because it negates the biased recruitment of thoughts that produces these effects

Our thoughts and our behavior are influenced, much more than we know or want, by the environment of the moment

You should assume that any number that is on the table has had an anchoring effect on you, and if the stakes are high you should mobilize yourself (your System 2) to combat the effect

Availability heuristic instances of the class will be retrieved from memory, and if retrieval is easy and fluent, the category will be judged to be large

People who had just listed twelve instances rated themselves as less assertive than people who had listed only six

People sometimes go by content rather than by ease of retrieval

The ease with which instances come to mind is a System 1 heuristic, which is replaced by a focus on content when System 2 is more engaged

People who let themselves be guided by System 1 are more strongly susceptible to availability biases than others who are in a state of higher vigilance

Merely reminding people of a time when they had power increases their apparent trust in their own intuition

Estimates of causes of death are warped by media coverage

People form opinions and make choices that directly express their feelings and their basic tendency to approach or avoid, other without knowing that they are doing so

The affect heuristic is an instance of substitution, in which the answer to an easy question serves as an answer to a much harder question

Don't expect discipline to be easy—it requires a significant effort of self-monitoring and self-control

You should not let yourself believe whatever comes to your mind

Your beliefs should be constrained by the logic of probability

When you specify a possible event in greater detail you can only lower its probability

Adding detail to scenarios makes them more persuasive, but less likely to come true

System 1 average instead of adding, so when the non-feminist bank tellers are removed from the set, subjective probability, increases

System 2 is not impressively alert

Individuals feel relieved of responsibility when they know that others have heard the same request for help

Subjects' unwillingness to deduce the particular from the general was matched only by their willingness to infer the general from the particular

People who are taught surprising statistical facts about human behavior may be impressed to the point of telling their friends about what they have heard, but this does not mean that their understanding of the world has really changed. The test of learning psychology is whether your understanding of situations you encounter has changed, not whether you have learned a new fact

You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general

Rewards for improved performance work better than punishment of mistakes

The feedback to which life exposes us is perverse. Because we tend to be nice to other people when they please us and nasty when they do not, we are statistically punished for being nice and rewarded for being nasty

Depressed children are an extreme group, they are more depressed than most other children—and extreme groups regress to the mean over time

You still make errors when your predictions are unbiased, but the errors are smaller and do not favor either high or low outcomes

Intuitive predictions tend to be overconfident and overly extreme

Correcting your intuitive predictions is a task for System 2

Your intuitions will deliver predictions that are too extreme and you will be inclined to put far too much faith in them

Narrative fallacies arise inevitably from our continuous attempt to make sense of the world. The explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple; are concrete rather than abstract; assign a larger role to talent, stupidity, and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen

The halo effect inclines us to match our view of all the qualities of a person to our judgment of one attribute that is particularly significant

Because of the halo effect, we get the causal relationship backward: we are prone to believe that the firm fails because its CEO is rigid, when the truth is that the CEO appears to be rigid because the firm is failing

System 1 is designed to jump to conclusions from little evidence

Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it

On average, the most active traders had the poorest results, while the investors who traded the least earned the highest returns

The potent psychological cause of the illusion is certainly that the people who pick stocks are exercising high-level skills

The illusions of validity and skill are supported by a powerful professional culture. People can maintain an unshakable faith in any proposition, however absurd, when they are sustained by a community of like-minded believers

Our tendency to construct and believe coherent narratives of the past makes it difficult for us to accept the limits of our forecasting ability

The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future

The person who acquires more knowledge develops an enhanced illusion of her skill and becomes unrealistically overconfident

Experts are just human in the end. They are dazzled by their own brilliance and hate to be wrong. Experts are led astray not by what they believe, but by how they thinnk

Errors of prediction are inevitable because the world is predictable. The high subjective confidence is not to be trusted as an indicator of accuracy (low confidence could be more informative)

Experts try to be clever, think outside the box, and consider complex combinations of features in making their predictions. Complexity combinations of features are better

Humans are incorrigibly inconsistent in making summary judgments of complex information

Unnoticed stimuli in nour environment have a substantial influence on our thoughts and actions

Because you have little direct knowledge of what goes on in your mind, you will never know that you might have made a different judgment or reached a different decision under very slightly different circumstances

To maximize predictive accuracy, final decisions should be left to formulas, especially in low-validity environments

Do not simply trust intuitive judgment but do not dismiss it, either

Supposed that you need to hire a sales representative for your firm. If you are serious about hiring the best possible person for the job, this is what you should do. First, select a few traits that are prerequisites for success in this position. Next, make a list of those questions for each trait and think about how you will score it, say on a 1-5 scale

