Think Fast

Like many people interested in the subject of this blog, I’ve been reading and enjoying Daniel Kahneman’s best-selling book Thinking Fast and Slow.

Those of us who dabble in the subject of critical thinking tend to assume a classical understanding of the human makeup, one that sees people as essentially rational creatures.  And when reason fails us, we tend to blame this failure on emotion or some other component of our animal/non-reasoning self temporarily overwhelming the rationality that makes us us. 

Kahneman’s work in psychology (which won him Nobel Prize when applied to economics) contradicts (or at least confounds) these assumptions, demonstrating as it did that our reason might actually be faulty (or, at least, doesn’t work the way we think it does). 

Kahneman (in landmark work done with his colleague Amos Tversky) posited that our “mind” actually consists of two components: a fast-processing piece which he names System 1, and a slower, more deliberate part named (you guessed it) System 2.  And unlike other attempts to bifurcate or trifurcate the brain (into artistic vs. quantitative right and left hemispheres, or Freud’s Ego, Superego and Id), Kahneman’s fast System 1 and slow System 2 seems to provide a great deal of rigorous descriptive and predictive power. 

Under this framework, System 1 processes information (such as information coming in from the senses) lightning fast and attempts to make sense of it via associations and stories.  You can experience the uncontrolled associative nature of System 1 the next time you hear a familiar song and immediately (and without any deliberate effort) remember the last time you heard it, the first time you heard it, a dozen songs like it, and that great date when you danced to it in college.  Stories provide a way for System 1 to create coherence around sensory data and other input, without having to engage the more deliberate concentrative power of System 2.

And this System 2 is extremely powerful, grabbing control and overriding the association- and story-driven decisions of System 1 whenever it likes.  The trouble is, deliberative System 2 doesn’t like to do this very often since it is a lazy system that would prefer to take System 1 at its word whenever possible.

Times when this is not possible include situations when understanding requires a statistical vs. story-based understanding since System 1 doesn’t really “do” probabilities.  In fact, the illustration (and tool) Kahneman uses to illustrate the distinction between the two Systems are bets or gambles which make no sense from a purely utilitarian point of view, but are perfectly understandable once you see decisions on whether to take those bets being made by System 1 that doesn’t really get probability and a System 2 that would rather not bother if it didn’t have to.

Beyond statistics, this two-part model helps explain our susceptibility to visual and cognitive illusions, such as this famous example:

Looking at this image, most of us “know” that the two parallel lines are the same length, regardless of the fact that our own eyes registers the first longer than the second (a visual that is confirmed by System 1 acting on its own- which is what happens when children confront this illusion for the first time).  The reason we grownups “know” the lines are of equal length is that our System 2 is pulling in not visual imagery (which is what System 1 uses to process data), but data drawn from memory, i.e., the specific memory of having experienced this illusion previously as a child.  (In fact, my memory recalls not just this illusion, but the exact puzzle book where I saw it published –one which had an elaborate maze on the cover whose overall shape resembles a British toff wearing a bowler hat.)

This combination of a fast associative processor and slower, lazier deliberative processor leads to other types of illusions/errors, my favorite being the response you get when you ask people how many of each animal Moses  brought onto the ark.  This gag doesn’t work on the printed page, but when you ask someone the question out loud, most of them will confidently announce “two,” and only afterwards feel sheepish that they mistook Moses for Noah, the confusion arising because both names fall into the associative category “famous Biblical figures with long-O sounds in their names”.  (My favorite use of this trick came when I asked the Moses question of my neighbor, the local Episcopalian Minister, who began on a long exegesis regarding relevant chapters of Genesis before I stopped her and told her Moses never had an ark.)

But the slow processor, which must take over to perform certain tasks (such as multiplying two-digit numbers in your head) can also cause errors and omissions, one of the most famous illustrated in this observational assessment. 

Illusions aside, during the course of any given day, most of the mind’s work is performed by System 1 with System 2 intervening only when necessary.  Reading this piece, for example (no matter how engrossed you might be by it) is pretty much a System 1 activity, given that it consists of processing written information in a language you understand.  In fact, System 2 has only really been engaged during a small portion of the period when you were involved with this piece (when you were counting the basketball passes if you clicked on the link above).

All very intriguing, I hear you cry out.  But what does that have to do with critical thinking in general and critical thinking about the US election specifically?  Expect an answer to that question next time.