Thinking, Fast and Slow

1: The Characters of the Story
offered many labels: For reviews of the field, see Jonathan St. B. T. Evans
and Keith Frankish, eds., 
In Two Minds: Dual Processes and Beyond
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Jonathan St. B. T. Evans,
“Dual-Processing Accounts of Reasoning, Judgment, and Social
C ogni ti on,” 
Annual Review of Psychology 59 (2008): 25 {59
eight="0%"5–78. Among the pioneers are Seymour Epstein, Jonathan
Evans, Steven Sloman, Keith Stanovich, and Richard West. I borrow the
terms System 1 and System 2 from early writings of Stanovich and West
that greatly influenced my thinking: Keith E. Stanovich and Richard F.
West, “Individual Differences in Reasoning: Implications for the Rationality
Debate,” 
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23 (2000): 645–65.
subjective experience of agency: This sense of free will is sometimes
illusory, as shown in Daniel M. Wegner, 
The Illusion of Conscious Will
(Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books, 2003).
attention is totally focused elsewhere: Nilli Lavie, “Attention, Distraction
and Cognitive Control Under Load,” 
Current Directions in Psychological
Science 19 (2010): 143–48.
conflict between the two systems: In the classic Stroop task, you are
shown a display of patches of different colors, or of words printed in
various colors. Your task is to call out the names of the colors, ignoring the

---

words. The task is extremely difficult when the colored words are
themselves names of color (e.g., GREEN printed in red, followed by Y
ELLOW printed in green, etc.).
psychopathic charm: Professor Hare wrote me to say, “Your teacher was
right,” March 16, 2011. Robert D. Hare, 
Without Conscience: The
Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us (New York: Guilford
Press, 1999). Paul Babiak and Robert D. Hare, 
Snakes in Suits: When
Psychopaths Go to Work (New York: Harper, 2007).
little people: Agents within the mind are called homunculi and are (quite
properly) objects of professional derision.
space in your working memory: Alan D. Baddeley, “Working Memory:
Looking Back and Looking Forward,” 
Nature Reviews: Neuroscience 4
(2003): 829–38. Alan D. Baddeley, 
Your Memory: A User’s Guide  (New
York: Firefly Books, 2004).