To avoid halo effects, you must collect the information on one trait at a time, scoring each before you move on to the next one. Do not skip around. To evaluate each candidate, add up the six scores

We have inherited from our ancestors a great facility to learn when to be afraid

We are confident when the story we tell ourselves comes easily to mind, with no contradiction and no competing scenario

The confidence that people have in their intuitions is not a reliable guide to their validity

Intuition cannot be trusted in the absence of stable regularities in the environment

Whether professionals have a chance to develop intuitive expertise depends essentially on the quality and speed of feedback, as well as on sufficient opportunity to practice

Expertise is not a single skill; it is a collection of skills

The proper way to elicit information from a group is not by starting with a public discussion but by confidentially collecting each person's judgment

Planning fallacy describe plans and forecasts that are unrealistically close to best-case scenarios and could be improved by consulting the statistics of similar cases

Contractors of kitchen renovations and of weapons systems readily admit that they routinely make most of their profits on additions to the original plan

People often take on risky projects because they are overly optimistic about the odds they face

Most of us view the world as more benign than it really is, our own attributes as more favorable than they truly are, and the goals we adopt as more achievable than they are likely to be. We also tend to exaggerate our ability to forcast the future, which fosters optimistic overconfidence

Optimists are normally cheerful and happy, and therefore popular; they are resilient in adapting to failures and hardships, their chances of clinical depression are reduced, their immune system is stronger, they take better care of their health, they feel healthier than others and are in fact likely to live longer

People achieve higher average returns by selling their skills to employers than by setting out on their own

Firms with award-winning CEOs subsequently underperform, in terms both of stock and of operating performance

Imagine that we are a year into the future. We implemented the plan as it now exists. The outcome was a disaster. Please take 5 to 10 minutes to write a brief history of that disaster

Unlike Econs, the Humans that psychologists know have a System 1. Their view of the world is limited by the information that is available at a given moment, and therefore they cannot be as consistent and logical as Econs. They are sometimes generous and often willing to contribute to the group to which they are attached. And they often have little idea of what they will like next year or even tomorrow

Bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughly than good. The self is more motivated to avoid bad self-definitions than to pursue good ones. Bad impressions and bad stereotypes are quicker to form and more resistant to disconfirmation than good ones

A stable relationship requires that good interactions outnumber bad interactions by at least 5 to 1

A friendship that may take years to develop can be ruined by a single action

Loss aversion refers to the relative strength of two motives: we are driven more strongly to avoid losses than to achieve gains

The aversion to the failure of not reaching the goal is much stronger than the desire to exceed it

Employers who violate rules of fairness are punished by reduced productivity, and merchants who follow unfair pricing policies can expect to lose sales

People who learned from a new catalog that the merchant was now chargin less for a product that they had recently bought at a higher price reduced their future purchases from the supplier by 15%, an average loss of $90 per customer. The customers evidently perceived the lower price as the reference point and thought of themselves as having sustained a loss by paying more than appropriate

When an unlikely event becomes the focus of attention, we will assign it much more weight than nits probability deserves

When you pay attention to a threat, you worry—and the decision weights reflect how much you worry

People attach values to gains and losses rather than to wealth, and the decision weights that they assign to outcomes are different from probabilities

People are averse to risk when they consider prospects with a substaintial chance to achieve a large gain. They are willing to accept less than the expected value of a gamble to lock in a sure gain

People are willing to pay much more for insurannce than expected value

People buy more protection against an unlikely disaster; they eliminate a worry and purchase peace of mind

People who face very bad optionns take desperate gambles, accepting a high probability of making things worse in exchange for a small hope of avoiding a large loss.

The thought of accepting the large sure loss is too painful, annd the hope of complete relief too enticinng, to make the sensible decision that it is time to cut one's losses

Consistent overweightinng of improbable outcomes eventually leads to inferior outcomes

The more vivid description produces a higher decision weight for the same probability

Chances of rare evennts receive less impact than they deserve according to their objective probabilities

Obsessive concerns, vivid images, concrete representations and explicit reminders all contribute to overweighting

The emotional evaluation of 'sure gain' and 'sure loss' is an automatic reaction of System 1

It is costly to be risk averse for gains and risk seeking for losses

Playing a very favorable but risky gamble multiple times reduces the subjective risk

The combinnation of loss aversion and narrow framing is a costly curse. Individual investors can avoid that curse, achieving the emotionnal benefits of braod framing while also saving time and agony, by reducing the frequenccy with which they check how well their innvestments are doing. Closely following daily fluctuations is a losing proposition, because the pain of the frequent small losses exceeds the pleasure of the equally frequent small gainns

