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 test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children.
Reason" in language - oh, what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.
No matter how corrupt and unjust a convict may be, he loves fairness more than anything else. If the people placed over him are unfair, from year to year he lapses into an embittered state characterized by an extreme lack of faith.
But government in which the majority rule in all cases can not be based on justice, even as far as men understand it.
I do ask myself why I make people so enraged, because I only ever say what I think. And while I know it might not be everyone's point of view, that doesn't seem particularly intolerable to me.
How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all.
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