Attribute Substitution

Daniel Kahneman and Shane Frederick described the mechanism, and Kahneman puts it at the centre of Thinking, Fast and Slow. Some questions are genuinely hard: will this hire succeed, is this investment sound, how satisfied am I with my life? System 1 does not stall when it meets one. It finds a related question it can answer at once (do I like this person, do I like their product, what is my mood right now?) and passes that answer up. System 2, which is lazy, rarely notices the swap, so the easy answer arrives feeling like a considered judgement on the hard question. Kahneman calls the original the target question and the easy one the heuristic question. Substitution is not stupidity; it is often a decent shortcut, and it is the reason we are almost never stumped. The danger is that the confidence belongs to the easy question while the stakes belong to the hard one. Kahneman tells of an investment executive who bought a carmaker's shares because its cars impressed him; whether the shares were underpriced was never asked. The defence is one check before an important judgement: write the hard question down, then ask which question you actually answered.