A commitment not to change one's posiitons for several periods improves financial performance

In the United States realizing losses reduces your taxes, while selling winners exposes you to taxes

A rational decision maker is interested onnly in the future consequences of current investments

The decision to invest additional resources in na losing account, when better investments are available, is known as the sunk-cost fallacy

The sunk-cost fallacy keeps people for too long in poor jobs, unhappy marriages, and unpromising research projects

People expect to have stronger emotional reactions to an outcome that is produced by action than to the same outcome when it is produced by inaction

A bad outcome is much more acceptable if it is framed as the cost of a lottery ticket that did nont winn than if it is simply described as losing a gamble. Losses evokes stronger negative feelings than costs

People will more readily forgo a disccount than pay a surcharge. The two may be economically equivalent, but they are not emotionally equivalent

Reframing is effortful and System 2 is normally lazy. Unless there is an obvios reasont o do otherwise, most of us passively accept decision problems as they are framed and therefore rarely have an opportunity to discover the extent to which our preferences are frame-bound rather than reality-bounnd

Decision makers tend to prefer the sure thing over the gamble when the outcomes are good. They tend to reject the sure thing and accept the gamble when both outcomes are negative

'Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to poinnt out what we ought too do, as well as to determine what we shall do.' - Jeremy Bentham

The photographer does not view the scene as a moment to be savored but as a future memory to be designed.

Picture taking is not necessarily the best way for the tourists experiencing self to enjoy a view

A person cannnot live nnormally while constantly reporting her experiences

Our emotional state is largely determined by what we attend to, and we are normally focused onn our current activity and immediate environemt. There are exceptions, where the quality of subjective experience is dominated by recurrent thoughts rahter than by the events of the moment

To get pleasure from eating, you must notice that you are doing it

Americans were far more prone to combine eating with other activities, and their pleasure from eating was correspondingly diluted

The second best predictor of the feelings of a day is whether a person did or did not have contacts with friends or relatives

More educationn is associated with higher evalution of one's life, but nont with greater experienced well-being

In the UnitedStates, the more educated tend to report higher stress. Ill health has a much stronger adverse effect on experienced well-being than on life evaluation. Livinng with children also imposes a significant cost in the currency of daily feelings, but the adverse effects on life evaluation are smaller. Religious participation also has relatively greater favorable impact on both positive affect and stress reduction than non life evaluation. Religion provides no reduction of feelings of depression or worry

Being poor makes one miserable, and that being rich may enhance one's life satisfaction, but does not improve experienced well-being

Illness is much worse for the very poor than for those who are more comfortable

The beneficial effeccts of the weekend on experienced well-being are significantly smaller for the very poor than for most everyone else

The satiation level beyond which experienced well-being no lonnger increases was a houshold income of about $75,000 inn high-cost areas

Higher inccome is associated with a reduced ability to enjoy the samll pleasures of life

Priming students with the idea of wealth reduces the pleasure their face expresses as they eat a bar of chocolate

Goals make a large difference

One recipe for a dissatisfied adulthood is setting goals that are especially difficult to attain

Tennagers goals innfluenncce what happens to them, where they ennd up, and how satisfied they are

Anny aspect of life to which attention is directed will loom large in a global evaluation

Focusing illusion: Nothing in life is an important as you think it is when you are thinking about it

Your mood is determined by whatever you think about

The focusing illusion can cause people to be wronng about their present state of well-being as well as about the happiness of others, and about their own happiness in the future

Depression involves a self-reinforcing cycle of miserable thoughts

Intuitive System 1, does the fast thinking, effortful and slower System 2, does the slow thinkinng, monitors System 1, and maintains control as best it can within its limited resources. The fictitous Econs, live in the land of theory, the Humans, act in the real world. The experienncing self, does the living, the remembering self, keeps score and makes the choices

It does nnot make sense to evaluate an entire life by its last moments, or to give no weight to duration inn deciding which life is more desirable

The central fact of our existence is that time is the ultimate finite resource, but the remembering self ignores that reality

The perspective of the remembering self is not always correct

It is a good bet that many of the things we say we will always remember will be long forgotten tenn years later

Individuals identify with their remembering self and care about their story

Rationality is logical coherence—reasonable or not

Do not interfere with the individual's right to choose, unless the choices harm others

When we observe people accting inn ways that seem odd, we should first examine the possibility that they have a good reason to do what they do

The acquisition of skills requires a regular environment, an adequate opportunity to practice, and rapid and unequivocal feedback about the correctness of thoughts and actions