This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.
Interpretation
We tend to simplify complex issues by unconsciously addressing easier ones instead.
In this quote, Daniel Kahneman highlights a common cognitive tendency known as intuitive heuristics, where individuals substitute challenging questions with simpler ones to avoid discomfort and confusion. This often occurs unconsciously, leading us to form conclusions based on oversimplified reasoning rather than fully engaging with the complexity of the original problem.
In practice
In a psychology class, while discussing decision-making, a teacher might quote this to illustrate cognitive biases.
We think, each of us, that we're much more rational than we are. And we think that we make our decisions because we have good reasons to make them. Even when it's the other way around. We believe in the reasons, because we've already made the decision.
The average investor's return is significantly lower than market indices due primarily to market timing.
Banks are run by executives, and executives protect themselves, and that does not always mean that banks are going to behave rationally.
Laziness is built deep into our nature.
Through some combination of culture and biology, our minds are intuitively receptive to religion.
You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general.
I don't believe in elitism. I don't think the audience is this dumb person lower than me. I am the audience.
Many persons nowadays seem to think that any conclusion must be very scientific if the arguments in favor of it are derived from twitching of frogs' legs (especially if the frogs are decapitated) and that, on the other hand, any doctrine chiefly vouched for by the feelings of human beings (with heads on their shoulders) must be benighted and superstitious.
The simplest thought, like the concept of the number one, has an elaborate logical underpinning.
As for doing good; that is one of the professions which is full. Moreover I have tried it fairly and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution.
Your cravings as a human animal do not become a prayer just because it is God whom you ask to attend to them.
Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.