DISCUSSION QUESTIONS THINKING FAST AND SLOW
Chapter One: The Characters of the Story
1. Discuss the differences between System 1 and 2. Do a T chart and generate
the differences. Each participant can give examples of when they feel like
they are using each system. Which is your strength? What can you do to
acknowledge the other?
2. Why is helpful to think about thinking and how that affects the way we
operate and make decisions?
3. How have we been dealing with bias and illusions in thinking ever since A
Nation at Risk? How can we take appositive steps to counterbalance such
faulty impressions of public education?
Chapter Two: Attention and Effort
1. Watch the video The Invisible Gorilla. Discuss the idea of focused attention
2. How are I.Q tests faulty measures of what we know as intelligence? How
are I.Q. tests used in your district? Why are we still thinking that memory
is an indicator of intelligence?
Chapter 3: The Lazy Controller
1. Recurrent theme of this book—many people are overconfident, prone to
place too much faith in their intuitions, find cognitive effort at least mildly
unpleasant and avoid it as much as possible. P. 45. What does this say about
how we make policy decisions about education and other important topics in
the current political climate? Note mine
2. Why is it that we do not fight NCLB more when we know it is bad public
policy, an inaccurate measure of student achievement, and ineffective?
Chapter 4: The Associative Machine
1. Name some examples of priming from your experience—in your job, in
advertising, personally. Once you recognize this, you will see it constantly.
2. How can you use priming deliberately in communications from the district, in
staff meetings, in one-on-one conversations?
Chapter 5: Cognitive Ease
1. How do politicians use the technique of repetition to make their messages
believable and imprinted in people’s memory? How should schools be using
this knowledge?
2. Persuasive Messages have certain key strategies, like quality of paper, ease
of reading, simplicity. How can you use this information in your position?
3. How can you use the idea of an easily recognized name? What are ways we
can get rid of educational jargon, particularly in special education, so that
our messages are more memorable and provide cognitive ease?
Chapter 6: Norms, surprise and causes
1. The brain recognizes norms and things that are familiar. How can we use
norms to our advantage?
2. When would you draw attention to surprises? How can that work to our
benefit.
Chapter 7: Machine for Jumping to Conclusions
1. Can you think of a time when a group you were working with jumped to
conclusions and later you came to realize that the conclusion was wrong?
2. We are programmed to believe what we here and have to work to
unbelieve it. How did you react to that statement? Were you surprised?
Or not?
3. Describe instances of the halo effect. How does it help to be aware that
the halo effect exists?
4. The framing effect is used frequently in the media. How do we use the
framing effect in public education? How can we use it to our advantage?
Chapter 8: How Judgments Happen
1. Our S1 system is constantly monitoring surroundings and making
assessments. How do we make quick judgments based on quick
assessments of surroundings? For example, when experiencing
professional development with a guest speaker, how quickly do you make
judgments about the quality of the inservice?
2. What are the things you look for? Are those based on intuition? Fact?
3. Have you ever had the immediate reaction that the professional
development is not what you wanted but in retrospect find out that you
actually found some valuable information?
Chapter 9: Answering an Easier Question
1. When conducting a meeting and having a difficult discussion, e.g.
boundary changes, do you find that the group gets sidetracked on an
easier topic? This is because we try to answer an easier question.
2. How can you as facilitator bring the topic back to the difficult one?
3. How much time do you think we waste in side conversations? How often
do you leave meetings thinking that you didn’t accomplish what you
hoped?
Chapter 10: Law of Small Numbers
1. How do we get trapped in the law of small numbers when we look at
student data and try to make sense out of where our students are?
2. How can you avoid that trap?
3. Name some examples like “hot hand” that are random and not really valid.
How can we keep from getting seduced by those thinking traps?
Chapter 11: Anchors
1. How do we revolve around “anchors” other than in negotiations of
contracts?
Chapter 12: Science of Availability
1. How does the media accent the availability bias?
2. Of what importance is this to public education?
Chapter 13: Availability, Emotion, and Risk
1. Paul Slovic says that “Mr. and Mrs. Citizen are guided by emotions rather
than by reason.” What evidence do you have of this in your position?
How can we counteract these effects?
2. What are some examples of ideas/systems in public education where we
give it too much weight?
Chapter 14: Tom W’s Speciality
1. When looking at data about student achievement, what are some
examples where groups need to question the true diagnostic validity of
their evidence?
Chapter 15: Linda Less is More
Chapter 16: Causes Trump Statistics
1. “Even compelling causal statistics will not change long-held beliefs or
beliefs rooted in personal experience.” How does this contribute to
racism?
2. “You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own
behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general.” How
can we use this idea to counteract prejudicial beliefs?
Chapter 17: Regression to the Mean
1. When looking at student achievement data, how should we be cognizant o
the principle of regression to the mean?
2. Give examples when people have said something is causal, when in fact it
is correlational.
Chapter 18: Taming Intuitive Predictions
1. What is your reaction to the idea that most predictions are overly
optimistic?
Chapter 19: Illusion of Understanding
1. Humans constantly fool ourselves and by constructing flimsy accounts of
the past and believing they are true. P 199. Educators often bring up
things that happen in the past whether it was one year ago or ten. We
also never really know the past but we construct a story that fits our
sense of the world, thereby committing narrative fallacy. Can you give
examples of when this has happened in your district?
