LARGE businesses can face problems, however, when they forget about the long term and start acting like the truck owner.

Bank of America is not the first company, or even the first bank, to make this mistake. In 1995, First Chicago imposed a $3 fee to use a teller for a transaction that could be conducted with an A.T.M. A storm of protest erupted. (Mr. Leno had a good line on that one, too: “So, if you want to talk to a human, it’s $3. But the good news is, for $3.95 you can talk dirty to her, so that’s O.K.”)

It took until 2002 for the company, by then called Bank One, to eliminate the fee and to acknowledge that it had been a public relations error.

Why can’t managers anticipate that their actions might provoke such outrage? The best explanation may be that people’s fairness judgments are gut reactions, not economic analyses. As Mr. Kahneman explains in his new book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” these are the types of judgments we make instinctively rather than reflectively. Feeling your blood boil typically does not involve careful calculation.

The fact that we react instinctively to some company actions can also mean that the public anger may be misplaced. Bank of America’s debit card fee was public and transparent — generally desirable features of a pricing policy, though they may not be good for public relations. Unfortunately, more unsavory actions that are less visible may be less likely to provoke customer fervor.

In a case I consider much more troubling, Bank of America recently settled a class-action lawsuit regarding overdraft fees on debit cards. Two bank policies were called out in the lawsuit. First, when a customer ran out of money and used a debit card, the bank would allow the purchase to go through — as a courtesy, it said — and then charge a fee of $35. Worse, the bank was accused of processing a day’s transactions in this order: from the largest to the smallest, rather than in the sequence in which they were actually made.