Thinking, Fast and Slow
Recommended by: Bill Roos
Posted in: Psychology
Purchase →We think of ourselves as conscious, reasoning selves who have beliefs, make choices, and decide what to think about and what to do. Kahneman refers to this as the mind’s “System 2.” However, the mind’s automatic System 1 is actually where the action is. Most of what you (your System 2) think and do originates in System 1, but System 2 takes over when things get difficult, and it normally has the last word.
Some examples of the automatic, effortless, always-on activities of System 1:
• Detect that one object is more distant than another.
• Complete the phrase “bread and…”
• Make a “disgust face” when shown a horrible picture.
• Detect hostility in a voice.
• Answer to 2 + 2 = ?
• Understand simple sentences.
• Recognize that a “meek and tidy soul with a passion for detail” resembles an occupational stereotype.
Some examples of the operation of System 2:
• Count the occurrences of the letter a in a page of text.
• Compare two washing machines for overall value.
• Fill out a tax form.
• Check the validity of a complex logical argument.
System 1 has biases, systemic errors that it tends to make in certain circumstances. Sometimes it answers easier questions than the one it was asked. It has little understanding of logic and statistics. It automatically tries to create a coherent story from the facts available, even if it doesn’t have enough data or the quality of the data is poor. But these biases cannot always be avoided, because System 2 may not realize that System 1 made an error.
The operations of System 2 require effortful attention and they are disrupted when attention is drawn away. System 2 is sometimes busy, and often lazy.
Kahneman sums it up:
“System 2 is much too slow and inefficient to serve as a substitute for System 1 in making routine decisions. The best we can do is a compromise: learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high. The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people’s mistakes than our own.”
Kahneman also notes
“a puzzling limitation of our mind: our excessive confidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we live in. We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events. Overconfidence is fed by the illusory certainty of hindsight.”
Here’s Kahneman discussing the book:
https://youtu.be/CjVQJdIrDJ0
Yale Law School professor Peter Schuck, commenting on the original paper on which this book was based, writes:
“[I]n widely cited experimental work that earned a Nobel Prize, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky showed that individual decision making is commonly distorted by recurrent, recalcitrant cognitive patterns and logical errors—some forty-five of them!”
Peter H. Schuck, Why Government Fails So Often – And How It Can Do Better (2014).
All Braver Angels should be aware of how the structure and processes of the human brain operate to mislead us time and time again. This book can help us avoid our natural cognitive distortions and think more clearly. It should also produce a greater degree of humility in our own beliefs and a greater willingness to listen to the other side. As Kahneman writes: “The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people’s mistakes than our own. “