2. How do these narrative fallacies establish the norm by which we make
decisions? How can this keep us stuck and unable to make new decisions
that are more fitting for the issue?
3. How does this contribute to blaming decision makers which in turn may
keep them from being willing to take risks?
4. “CEOs do influence performance but the effects are much smaller than
a reading of the business press suggests.” Please discuss.
Chapter 20—Illusion of Validity
1. “Confidence in judgment reflects coherence of information and cognitive
ease—the ability to create a coherent story.” “It is wise to take
declarations of high confidence as the ability of a person to create a
coherent story, not that the story is true.” How does this affect us as
we make decisions?
2. How is this reflected in political rhetoric from legislative bodies
surrounding policy decisions?
3. “People who predict the future make many mistakes because the future
is unpredictable,” How much reliance do you put on those who predict
outcomes? How does this statement affect the way you may think about
experts in the future?
Chapter 21—Intuitions vs. Formula
1. We are better off using algorithms to make decisions instead of
intuition. What algorithms do you use in hiring good people?
2. What algorithms do you use in making decisions about instructional
needs based on student data?
3. In this case less is more. How many algorithms do you use in hiring? In
making instructional decisions? How and why did you choose them?
Chapter 22: Expert Intuition: When can we trust it
1. Expertise is not a single skill but a collection. Experts may be highly
expert in some tasks but a novice in others. Where are you an expert?
Where are you a novice?
2. Short-term forecasting is more reliable than long-term. When have you
relied on a long-term forecast only to have to revamp and modify?
Chapter 23: The Outside View
1. Have you been part of a project that took longer than expected? One
for which energy waned before it was completed? Did you try to gather
data around similar projects before you started so you would have
reasonable expectations? Why or why not?
2. How would you plan projects in the future?
Chapter 24: Engine of Capitalism
1. Optimistic individuals play a disproportionate role in shaping our
environment. What are some examples in your setting?
2. What are some benefits you have received from this optimism?
3. Has anyone ever questioned this optimism and been perceived as being
disloyal, a nay-sayer? How can you incorporate those diverse opinions
into decisions so that better, more realistic decisions can be made?
Chapter 25: Bernoulli’s Errors
1. Because people are risk-averse, how has that affected decisions that
have been made in your setting? Has that influenced such things as
boundary shifts? Facility studies? Contract negotiations?
Chapter 26: Prospect Theory
1. Prospect theory talks about relative effects e.g. such as turning the
light on in a dark room is more noticeable than turning a light on in a lit
room. How does this effect influence our decisions?
2. We are also more sensitive to loss aversion than to gains. How does this
affect contract negotiations? Having teachers move rooms or change
grade levels/assignments?
Chapter 27: Endowment Effect
1. Endowment Effect similar to prospect theory in that gains are measured
against personal history, not global state of affairs. Again, how does
this influence how we make difficult decisions?
Chapter 28—Bad Events
1. The brain processes angry faces quicker than happy ones. How do we let
negative people, including bullies, demand more airtime than those who
have positive input? How can we stop paying so much attention to
bullies? How can we create meetings so that everyone has an equal
voice, not just the unhappy people?
Chapter 29: Fourfold Pattern
1. When people overweight probability outcomes—such as winning the
lottery—organizations/people get inferior outcomes. What are some
things we overweight in public education?
Chapter 30: Rare Events
1. People tend to underweight some rare events because they have not
experienced them. What are examples of things we underweight in
public education?
Chapter 31: Risk Policies
Chapter 32: Keeping Score
1. Sometimes we “keep score” by not canceling a floundering project
because we are keeping score against how this might appear on someone’s
record. Some projects and ideas, however, need to fail or implode
before we can move forward. What are some examples, beside NCLB,
that need to fail? Outcomes based education is an idea that lingered too
long because no one wanted to admit that it was too cumbersome to
administer. Do you have other examples?
2. Fear of regret can keep people immobilized. How can we counteract that
fear?
Chapter 33: Reversals
1. Are you aware of consciously using positive words to frame ideas, e.g.
Italy won the World Cup vs. France lost? What is an example that you
have used?
2. Do you use percentages to frame ideas in a positive way? Give an
example.
Chapter 35: Two Selves
1. There is a difference between the experience and the memory of the
experience. How does this contribute to the idea that there are more
than two sides to every story?
2. Why is it that we remember pain more quickly than pleasure?
Chapter 36: Life as a Story
1. Memory constructs stories. The feelings at the end of the experience
are the most memorable. How is this important as we consider the
experiences our students have in school?
Chapter 37: Experienced Well-Being
1. What we pay attention to shapes our emotional state. What are some
things we can do to support our staff, to support a state of well-being
when such things as socializing with peers, noise levels, and time pressure
are contributing factors to states of well-being?
Chapter 38: Thing about Life
1. Setting goals is important. Achievement of short term goals contributes
to states of well-being. How can we use this information in public
education? Personally?
Conclusions
1. Discuss the difference between economists of the Chicago school and
the behaviorist economists.
2. Discuss how, as an organization, you can avoid judgment errors of S1 and
S2.