# Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman Synced: [[2023_11_30]] 6:03 AM Last Highlighted: [[2019_09_26]]  ## Highlights [[2019_09_26]] (Location 4) > [[2019_04_12]] (Location 867) > When you are actively involved in difficult cognitive reasoning or engaged in a task that requires self-control, your blood glucose level drops. The effect is analogous to a runner who draws down glucose stored in her muscles during a sprint. The bold implication of this idea is that the effects of ego depletion could be undone by ingesting glucose, and Baumeister and his colleagues have confirmed this hypothesis [[2019_04_12]] (Location 931) > Whether the city comes to mind when the state is mentioned depends in part on the automatic function of memory. People differ in this respect. The representation of the state of Michigan is very detailed in some people’s minds: residents of the state are more likely to retrieve many facts about it than people who live elsewhere; geography buffs will retrieve more than others who specialize in baseball statistics; more intelligent individuals are more likely than others to have rich representations of most things. Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed. Memory function is an attribute of System 1. However, everyone has the option of slowing down to conduct an active search of memory for all possibly relevant facts—just as they could slow down to check the intuitive answer in the bat-and-ball problem. The extent of deliberate checking and search is a characteristic of System 2, which varies among individuals. [[2019_04_16]] (Location 961) > A team of researchers at the University of Oregon explored the link between cognitive control and intelligence in several ways, including an attempt to raise intelligence by improving the control of attention. During five 40-minute sessions, they exposed children aged four to six to various computer games especially designed to demand attention and control. In one of the exercises, the children used a joystick to track a cartoon cat and move it to a grassy area while avoiding a muddy area. The grassy areas gradually shrank and the muddy area expanded, requiring progressively more precise control. The testers found that training attention not only improved executive control; scores on nonverbal tests of intelligence also improved and the improvement was maintained for several months. Other research by the same group identified specific genes that are involved in the control of attention, showed that parenting techniques also affected this ability, and demonstrated a close connection between the children’s ability to control their attention and their ability to control their emotions. [[2019_04_17]] (Location 1046) > Psychologists think of ideas as nodes in a vast network, called associative memory, in which each idea is linked to many others. There are different types of links: causes are linked to their effects (virus cold); things to their properties (lime green); things to the categories to which they belong (banana fruit). One way we have advanced beyond Hume is that we no longer think of the mind as going through a sequence of conscious ideas, one at a time. In the current view of how associative memory works, a great deal happens at once. An idea that has been activated does not merely evoke one other idea. It activates many ideas, which in turn activate others. Furthermore, only a few of the activated ideas will register in consciousness; most of the work of associative thinking is silent, hidden from our conscious selves. The notion that we have limited access to the workings of our minds is difficult to accept because, naturally, it is alien to our experience, but it is true: you know far less about yourself than you feel you do. [[2019_04_17]] (Location 1092) > Reciprocal priming effects tend to produce a coherent reaction: if you were primed to think of old age, you would tend to act old, and acting old would reinforce the thought of old age. [[2019_04_17]] (Location 1093) > Reciprocal links are common in the associative network. For example, being amused tends to make you smile, and smiling tends to make you feel amused. [[2019_04_17]] (Location 1109) > 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 should not be affected by the location of the polling station, for example, but it is. A study of voting patterns in precincts of Arizona in 2000 showed that the support for propositions to increase the funding of schools was significantly greater when the polling station was in a school than when it was in a nearby location. [[2019_04_17]] (Location 1131) > Some cultures provide frequent reminders of respect, others constantly remind their members of God, and some societies prime obedience by large images of the Dear Leader. Can there be any doubt that the ubiquitous portraits of the national leader in dictatorial societies not only convey the feeling that “Big Brother Is Watching” but also lead to an actual reduction in spontaneous thought and independent action? [[2019_04_17]] (Location 1148) > The idea you should focus on, however, is that disbelief is not an option. The results are not made up, nor are they statistical flukes. You have no choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these