Friday, February 28, 2014

Thinking, fast and slow

BBC Horizon 'How do we really make decisions?'  originally aired on BBC 2 on 24 February 2014

Referred to a lot from the book by Daniel Kahneman 'Thinking, fast and slow.'

Most of the time, our fast, intuitive mind is in control, efficiently taking charge of all the thousands of decisions we make each day. The problem comes when we allow our fast, intuitive system to make decisions that we really should pass over to our slow, logical system. This is where the mistakes creep in.

Our thinking is riddled with systematic mistakes known to psychologists as cognitive biases. And they affect everything we do. They make us spend impulsively, be overly influenced by what other people think. They affect our beliefs, our opinions, and our decisions, and we have no idea it is happening.

It may seem hard to believe, but that's because your logical, slow mind is a master at inventing a cover story. Most of the beliefs or opinions you have come from an automatic response. But then your logical mind invents a reason why you think or believe something.
 
A useful list of Cognitive Biases is available at Wikipedia


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