Book Review: Thinking Fast and Slow

We’re frequently told that life is all about balance - where all truths are often a paradox, there is an art to finding the middle way through two seemingly opposing polarities. Nowhere is this more evident than when it comes to balancing our logical reasoning with our emotional intuition - our left and right hemispheres so to speak. In his worldwide bestseller - Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Khaneman, world famous psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think.

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When your life feels like a compelling drama of push and pull, there’s often a physiological reason behind the plot twists and turns - that we literally do find ourselves in ‘two minds’, one being reactive and automatic, and the other much more cooly calculated. Ultimately, this determines how we make decisions, think and act.

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System 1 is mostly unconscious - it’s the automatic, excitable element that can initially be hard to rationalise away, it tells us to give into our urges and instinctive reactions, often either because it feels good or will protect us in some way. This system is a legacy of our evolutionary past - there are inherent survival advantages in being able to make rapid actions and judgements. However intuition and instinct should not be confused - intuition is much more carefully honed via learned experience.

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System 2 is much more Hippocratic in its approach - the voice of logic, reason and clinically careful consideration. This deals with conscious activities of the mind such as self-control, choices and deliberate and focused attention. The relationship between these two complex, and occasionally mismatched systems determines much of our behaviour, and therefore destiny in life.

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This point is infamously illustrated by the Bat And Ball Problem: if a bat and ball cost $1.10, and the bat costs $1 more than the ball, how much does the ball cost? The intuitive answer is $0.10, but more careful consideration actually reveals it to be $0.05. The issue partly lies in the fact that System 1 perceives the problem to be simpler than it is, assuming that it can handle it on its own. It also exposes our innate mental laziness, because harnessing system 2 takes a lot more mental energy.

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Using system 2 is an important aspect of making more intelligent decisions in life, and strengthening this system instead of bypassing it involves practicing restraint, self-control, and focus. This can be especially difficult in todays world of constant overstimulation, consequently lower attention spans, propaganda and priming.

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Priming is when exposure to a word, concept or event causes us to summon associations. For example if you were asked to fill in the blanks for a word like “SO_P”, being primed by being exposed to the word EAT beforehand, could lead you to decide on SOUP, whereas being exposed to the word SHOWER, would lead you to settle on SOAP. This affects not just our minds, but our bodies and behaviours as well. For example, one study found that people primed with words such as ‘Florida’ or ‘wrinkle’ designed to provoke associations of being elderly, responded by walking at a slower pace than usual.

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This demonstrates that rather uncomfortably, we are not always as in control of our actions, judgements and choices as we like to think - we are creatures of our environments as they say. This leads us to wonder about the wider implications of social, economic and cultural priming that occurs in society at large, as well as the judgements and assumptions that we make about others in our lives.

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There is also the addition of confirmation bias, which is the tendency for people to agree with information that supports their previously held beliefs, as well as to accept whatever information is presented to them. Similarly The Halo Effect leads us to believe we will like someone just because we like one prevailing or more evident component of their character, even if we know relatively little about them.

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The Halo Effect and Confirmation Bias both occur because our minds are eager to make quick judgements. This often leads to mistakes because we don’t have enough information to make an accurate call, our minds rely on false suggestions and oversimplifications to fill in the gaps in the data, leading to false conclusions. These shortcuts are called heuristics.

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There are 2 main types of heuristic - the substitution heuristic and availability heuristic. The substitution heuristic is when we oversimplify the question, often one that entertains our cognitive biases instead of detailed research and deeper thought. The availability heuristic is where you overestimate the probability of something you hear often or find easy to remember, for example we think some tragic events that we read about in the news are much more common place than they are, simply because we are exposed to them in this way so frequently.

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Calculating accurate probabilities and insights often requires data. This helps us to keep the base rate in mind, as opposed to jumping to conclusions. It’s also helpful to remember that everything regresses to the mean. This is compounded by the fact that our minds don’t remember experiences in a straightforward way, whereas the experiencing self records how the situation feels now, the memory self records how the entire event unfolded after the fact.

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The memory self tends to dominate the experiencing self, but it’s actually less accurate because of ‘duration neglect’ - where we ignore the total duration of the event in favour of a particular memory from it. Second is the peak-end rule, where we overemphasise what occurs at the end of an event. Shifting into ‘mind over matter’ reminds us that adjusting the focus of our minds can dramatically affect our thoughts and behaviours.

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Systems 1 and 2 require different energy levels. Low cognitive input, or cognitive ease, is when system 1 is in charge and we feel most creative, intuitive and happy, however we are also more likely to make mistakes. System 2 flares up under cognitive strain and our awareness is more heightened. This system is more ready to double-check our judgments, so although it can be detrimental to creativity, we are statistically less likely to make mistakes.

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You can actively shift yourself into either of these states using different techniques. For example, seeing something familiar puts us into a state of cognitive ease, so if something is repeated to us, or made more memorable, it becomes more persuasive. Alternatively, exposing ourselves to complicated or confusing problems can shift us into a state of cognitive strain.

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It should be noted that any prevalent theory should always be open to revision. For a long time, influential groups of economists argued that we make rational decisions owing to ‘utility theory’ - whereby individuals make decisions by searching for rational facts and choosing the best overall outcome for them personally. We know this not to be the case.

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Using utility theory, the Chicago Schoo of Economics and Milton Friedman argued that individuals in the market-place are ultra-rational decision makers, later named ‘Econs’. These Econs were proposed to act rationally and value wealth in the same way, weighing only how much utility it provides them. Thanks to relativity and gut feeling however, we are a lot more irrational than we like to think.

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One thought movement that promotes this is Prospect Theory. We often make irrational decisions because we fear potential losses more than we value potential gains, and we also value things based on context and wider reference points.

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Thinking Fast And Slow reminds us that we can often be ‘in two minds’ about something. The first acts instinctively and requires little effort, the second is more deliberate and requires more of our attention. Our thoughts and actions vary depending on which of the two systems is in control of our brain at the time. The main take homes to remember when navigating this are:

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• Repetition: messages are more persuasive when we’re repeatedly exposed to them. This is probably because we evolved in a way that made repeated exposure to things that seemingly had no bad consequences seem inherently good.
• Damn Lies And Statistics: don’t believe in rare statistical events that are over-reported in newspapers. Disasters and other events are an important part of our history but we often overestimate their probability, because of repetition and vivid mental associations.
• You’re more creative and intuitive when you’re in a better mood. But some element of cognitive stress can help us to think more deeply about the task at hand.

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