Sunday, March 18, 2012

The Moses Illusion

One of the books I am now reading is Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow. I'm getting familiar with System I and System II.

Here's a mind-question from Kahneman: "How many animals of each kind did Moses take into the ark?" (See below for answer...)


Kahneman writes: "The number of people who detect what is wrong with this question is so small that it has been dubbed the “Moses illusion.” Moses took no animals into the ark; Noah did." (p. 73)

Most people don't get the right answer because of the automatic "associative machine" in our mind's System I.