studies are true. More important, you must accept that they are true about you. If you had been exposed to a screen saver of floating dollar bills, you too would likely have picked up fewer pencils to help a clumsy stranger. You do not believe that these results apply to you because they correspond to nothing in your subjective experience. But your subjective expefteelief. Trience consists largely of the story that your System 2 tells itself about what is going on. Priming phenomena arise in System 1, and you have no conscious access to them. [[2019_04_17]] (Location 1170) > 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. It offers a tacit interpretation of what happens to you and around you, linking the present with the recent past and with expectations about the near future. It contains the model of the world that instantly evaluates events as normal or surprising. It is the source of your rapid and often precise intuitive judgments. And it does most of this without your conscious awareness of its activities. [[2019_04_20]] (Location 1302) > The symmetry of many associative connections was a dominant theme in the discussion of associative coherence. As we saw earlier, people who are made to “smile” or “frown” by sticking a pencil in their mouth or holding a ball between their furrowed brows are prone to experience the emotions that frowning and smiling normally express. The same self-reinforcing reciprocity is found in studies of cognitive ease. On the one hand, cognitive strain is experienced when the effortful operations of System 2 are engaged. On the other hand, the experience of cognitive strain, whatever its source, tends to mobilize System 2, shifting people’s approach to problems from a casual intuitive mode to a more engaged and analytic mode. [[2019_04_20]] (Location 1318) > The experimenters recruited 40 Princeton students to take the CRT. Half of them saw the puzzles in a small font in washed-out gray print. The puzzles were legible, but the font induced cognitive strain. The results tell a clear story: 90% of the students who saw the CRT in normal font made at least one mistake in the test, but the proportion dropped to 35% when the font was barely legible. You read this correctly: performance was better with the bad font. Cognitive strain, whatever its source, mobilizes System 2, which is more likely to reject the intuitive answer suggested by System 1. [[2019_04_20]] (Location 1359) > The consequences of repeated exposures benefit the organism in its relations to the immediate animate and inanimate environment. They allow the organism to distinguish objects and habitats that are safe from those that are not, and they are the most primitive basis of social attachments. Therefore, they form the basis for social organization and cohesion—the basic sources of psychological and social stability. [[2019_04_23]] (Location 1431) > The central characteristics and functions of System 1 and System 2 have now been introduced, with a more detailed treatment of System 1. Freely mixing metaphors, we have in our head a remarkably powerful computer, not fast by conventional hardware standards, but able to represent the structure of our world by various types of associative links in a vast network of various types of ideas. The spreading of activation in the associative machine is automatic, but we (System 2) 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. We next go into more detail of the wonders and limitation of what System 1 can do. [[2019_04_25]] (Location 1546) > The experience of freely willed action is quite separate from physical causality. Although it is your hand that picks up the salt, you do not think of the event in terms of a chain of physical causation. You experience it as caused by a decision that a disembodied you made, because you wanted to add salt to your food. Many people find it natural to describe their soul as the source and the cause of their actions. The psychologist Paul Bloom, writing in The Atlantic in 2005, presented the provocative claim that our inborn readiness to separate physical and intentional causality explains the near universality of religious beliefs. He observes that “we perceive the world of objects as essentially separate from the world of minds, making it possible for us to envision soulless bodies and bodiless souls.” The two modes of causation that we are set to perceive make it natural for us to accept the two central beliefs of many religions: an immaterial divinity is the ultimate cause of the physical world, and immortal souls temporarily control our bodies while we live and leave them behind as we die. In Bloom’s view, the two concepts of causality were shaped separately by evolutionary forces, building the origins of religion into the structure of System 1. [[2019_04_25]] (Location 1624) > Indeed, there is evidence that people are more likely to be influenced by empty persuasive messages, such as commercials, when they are tired and depleted. [[2019_04_25]] (Location 1658) > The sequence in which we observe characteristics of a person is often determined by chance. Sequence matters, however, because the halo effect increases the weight of first impressions, sometimes to the point that subsequent information is mostly wasted. [[2019_04_25]] (Location 1697) > A simple rule can help: before an issue is discussed, all members of the committee should be asked to write a very brief summary of their position. This procedure makes good use of the value of the diversity of knowledge and opinion in the group. The standard practice of open discussion gives too much weight to the opinions of those who speak early and assertively, causing others to line up behind them. [[2019_04_26]] (Location 1750) > Overconfidence: As the WY SIATI rule implies, neither the quantity nor the quality of the evidence counts for much in subjective confidence. 