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.
Be good and you will be lonely.
Maybe there are times when mystery is more important than knowledge. I realized that the white page is a magic box. Ultimately, the mistery box is all of us. Ubiquitous technologies. What comes next ? Mystery as catalyst for imagination.
My life was hurrying, racing tragically toward its end. And yet at the same time it was dripping so slowly, so very slowly now, hour by hour, minute by minute. One always has to wait until the sugar melts, the memory dies, the wound scars over, the sun sets, the unhappiness lifts and fades away.
I surrendered my beliefs and found myself at the tree of life injecting my story into the veins of leaves only to find that stories like forests are subject to seasons
Records told the same tale, then the lie passed into history and became truth.
God made yeast, as well as dough, and loves fermentation just as dearly as he loves vegetation.
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