Cognitive biases -an alternative account of decision making

A vision of flawed human reason. Cognitive biases, fallacies and illusions -a crucial pivot point in the way we see ourselves.

Kahneman and Tversky challenged” the idea, orthodox among social theorists in the 1970s, that people are generally rational. People making decisions under uncertain conditions do not behave in the way that economic models have traditionally assumed; they do not “maximize utility”.

Kahneman and Tversky’s work illustrates the limits of social policy, and systematic errors in the thinking of normal people: errors arising not from the corrupting effects of emotion, but built into our evolved cognitive machinery.

System 2, in Kahneman’s scheme, is our slow, deliberate, analytical and consciously effortful mode of reasoning about the world. System 1, by contrast, is our fast, automatic, intuitive and largely unconscious mode. It is System 1 that detects hostility in a voice and effortlessly completes the phrase “bread and. . . . ” It is System 2 that swings into action when we have to fill out a tax form or park a car in a narrow space.