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.
The U.S. Constitution protects our privacy from the prying eyes of government. It does not, however, protect us from the prying eyes of companies and corporations.
A judgment about life has no meaning except the truth of the one who speaks last, and the mind is at ease only at the moment when everyone is shouting at once and no one can hear a thing.
I'm not alive. People believe memories grow vague, are erased by time, since nothing endures against the passage of time. That's the difference; time does not pass over me, over us. It doesn't erase anything, doesn't undo it. I'm not a live. I died in Auschwitz but no one knows it.
Water in the boat is the ruin of the boat, but water under the boat is its support.
The line between disorder and order lies in logistics.
I am sorry to have to inform you that I do not believe in the Bible as a divine revelation, & therefore not in Jesus Christ as the Son of God.
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