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[Edwardo Piet]

Well we'll never be 100% unbiased or rational because biases are built into human psychology via heuristics and System 1:

In the book's first section, Kahneman describes two different ways the brain forms thoughts:

System 1: Fast, automatic, frequent, emotional, stereotypic, subconscious
System 2: Slow, effortful, infrequent, logical, calculating, conscious

Kahneman covers a number of experiments which purport to highlight the differences between these two thought systems and how they arrive at different results even given the same inputs. Terms and concepts include coherence, attention, laziness, association, jumping to conclusions, and how one forms judgments. The System 1 vs. System 2 debate dives into the reasoning or lack thereof for human decision making, with big implications for market research.

The second section offers explanations for why humans struggle to think statistically. It begins by documenting a variety of situations in which we either arrive at binary decisions or fail to precisely associate reasonable probabilities with outcomes. Kahneman explains this phenomenon using the theory of heuristics. Kahneman and Tversky originally covered this topic in their landmark 1974 article titled Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.

Kahneman uses heuristics to assert that System 1 thinking involves associating new information with existing patterns, or thoughts, rather than creating new patterns for each new experience. For example, a child who has only seen shapes with straight edges would experience an octagon rather than a triangle when first viewing a circle. In a legal metaphor, a judge limited to heuristic thinking would only be able to think of similar historical cases when presented with a new dispute, rather than seeing the unique aspects of that case. In addition to offering an explanation for the statistical problem, the theory also offers an explanation for human biases.

We can indeed change and manage our biases, but only with System 2... and System 1 is more powerful. We have to stop and think to avoid biases and irrationality and the cognitive strain involved for that and our reliance on our automatic habitual System 1 makes it impossible for us to do that all the time. We'd have to be superhuman to be rational all the time.

System 1 makes us blind to our own blindness. When it is engaged and we're being irrational, we're not able to stop to think to realize we are being irrational. When we're in habit-mode, we don't notice the mental shortcuts we are using to jump to conclusions and engage in things like confirmation bias and the halo effect.

Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.