Aug 14, 2026 · 12 min · 7 segments
Most poor decisions are not made by reckless people. They are made by capable people at the wrong moment – when they are tired, stressed or have consumed alcohol. In this episode, Grace is joined by…
Louise WestonGuestGraceHostSo when people hear bias, they often think, you know, purely about prejudice, discrimination, but you're talking about something kind of broader here, aren't you?
So there's a psychologist, Susan Fiske, she, she coined this term cognitive miser-
Mm-hmm
... which describes the way that we kind of conserve mental effort when we're making decisions by relying on shortcuts, habits, heuristics, rather than careful analytical thinking where possible.
And that's, you know, human beings can't process every single piece of information perfectly all the time.
Mm-hmm.
And Daniel Kahneman, who won a, a Nobel Prize on his work around judgment and decision-making, kind of described the way that we think and make decisions as, as, as being part, you know, being two systems.
Right.
Nattily named system one, which is kind of the, the fast, automatic, instinctive type of thinking.
So things like when we're driving a car on an empty road, you know, we're not thinking too much about it.
When we're, you know, somebody asks us what two plus two is, we, you know, we're not-
Yeah
This is the type of, you know, when, when we're thinking about things, it requires really conscious effort, attention.
So when people hear bias, they often think, you know, purely about prejudice, discrimination, but you're talking about something kind of broader here, aren't you?
So there's a psychologist, Susan Fiske, she, she coined this term cognitive miser-
Mm-hmm
... which describes the way that we kind of conserve mental effort when we're making decisions by relying on shortcuts, habits, heuristics, rather than careful analytical thinking where possible.
And that's, you know, human beings can't process every single piece of information perfectly all the time.
Mm-hmm.
And Daniel Kahneman, who won a, a Nobel Prize on his work around judgment and decision-making, kind of described the way that we think and make decisions as, as, as being part, you know, being two systems.
Right.
Nattily named system one, which is kind of the, the fast, automatic, instinctive type of thinking.
So things like when we're driving a car on an empty road, you know, we're not thinking too much about it.
When we're, you know, somebody asks us what two plus two is, we, you know, we're not-
Yeah
This is the type of, you know, when, when we're thinking about things, it requires really conscious effort, attention.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
