To anyone, who has ever come across the above title, must have been well aware that this post has to do something with the book that goes on by the same name as the title of this article, written by the famous Behavioral Economist “Dr. Daniel Kahneman”. And yes, it is absolutely true, I will be talking about some of the lessons that I have learned from the book after completing the first part.
In the book, most of the time Dr. Kahneman brings attention of the readers to a new concept by enabling them to take a small experiment beforehand. This experiment based approach certainly ignites some level of curiosity and also helps in keeping the readers more engaged with the content. Added to that, it also leaves some space for the readers to introspect and mingle with the content to see how it applies in their day to day life. As a matter of fact, I have tried to follow Dr. Kahneman and I have started the article with a small experiment as well.
I would like to add a small disclaimer here, this experiment is only meant for those who have either read the book or are familiar with its title at least.
So, here goes the experiment !!
Just figure out what is wrong in the article until now. To give some hints, I have already talked about the item that is wrong!!
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Think!!
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Eureka!! If you have figured it out, or else I would just give some more hints here. Focus on the title.
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Think!!
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Okay! Let’s get over the experiment before the non participants start to feel irritated.
The title of the article reads “Thinking fast or slow”, and anyone who has stumbled on the article because they were familiar with the book, must have read the title as “Thinking fast and slow”, which is actually the title of the book. The difference between the two names is very miniscule and often goes unnoticed to most people.
Okay so what was the experiment in all this?
Anyone who has read the book must have understood my point and must have entered in the reflection mode, so I will advise them to pause for a couple of minutes and refresh their memory. If you are still confused and curious then let’s get into the details about the point that I am trying to make here and decode the experiment, which will in turn give a good idea about the content of the book and might as well persuade a couple of readers to go ahead and read the book. So, here we go.
If you haven’t read the book mentioned above or heard about it, then assume any book that you have read recently or anytime in your life. And now, suppose that you come across a post with a title similar to that of the book and irrespective of whether you clicked on the article to read or not, your mind must have made a quick image or brought in some memory associated with it in your head. Right? It just pops in your head and seems like an involuntary action of which you had no control over. As explained in the book “System 1” (fast thinking) was in action at the moment. System 1 is like the active memory of your brain that stores a lot of what you see or do in your day to day life that requires minimal conscious effort. And as a matter of fact, it stores certain facts that you had not even intended to store, like a face of a stranger that you might have noticed while running last week.
To make it more illustrative, think of a ripple that gets formed in the lake when you throw a stone. It spreads out and covers the entire lake almost immediately, however at the far ends of the lake its visibility becomes almost negligible. System 1 of your brain is exactly like a lake here and the information is wired in it like a ripple. In the example above, the image of the book is stored somewhere in one of the outermost layers of the ripple. But as soon as you came across the title of the article System 1 went to work almost immediately. Even before you were done reading the title completely. It quickly formed connections with the outer layers of the ripple and within a very short interval of time it managed to bring the stored information to the center and that eventually led to a quick formation of the image or any associated memory of the book in your mind. In our experiment also the System 1 was hyperactive, and when you act so fast you are bound to miss out on small details like the one in the experiment. This is the main characteristic of System 1, it is quick and immediately tries to come out with a response, no matter what the situation is.
Take a moment, if you are still imagining the lake. As a recommendation, try to activate your System 2 because there is going to be some slow thinking required here to fully grasp the content.
If you have gotten past the last paragraph, you can introspect and understand that it took relatively more of your time to completely grasp the content of the last paragraph as compared to content of earlier paragraphs. The reason is simple: the content mentioned above pointed out a new concept that was completely foreign to you. And to fully grasp it you had to do some sort of analytical thinking and mental exertion that required conscious effort. Kahneman terms this sort of reasoning as Slow thinking or action of “System 2”.System 2 is the lazy part of the brain and always prefers to rest. It only gets activated when it is actively directed by the consciousness.
In our experiment the laziness of System 2 was more responsible than the rapidness of System 1 for failure. I will make it clear now.
To succeed in the experiment, there was a level of conscious effort required at the participants’ end. Like, re reading the article again and then thinking about what must have been wrong. Right? But as a lazy human being we are entitled to act lazy and minimize the amount of hard work that is required. And especially so, when we are expected to get the answer by just scrolling down. This laziness forms the core of the functioning of the human brain and it is the extent to which humans are able to get past this laziness that actually determines the success of anyone in any given task, not just this experiment.
And even if you had managed to scroll and had glanced over the title to look for the error, it would have been hard for you to lay your eyes on a small word like “or” which is surrounded by other more important words like “Thinking”, “Fast” and “slow”. The dominance of the other three words was such that the fourth word simply got missed out and many of you got victimized by the same. Technically, this is referred to as the “Halo effect”. I will not go into detail of the term here as I wish to devote a complete article to it.
I will highlight how system 1 and 2 influence decision making by taking another example in case the experiment thing is still bouncing over your head. Let’s say you plan to go out for a run and you intend to run 2 kilometers. You complete the first kilometer and your toes start to hurt. Your first reaction to the pain would be to stop because that is what is stored in your brain (System 1), to stop when you start to feel uncomfortable. However, if you were to think more consciously, you could have drawn back to moments where you had kept on running despite suffering from immense pain and that retrospection would have somehow given you the courage to go for the next kilometer and eventually you would have ended up completing the distance pretty smoothly. The point here is that as a human being we need to constantly remind ourselves that we should not make decisions based on our System 1, instead we should often challenge it by going against it and keep updating it with more of our conscious abilities.
To summaries, we can say that System 1 is the active memory and is often responsible for the quick intuition and judgements. The activities like walking casually, daydreaming etc. and all the other activities that require little to none of your conscious effort is the function of the System 1. While the activities like running, self-control etc. that require some sort of mental exertion and analytical thinking is the function of System 2.However, as an irrational human being we often end up becoming slaves to System 1 and put our System 2 on hold in most of the life situations that challenge us in some way. As Kahneman says System 1 is the sweet tooth, and most of us fall prey to it.
I would end by giving a quick task to anyone who is still here. The next time you go on and grab your smartphone to scroll random stuff on the Internet, just care about asking yourself. Whether you are making a conscious choice or not?
PS : There are many more anecdotes that can be drawn from the book and immediately applied in our day to day life, which can definitely boost the quality of our decision making abilities. So, I will recommend this book to anyone and everyone.