In November, I will be moving to a new format where each month, I will focus on one book or several books that encapsulate one of the major themes I have covered so far. Meanwhile, there are three significant books that I will cover in September and October. The books include, “Thinking Fast and Slow,” Howard Zinn’s book, “A People’s History.” and Brad DeLong with“Slouching Toward Utopia.”
Thinking Fast and Slow is a foundational book that you will help you to understand why we humans do what we do. It was published in 2011 and is based on years of work by Daniel Kahneman, a professor at Princeton. A lot of the work was done with his friend and colleague, Amos Tverksy who died in 1996. Six years after Tversky's death, Kahneman received the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for the work he did in collaboration with Tversky. At that time, Kahneman told The New York Times in an interview, "I feel it is a joint prize. We were twinned for more than a decade.”
The book starts with this frame: He labels them System 1 and 2 but they are not systems in the standard sense. There is no part of your brain that one system would call home. But the labels are a useful way to understand the quirks of our minds. You could call them automatic and effortful systems.
System 1 operates automatically and cannot be turned off at will. Errors of intuitive thought are difficult to prevent. System 2 may have no clue to the error. It can only prevent the errors by enhanced monitoring and effortful activity. This continuous vigilance is not good and very impractical. The best we can do is compromise. Using this frame, the book presents lots of information that explain how we make mistakes. Knowing this doesn’t always make it easy to overcome our mistakes but if you start seeing the world through these frames, people make a lot more sense.
I am going to continue this book's summary by giving you many examples from the book that I found especially powerful. These are all snippets that build a complete frame that helped me see how people are manipulated, how and why we chose the wrong things and also how I think we can use our wonderful brains to slowly escape.
System 1 has been shaped by evolution to provide a continuous assessment of the main problems an organism must solve to survive. System 1 creates a coherent pattern and links a sense of cognitive ease to illusions of truth. It infers and invents causes and intentions. It neglects ambiguity and suppresses doubt. It is biased to believe and confirm. It over weighs low probabilities, like fearing flying more than driving. It responds more strongly to losses than to gains.
A remarkable aspect of your mental life is that you are rarely stumped. You have intuitive feelings and opinions about everything that comes your way. You often have answers to questions you do not completely understand, relying on evidence that you can neither explain or defend.
The disruption of System 2 makes it difficult for people to unbelieve false sentences. When System 2 is engaged, we will believe almost anything. System 1 is gullible and biased, System 2 is in charge of doubting and unbelieving. But System 2 is often busy and lazy. People are more influenced by empty persuasive messages when they are tired and depleted. System 1 uses confirmation bias and favors uncritical acceptance of suggestions and explanations. This is why you should never make important decision when you are tired and probably while sleeping on it makes so much sense.
The idea of money primes individualism, a reluctance to be involved with others, or to accept demands from others. Reminding people of their mortality increases the appeal of authoritarian ideas, which may become reassuring in the context of the terror of death. People who are asked to think of something they are ashamed of are more inclined to buy soap, it triggers a desire to cleanse. I laughed when I read this because after Biden was inaugurated and I was in the shower, I felt I was washing off the ugly of Trump.
The marvels of priming are vast. Talk about the elderly and you will be slower to get up. Studies show it impacts voting, if you vote in a church, you might vote against issues of what you perceive as moral questions. If you vote in a school, you are more likely to support school bond increases. Anchoring or priming can be threatening to subjective autonomy. If the content of your screen saver can affect your willingness to help strangers (and studies show that it can), how free are you?
A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. If you cannot remember the source of a statement, and have no way to relate it to other things, you have no option but to go with a sense of cognitive ease. Familiarity breeds liking. Mood affects the operation of system 1, when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.
Kahneman references Taleb and his references to causality in the Black Swan. When a major news item happens, and the stock market makes a move, causality is assigned. The experience of freely willed action is quite separate. Many people find it natural to describe their soul as the source and cause of their actions. Paul Bloom presented the provocative claim that our inborn readiness to separate physical and intentional causality explains the near universality of religious beliefs. We observe the world from two minds, making it possible for us to envision soulless bodies and bodiless souls. The two modes of causation that we are set to perceive make it natural for us to accept the two central beliefs in many religions, an immaterial divinity is the ultimate cause of the physical world, and immortal souls temporarily control our bodies while we live and leave them behind as we die. The two concepts of causality were shaped separately by evolutionary forces, building the origins of religion into the structure of System 1.
People tend to assess the importance of issues by the ease at which they are retrieved from memory and this is determined by the extent of the media coverage. There is little coverage of critical but unexciting issues. This explains why we often think things are much worse than they actually are.
Next week, we will continue to explore this fascinating work. Meanwhile, take one of the examples and see if you can explore how these systems are working on you.