“You believe you know what goes on in your mind, which often consists of one conscious thought leading in an orderly way to another. But that is not the only way the mind works, or indeed is that the typical way. Most impressions, and thoughts arise in your conscious experience without your knowing how they get there… The mental work that produces impressions, intuitions, and many decisions goes on in silence in our mind.” — Daniel Kahneman

According to Thinking, Fast and Slow, we have two sequential systems manage how we process new information:

System 1, our Intuition, automatically, quickly, and involuntarily generates impressions, feelings, and inclinations with as little effort as possible by creating coherence and causality of activated ideas in associative memory. This is the system "we share with other animals. We are born prepared to perceive the world around us, recognize objects, orient attention, avoid losses". It's how we understand nuances of social situations. It has a "special aptitude" for stories about "active agents" with personalities, habits and abilities. This system cannot be turned off.

System 2, our Intelligence, allocates attention to effortful mental activities that demand it, like complex computations, turning impressions from S1 into beliefs, attitudes, and intentions, and perpetuating a sense of agency, choice, and the reasoning self. This system can construct thoughts in an orderly series of steps. It's activated when an event "violates the model of the world that System 1 maintains". This system is disrupted whenever our limited budget for attention ("working memory") is exceeded, and is inherently lazy. It's the one we call "I"

Psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist has shown this division of our intuitive and deliberative systems can be observed as physical differences in the brain’s right and left hemispheres. The right hemisphere is broadly vigilant, used to make connections with the world, sustained and alert, looks for things are defy our expectations, understands implicit meanings and metaphors, looks at the world as a unified thing, but is interested in the never fully graspable — it’s intuitive. The left hemisphere has a narrow focus, looks for what it already knows, operates in a simplified version of reality, wants to be precise, has a disposition for the mechanical, looks at things as an assemblage of parts, and is a closed system, perfect but empty — it’s intelligent.

As a result of this dynamic:

We're quick to act, opting to do something over nothing (Action Bias), especially to avoid something bad (Prospect Theory).

Our limited appetite for heavy mental processing (Analysis Paralysis, Decision Fatigue) means we prefer the fastest and easiest ways of thinking (Law of Least Effort), like relying on our feelings (Affect Heuristic), the specifics of the present situation (Base Rate Fallacy), things we're familiar with (Representativeness Heuristic, Matching), what's worked in the past (Status Quo Bias) and things that are less ambiguous (Ambiguity Effect).

Our highly associative working memory (Availability Bias) can be dramatically influenced by the way information is presented, including the way it's oriented (Framing), and what associations are drawn out (Priming). We're particularly wired for pictures over words (Picture Superiority Effect).

We have a strong sense of agency, with a deep-seated need for feeling power and control (Autonomy Bias), retaining that autonomy (Reactance), avoiding self-contradiction (Cognitive Dissonance), and overestimating our own prospects (Optimism Bias), giving us a sense that we're the center of everyone's universe (Spotlight Effect).

We're social animals, constantly locating our social position (Competition), conforming to others' behavior (Social Norms), interdependently interacting with others (Reciprocity), and drawing ourselves closer to life (Biophilia Effect).

"Bias and noise—systematic deviation and random scatter—are different components of error... In terms of overall error, noise and bias are independent: the benefit of reducing noise is the same, regardless of the amount of bias" ... "Psychological biases creates system noise when judges are biased. In different ways, or to a different extent... "Psychological biases, as a mechanism, are universal, and they often produce shared errors. But when there are large differences in biases (different prejudgments) or when the effect of biases depends on context (different triggers), there will be noise." — Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

Several schools of thought within the broad banner of "behavioral economics" have emerged to counter-act and redirect the forces of biases and noise, led in large part by the Nudges school of thought.

"Our smallest actions create norms. Our norms create values. Our values drive behavior. And our behaviors cascade." — Derek Thompson, The Atlantic

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