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. We often fail to allow for the possibility that evidence that should be critical to our judgment is missing—what we see is all there is. Furthermore, our associative system tends to settle on a coherent pattern of activation and suppresses doubt and ambiguity. [[2019_04_26]] (Location 1766) > “Let’s decorrelate errors by obtaining separate judgments on the issue before any discussion. We will get more information from independent assessments.” [[2019_04_26]] (Location 1769) > “They made that big decision on the basis of a good report from one consultant. WYSIATI—what you see is all there is. They did not seem to realize how little information they had.” [[2019_04_30]] (Location 1944) > The technical definition of heuristic is a simple procedure that helps find adequate, though often imperfect, answers to difficult questions. [[2019_05_03]] (Location 2139) > System 1 is highly adept in one form of thinking—it automatically and effortlessly identifies causal connections between events, sometimes even when the connection is spurious. [[2019_05_03]] (Location 2147) > You can predict the outcome of repeated sampling from an urn just as confidently as you can predict what will happen if you hit an egg with a hammer. You cannot predict every detail of how the shell will shatter, but you can be sure of the general idea. There is a difference: the satisfying sense of causation that you experience when thinking of a hammer hitting an egg is altogether absent when you think about sampling. [[2019_05_07]] (Location 2193) > The author pointed out that psychologists commonly chose samples so small that they exposed themselves to a 50% risk of failing to confirm their true hypotheses! [[2019_05_07]] (Location 2303) > The exaggerated faith in small samples is only one example of a more general illusion—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. Jumping to conclusions is a safer sport in the world of our imagination than it is in reality. [[2019_05_07]] (Location 2306) [[favorite]] > Statistics produce many observations that appear to beg for causal explanations but do not lend themselves to such explanations. Many facts of the world are due to chance, including accidents of sampling. Causal explanations of chance events are inevitably wrong. [[2019_05_07]] (Location 2315) > “The sample of observations is too small to make any inferences. Let’s not follow the law of small numbers.” [[2019_05_08]] (Location 2423) > The anchoring effect is not a laboratory curiosity; it can be just as strong in the real world. In an experiment conducted some years ago, real-estate agents were given an opportunity to assess the value of a house that was actually on the market. They visited the house and studied a comprehensive booklet of information that included an asking price. Half the agents saw an asking price that was substantially higher than the listed price of the house; the other half saw an asking price that was substantially lower. Each agent gave her opinion about a reasonable buying price for the house and the lowest price at which she would agree to sell the house if she owned it. The agents were then asked about the factors that had affected their judgment. Remarkably, the asking price was not one of these factors; the agents took pride in their ability to ignore it. They insisted that the listing price had no effect on their responses, but they were wrong: the anchoring effect was 41%. Indeed, the professionals were almost as susceptible to anchoring effects as business school students with no real-estate experience, whose anchoring index was 48%. The only difference between the two groups was that the students conceded that they were influenced by the anchor, while the professionals denied that influence. [[2019_05_08]] (Location 2473) > My advice to students when I taught negotiations was that if you think the other side has made an outrageous proposal, you should not come back with an equally outrageous counteroffer, creating a gap that will be difficult to bridge in further negotiations. Instead you should make a scene, storm out or threaten to do so, and make it clear—to yourself as well as to the other side—that you will not continue the negotiation with that number on the table. [[2019_05_08]] (Location 2483) > Before you read this chapter you might have thought that capping awards is certainly good for potential defendants, but now you should not be so sure. Consider the effect of capping awards at $1 million. This rule would eliminate all larger awards, but the anchor would also pull up the size of many awards that would otherwise be much