BOOK QUESTION: Thinking, fast and slow What does the author mean by “mental shotgun”? Select all true statements.

Question

BlackTom AI · Accepted Answer

Mental shotgun describes System 1’s tendency to fire many associations at once so that judgments are contaminated by extra, automatically produced information that isn’t strictly required for the question at hand.

1) Relevant knowledge points and concepts
- System 1 (fast thinking) is associative: a stimulus primes many related ideas, feelings, and impressions.
- Substitution and associative spillover: when a hard question is asked, a simpler related answer is produced, often based on a bundle of activated associations.
- Kahneman’s “mental shotgun” metaphor captures that System 1 “shoots” many mental fragments toward the judgment, some of which are irrelevant or misleading.

2) Step-by-step reasoning process
- A judgment prompt (e.g., “How satisfied are you with your life?”) activates a network of associations (recent events, mood, a political headline, a family memory).
- System 1 computes many of these pieces rapidly and presents them to consciousness.
- The conscious judgment assimilates some of this extra material, so the final answer reflects more information than the specific question required.
- Because some activated pieces are incidental, they can distort the judgment.

3) (No numerical calculations here; conceptual steps listed above.)

4) Why the correct answer is correct
- Option b states that people compute and produce more information than strictly needed and some of it can be irrelevant or misleading. That is precisely what Kahneman means by “mental shotgun”: an overproduction of associative responses that spill into judgments.

5) Why the other options are incorrect
- Option a describes rater leniency/severity (individual disposition producing variability or “noise”), which is a different concept (bias/noise in judgment), not the “mental shotgun.”
- Option c describes the availability/WYSIATI bias (relying solely on readily available information), which is related to System 1 but not the same as producing an excess of associative information; it emphasizes omission of unseen information rather than overproduction of extra associations.

Conclusion: Option b is correct, while a and c are incorrect. The final answer matches the provided answer: b.

BOOK QUESTION: Thinking, fast and slow What does the author mean by “mental shotgun”? Select all true statements.多项选择题

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