Book Review: Thinking, Fast and Slow
The book describes the operation of the mind via two systems:
System 1
Operating automatically and quickly, with no sense of voluntary control.
Requires little or no effort.
Responsible for the effortless origination of impressions and feelings that are the main sources of the choices and beliefs of System 2.
System 2
Allocates attention to effortful mental activities (things like complex computation).
Think subjective experiences like agency, choice and concentration.
Requires attention and is disrupted when attention is drawn away.
System 2 is in charge of self control.
When we think about ourselves we think about us in the context of system 2, the conscious, reasonable self that has beliefs, makes choices and decides what to think and what to do.
2. We can be blind to the obvious, but also we can be blind to our blindness.
Things like intense focussing can blind us to the obvious
3. An an experiment called “The Gorilla Study”
Viewers are tasked to count the number of times white t-shirt wearing basketball team players pass the ball, and are instructed to ignore the black t-shirt wearing players in the game. Mid way through the video a women in a gorilla suit walks into the middle of the floor and waves her arms around. The task is so absorbing, about half of the people watching it do not see the gorilla. Furthermore, viewers who fail to see the gorilla are certain it was not there.
4. “Ego depletion.”
If you have to force yourself to do something you are less able to exert self-control when the next challenge comes along.
Reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences with a study done on eight parole judges.
The default decision is denial of parole, with 35% of parole requests approved.
As part of the study the exact time of each decision is recorded, and the times of the judges food breaks.
The study found that the portion of approved requests spikes after each meal, when about 65% of the 35% requests are granted. The approval rate after that drops steadily to zero until the judges have their next meal.
5. Intelligence, control and rationality.
Individuals who uncritically follow their intuitions about puzzles, tasks or questions, are prone to accept impulsive, impatient suggestions and keen to receive immediate gratification.
In a study of the following question “what would you prefer €3,400 now or €3,800 next month?” Approx. 60% of intuitive respondents go with €3,400 now. Wheres with respondents more prone to critical thinking and activating their system 2, only 37% of these are likely to go with €3,400 for now.
6. Some people are more like their system 1, others their system 2.
High intelligence does not make people immune to biases or cognitive errors.
Rationality, should be distinct from intelligence.
In this same thread “laziness” is proposed as a flaw of rationality.
7. Associative memory and how it works.
Psychologists think of ideas as nodes in a vast network, called associative memory, in which each idea is linked with many others.
Most of the work of associative thinking is silent, hidden from our conscious selves.
8. How “priming effects” impact our associative memory.
Our actions and emotions can be primed by events of which we are not even aware. In an experiment carried out by psychologist John Barge at NYU, he asked students to to assemble four word sentences from a set of five words. For example, “finds he it yellow instantly”.
For ONE group of students, half the scrambled sentences contained words associated with the elderly:
Florida
Forgetful
Bald
Grey
Wrinkle
Once they completed this task, the young students were asked to walk down the short corridor to another room to complete another experiment.
The short walk was the experiment. The researchers measured the time it took for people to walk the corridor. The young students who fashioned the sentences from words with a elderly theme walked down the hallway significantly more slowly than the others.
Money primed people tend to be more selfish.
In an experiment where a student “clumsily” dropped a bunch of pencils on the floor, other student participants with money (unconsciously) on their mind (they were shown a screensaver background with money as the theme), picked up fewer pencils.
9. Cognitive Ease & Illusions of truth.
A reliable way to make people believe in falsehood is frequent repetition because familiarity is not easily distinguished from the truth.
If it is strongly linked by logic or association to other beliefs or preferences that you hold, or comes from a source you trust and like, you will feel a sense of cognitive ease.
Interestingly, the book comments that survival prospects are poor for anything not suspicious of novelty.
Initial caution will fade if the stimulus is actually safe, implying that quickly assessing something as safe or true can be a very dangerous default.
10. Jumping to conclusions.
The psychologist Daniel Gilbert proposed that understanding a statement must begin with an attempt to believe it: you must first know what the idea would mean if it were true. Only then can you decide whether or not to unbelieve it.
Think if you were asked the question “is Sam friendly?” Different instances of Sam’s behavior will automatically come to mind than if the question was asked “is Sam unfriendly?”
When system 2 is otherwise engaged, we will believe almost anything. Remember that system 2 is often busy and often lazy.