smaller. It would almost certainly benefit serious offenders and large firms much more than small ones. [[2019_05_08]] (Location 2503) [[favorite]] > If the content of a screen saver on an irrelevant computer can affect your willingness to help strangers without your being aware of it, how free are you? [[2019_05_08]] (Location 2512) > “Plans are best-case scenarios. Let’s avoid anchoring on plans when we forecast actual outcomes. Thinking about ways the plan could go wrong is one way to do it.” [[2019_05_08]] (Location 2515) > “Our aim in the negotiation is to get them anchored on this number.” [[2019_05_22]] (Location 2723) > Jonathan Haidt said in another context, “The emotional tail wags the rational dog.” [[2019_05_22]] (Location 2777) > In Love Canal, buried toxic waste was exposed during a rainy season in 1979, causing contamination of the water well beyond standard limits, as well as a foul smell. The residents of the community were angry and frightened, and one of them, Lois Gibbs, was particularly active in an attempt to sustain interest in the problem. The availability cascade unfolded according to the standard script. At its peak there were daily stories about Love Canal, scientists attempting to claim that the dangers were overstated were ignored or shouted down, ABC News aired a program titled The Killing Ground, and empty baby-size coffins were paraded in front of the legislature. A large number of residents were relocated at government expense, and the control of toxic waste became the major environmental issue of the 1980s. The legislation that mandated the cleanup of toxic sites, called CERCLA, established a Superfund and is considered a significant achievement of environmental legislation. It was also expensive, and some have claimed that the same amount of money could have saved many more lives if it had been directed to other priorities. Opinions about what actually happened at Love Canal are still sharply divided, and claims of actual damage to health appear not to have been substantiated. Kuran and Sunstein wrote up the Love Canal story almost as a pseudo-event, while on the other side of the debate, environmentalists still speak of the “Love Canal disaster.” [[2019_05_23]] (Location 2805) > Even in countries that have been targets of intensive terror campaigns, such as Israel, the weekly number of casualties almost never came close to the number of traffic deaths. The difference is in the availability of the two risks, the ease and the frequency with which they come to mind. Gruesome images, endlessly repeated in the media, cause everyone to be on edge. [[2019_05_23]] (Location 2807) > As I know from experience, it is difficult to reason oneself into a state of complete calm. [[2019_05_23]] (Location 2827) > “This is an availability cascade: a nonevent that is inflated by the media and the public until it fills our TV screens and becomes all anyone is talking about.” [[2019_05_23]] (Location 3001) > The essential keys to disciplined Bayesian reasoning can be simply summarized:   Anchor your judgment of the probability of an outcome on a plausible base rate. Question the diagnosticity of your evidence. [[2019_05_23]] (Location 3013) > “They keep making the same mistake: predicting rare events from weak evidence. When the evidence is weak, one should stick with the base rates.” [[2019_05_30]] (Location 3220) > “They constructed a very complicated scenario and insisted on calling it highly probable. It is not—it is only a plausible story.” [[2019_05_30]] (Location 3222) > “They added a cheap gift to the expensive product, and made the whole deal less attractive. Less is more in this case.” [[2019_05_30]] (Location 3224) > “In most situations, a direct comparison makes people more careful and more logical. But not always. Sometimes intuition beats logic even when the correct answer stares you in the face.” [[2019_05_30]] (Location 3280) > Stereotyping is a bad word in our culture, but in my usage it is neutral. One of the basic characteristics of System 1 is that it represents categories as norms and prototypical exemplars. This is how we think of horses, refrigerators, and New York police officers; we hold in memory a representation of one or more “normal” members of each of these categories. [[2019_05_30]] (Location 3290) > The social norm against stereotyping, including the opposition to profiling, has been highly beneficial in creating a more civilized and more equal society. It is useful to remember, however, that neglecting valid stereotypes inevitably results in suboptimal judgments. Resistance to stereotyping is a laudable moral position, but the simplistic idea that the resistance is costless is wrong. The costs are worth paying to achieve a better society, but denying that the costs exist, while satisfying to the soul and politically correct, is not scientifically defensible. Reliance on the affect heuristic is common in politically charged arguments. The positions we favor have no cost and those we oppose have no benefits. We should be able to do better. [[2019_05_30]] (Location 3384) > Subjects’ unwillingness to deduce the particular from the general was matched only by their willingness to infer the general from the particular. [[2019_05_30]] (Location 3385) > This is a profoundly important conclusion. 