Thinking, Fast and Slow

he gorilla study illustrates two important facts about our minds: we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.

You can do several things at once, but only if they are easy and undemanding

Different groups of participants stated their willingness to pay to save 2,000, 20,000, or 200,000 birds. If saving birds is an economic good it should be a sum-like variable: saving 200,000 birds should be worth much more than saving 2,000 birds. In fact, the average contributions of the three groups were $80, $78, and $88 respectively. The number of birds made very little difference. What the participants reacted to, in all three groups, was a prototype—the awful image of a helpless bird drowning, its feathers soaked in thick oil. The almost complete neglect of quantity in such emotional contexts has been confirmed many times.