"Ant mega-colony takes over world"

Best article title I've seen since Super Cally Go Ballistic, Celtic are Atrocious and Diana fund pays out to Gypsies and Asylum Seekers in the Express.

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Introducing System 3: How we use our imagination to make choices

In recent years we’ve become used to thinking about decisions as “system 1” or “system 2”. System 1 choices are automatic decisions, made without thinking, based on an immediate emotional or sensory reaction. System 2 is used to stop and rationally calculate the consequences of our choices, and determine the best cost-benefit tradeoff.

But these two processes don’t capture every decision. Indeed they might only encompass a minority of our daily choices.

Recent work in neuroscience and psychology has discovered another way of making choices: with the imagination. Customers imagine their possible futures: the outcomes they would experience after a choice, and how those outcomes will make them feel. The future that makes them feel happiest will be the one they choose. These choices use different parts of the brain than System 1 and 2. They are called System 3 choices.

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The Cognitive Economics session will take place on Sunday 6 January 2019 at 8-10am in Atlanta Marriott Marquis, International 10. I hope that any readers who are attending the conference are able to come along!

Let’s give you a quick overview of the session:
Dan Benjamin, University of Southern California; Kristen Cooper, Gordon College; Ori Heffetz, Cornell University and Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Miles Kimball, University of Colorado Boulder will be presenting a paper on What Do People Want? On the use of large-scale surveys to estimate multidimensional indifference maps over "fundamental" goods that include mental states such as emotions, perceptions and beliefs: answering the quest…
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