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. There is a deep gap between our thinking about statistics and our thinking about individual cases. Statistical results with a causal interpretation have a stronger effect on our thinking than noncausal information. But even compelling causal statistics will not change long-held beliefs or beliefs rooted in personal experience. On the other hand, surprising individual cases have a powerful impact and are a more effective tool for teaching psychology because the incongruity must be resolved and embedded in a causal story. [[2019_05_30]] (Location 3398) > “No need to worry about this statistical information being ignored. On the contrary, it will immediately be used to feed a stereotype.” [[2019_06_12]] (Location 3429) > The discovery I made on that day was that the flight instructors were trapped in an unfortunate contingency: because they punished cadets when performance was poor, they were mostly rewarded by a subsequent improvement, even if punishment was actually ineffective. Furthermore, the instructors were not alone in that predicament. I had stumbled onto a significant fact of the human condition: 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. [[2019_06_12]] (Location 3602) > “Perhaps his second interview was less impressive than the first because he was afraid of disappointing us, but more likely it was his first that was unusually good.” [[2019_06_12]] (Location 3605) > “Our screening procedure is good but not perfect, so we should anticipate regression. We shouldn’t be surprised that the very best candidates often fail to meet our expectations.” [[2019_06_12]] (Location 3712) > Assuming this estimate, we have all we need to produce an unbiased prediction. Here are the directions for how to get there in four simple steps:   Start with an estimate of average GPA. Determine the GPA that matches your impression of the evidence. Estimate the correlation between your evidence and GPA. If the correlation is .30, move 30% of the distance from the average to the matching GPA.   Step 1 gets you the baseline, the GPA you would have predicted if you were told nothing about Julie beyond the fact that she is a graduating senior. In the absence of information, you would have predicted the average. (This is similar to assigning the base-rate probability of business administration grahavрduates when you are told nothing about Tom W.) Step 2 is your intuitive prediction, which matches your evaluation of the evidence. Step 3 moves you from the baseline toward your intuition, but the distance you are allowed to move depends on your estimate of the correlation. You end up, at step 4, with a prediction that is influenced by your intuition but is far more moderate. This approach to prediction is general. You can apply it whenever you need to predict a quantitative variable, such as GPA, profit from an investment, or the growth of a company. [[2019_08_29]] (Location 5499) > “Considering her vast wealth, her emotional response to trivial gains and losses makes no sense.” [[2019_08_30]] (Location 5698) > “She didn’t care which of the two offices she would get, but a day after the announcement was made, she was no longer willing to trade. Endowment effect!” [[2019_08_30]] (Location 5700) > “These negotiations are going nowhere because both sides find it difficult to make concessions, even when they can get something in return. Losses loom larger than gains.” [[2019_09_04]] (Location 5889) > “This reform will not pass. Those who stand to lose will fight harder than those who stand to gain.” [[2019_09_04]] (Location 5893) > “They would find it easier to renegotiate the agreement if they realized the pie was actually expanding. They’re not allocating losses; they are allocating gains.” [[2019_09_04]] (Location 6042) > [[2019_09_04]] (Location 6077) > The thought of accepting the large sure loss is too painful, and the hope of complete relief too enticing, to make the sensible decision that it is time to cut one’s losses. This is where businesses that are losing ground to a superior technology waste their remaining assets in futile attempts to catch up. Because defeat is so difficult to accept, the losing side in wars often fights long past the point at which the victory of the other side is certain, and only a matter of time. [[2019_09_04]] (Location 6123) > “He is tempted to settle this frivolous claim to avoid a freak loss, however unlikely. That’s overweighting of small probabilities. Since he is likely to face many similar problems, he would be better off not yielding.” [[2019_09_04]] (Location 6127) > “They will not cut their losses so long as there is a chance of breaking even. This is risk-seeking in the losses.” [[2019_09_06]] (Location 6367) > “Tsunamis are very rare even in Japan, but the image is so vivid and compelling that tourists are bound to overestimate their probability.” [[2019_09_06]] (Location 6369) > “It’s the familiar disaster cycle. Begin by exaggeration and overweighting, then neglect sets in.” [[2019_09_06]] (Location 6371) > “We shouldn’t focus on a single scenario, or we will overestimate its probability. Let’s set up specific alternatives and make the probabilities add up to 100%.” [[2019_09_06]] (Location 6373) > “They want people to be worried by the risk. That’s why they describe it as 1 death per 1,000. They’re counting on denominator neglect.” [[2019_09_06]] (Location 6514) > “Tell her to think like a trader! You win a few, you lose a few.” [[2019_09_06]] (Location 6518) > “They never buy extended warranties. That’s their risk policy.” [[2019_09_06]] (Location 6520) > “Each of our executives is loss averse in his or her domain. That’s perfectly natural, but the result is that the organization is not taking enough risk.” [[2019_09_23]] (Location 6732) > “He has separate mental accounts for cash and credit purchases. I constantly remind him that money is money.” [[2019_09_23]] (Location 6734) > “We are hanging on to that stock just to avoid closing our mental account at a loss. It’s the disposition effect.” [[2019_09_23]] (Location 6736) > “We discovered an excellent dish at that restaurant and we never try anything else, to avoid regret.”   “The salesperson showed me the most expensive car seat and said it was the safest, and I could not bring myself to buy the cheaper model. It felt like a taboo tradeoff.” [[2019_09_24]] (Location 6929) > “You say this was an outstanding speech because you compared it to her other speeches. Compared to others, she was still inferior.” [[2019_09_24]] (Location 6931) > “It is often the case that when you broaden the frame, you reach more reasonable decisions.” [[2019_09_24]] (Location 6933) > “When you see cases in isolation, you are likely to be guided by an emotional reaction of System 1.” [[2019_09_24]] (Location 7165) > “They will feel better about what happened if they manage to frame the outcome in terms of how much money they kept rather than how much they lost.” [[2019_09_24]] (Location 7167) > “Let’s reframe the problem by changing the reference point. Imagine we did not own it; how much would we think it is worth?” [[2019_09_24]] (Location 7171) > “They ask you to check the box to opt out of their mailing list. Their list would shrink if they asked you to check a box to opt in!” [[2019_09_24]] (Location 7189) > Jeremy Bentham opened his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation with the famous sentence “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.” [[2019_09_25]] (Location 7347) > “You are thinking of your failed marriage entirely from the perspective of the remembering self. A divorce is like a symphony with a screeching sound at the end—the fact that it ended badly does not mean it was all bad.” [[2019_09_25]] (Location 7349) > “This is a bad case of duration neglect. You are giving the good and the bad part of your experience equal weight, although the good part lasted ten times as long as the other.” [[2019_09_25]] (Location 7447) > “You seem to be devoting your entire vacation to the construction of memories. Perhaps you should put away the camera and enjoy the moment, even if it is not very memorable?” [[2019_09_25]] (Location 7449) > “She is an Alzheimer’s patient. She no longer maintains a narrative of her life, but her experiencing self is still sensitive to beauty and gentleness.” [[2019_09_25]] (Location 7469) > Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls flow—a state that some artists experience in their creative moments and that many other people achieve when enthralled by a film, a book, or a crossword puzzle: interruptions are not welcome in any of these situations. [[2019_09_26]] (Location 7580) > “The objective of policy should be to reduce human suffering. We aim for a lower U-index in society. Dealing with depression and extreme poverty should be a priority.” [[2019_09_26]] (Location 7583) [[favorite]] > “The easiest way to increase happiness is to control your use of time. Can you find more time to do the things you enjoy doing?” [[2019_09_26]] (Location 7585) > “Beyond the satiation level of income, you can buy more pleasurable experiences, but you will lose some of your ability to enjoy the less expensive ones.”   Thinking [[2019_09_26]] (Location 7664) > In part because of these findings I have changed my mind about the definition of well-being. The goals that people set for themselves are so important to what they do and how they feel about it that an exclusive focus on experienced well-being is not tenable. We cannot hold a concept of well-being that ignores what people want. On the other hand, it is also true that a concept of well-being that ignores how people feel as they live and focuses only on how they feel when they think about their life is also untenable. [[2019_09_26]] (Location 7677) > Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it. [[2019_09_26]] (Location 7776) > “She thought that buying a fancy car would make her happier, but it turned out to be an error of affective forecasting.” [[2019_09_26]] (Location 7778) > “His car broke down on the way to work this morning and he’s in a foul mood. This is not a good day to ask him about his job satisfaction!” [[2019_09_26]] (Location 7780) > “She looks quite cheerful most of the time, but when she is asked she says she is very unhappy. The question must make her think of her recent divorce.” [[2019_09_26]] (Location 7784) > “He has chosen to split his time between two cities. Probably a serious case of miswanting.”