[acb-hsp] Thinking, Fast and Slow

[peter altschul]

Thinking, Fast and Slow

 by Daniel Kahneman -- review

An outstandingly clear and precise study of the 'dual- process' 
model of the brain and our embedded self-delusions

Galen Strawson guardian.co.uk 13 December 2011

A human being "is a dark and veiled thing; and whereas the hare 
has seven skins, the human being can shed seven times seventy 
skins and still not be able to say: This is really you, this is 
no longer outer shell." So said Nietzsche, and Freud agreed: we 
are ignorant of ourselves.  The idea surged in the 20th century 
and became a commonplace, a "whole climate of opinion", in 
Auden's phrase.

It's still a commonplace, but it's changing shape.  It used to be 
thought that the things we didn't know about ourselves were dark 
-- emotionally fetid, sexually charged.  This was supposed to be 
why we were ignorant of them: we couldn't face them, so we 
repressed them.  The deep explanation of our astonishing ability 
to be unaware of our true motives, and of what was really good 
for us, lay in our hidden hang-ups.

These days, the bulk of the explanation is done by something 
else: the "dual-process" model of the brain.  We now know that we 
apprehend the world in two radically opposed ways, employing two 
fundamentally different modes of thought: "System 1" and "System 
2".  System 1 is fast; it's intuitive, associative, metaphorical, 
automatic, impressionistic, and it can't be switched off.  Its 
operations involve no sense of intentional control, but it's the 
"secret author of many of the choices and judgments you make" and 
it's the hero of Daniel Kahneman's alarming, intellectually 
aerobic book Thinking, Fast and Slow.

System 2 is slow, deliberate, effortful.  Its operations require 
attention.  (To set it going now, ask yourself the question "What 
is 13 x 27?" And to see how it hogs attention, go to 
theinvisiblegorilla.com/videos.html and follow the instructions 
faithfully.) System 2 takes over, rather unwillingly, when things 
get difficult.  It's "the conscious being you call 'I'", and one 
of Kahneman's main points is that this is a mistake.  You're 
wrong to identify with System 2, for you are also and equally and 
profoundly System 1.  Kahneman compares System 2 to a supporting 
character who believes herself to be the lead actor and often has 
little idea of what's going on.

System 2 is slothful, and tires easily (a process called "ego 
depletion") -- so it usually accepts what System 1 tells it.  
It's often right to do so, because System 1 is for the most part 
pretty good at what it does; it's highly sensitive to subtle 
environmental cues, signs of danger, and so on.  It kept our 
remote ancestors alive.  SystÁchggme 1 a ses raisons que 
SystÁchggme 2 ne connaÁggrggment point, as Pascal might have 
said.  It does, however, pay a high price for speed.  It loves to 
simplify, to assume WYSIATI ("what you see is all there is"), 
even as it gossips and embroiders and confabulates.  It's 
hopelessly bad at the kind of statistical thinking often required 
for good decisions, it jumps wildly to conclusions and it's 
subject to a fantastic suite of irrational biases and 
interference effects (the halo effect, the "Florida effect", 
framing effects, anchoring effects, the confirmation bias, 
outcome bias, hindsight bias, availability bias, the focusing 
illusion, and so on).

The general point about the size of our self-ignorance extends 
beyond the details of Systems 1 and 2.  We're astonishingly 
susceptible to being influenced -- puppeted -- by features of our 
surroundings in ways we don't suspect.  One famous (pre-mobile 
phone) experiment centred on a New York City phone booth.  Each 
time a person came out of the booth after having made a call, an 
accident was staged -- someone dropped all her papers on the 
pavement.  Sometimes a dime had been placed in the phone booth, 
sometimes not (a dime was then enough to make a call).  If there 
was no dime in the phone booth, only 4% of the exiting callers 
helped to pick up the papers.  If there was a dime, no fewer than 
88% helped.

Since then, thousands of other experiments have been conducted, 
right across the broad board of human life, all to the same 
general effect.  We don't know who we are or what we're like, we 
don't know what we're really doing and we don't know why we're 
doing it.  That's a System-1 exaggeration, for sure, but there's 
more truth in it than you can easily imagine.  Judges think they 
make considered decisions about parole based strictly on the 
facts of the case.  It turns out (to simplify only slightly) that 
it is their blood-sugar levels really sitting in judgment.  If 
you hold a pencil between your teeth, forcing your mouth into the 
shape of a smile, you'll find a cartoon funnier than if you hold 
the pencil pointing forward, by pursing your lips round it in a 
frown-inducing way.  And so it goes.  One of the best books on 
this subject, a 2002 effort by the psychologist Timothy D Wilson, 
is appropriately called Strangers to Ourselves.

We also hugely underestimate the role of chance in life (this is 
System 1's work).  Analysis of the performance of fund managers 
over the longer term proves conclusively that you'd do just as 
well if you entrusted your financial decisions to a monkey 
throwing darts at a board.  There is a tremendously powerful 
illusion that sustains managers in their belief their results, 
when good, are the result of skill; Kahneman explains how the 
illusion works.  The fact remains that "performance bonuses" are 
awarded for luck, not skill.  They might as well be handed out on 
the roll of a die: they're completely unjustified.  This may be 
why some banks now speak of "retention bonuses" rather than 
performance bonuses, but the idea that retention bonuses are 
needed depends on the shared myth of skill, and since the myth is 
known to be a myth, the system is profoundly dishonest -- unless 
the dart-throwing monkeys are going to be cut in.

In an experiment designed to test the "anchoring effect", highly 
experienced judges were given a description of a shoplifting 
offence.  They were then "anchored" to different numbers by being 
asked to roll a pair of dice that had been secretly loaded to 
produce only two totals -- three or nine.  Finally, they were 
asked whether the prison sentence for the shoplifting offence 
should be greater or fewer, in months, than the total showing on 
the dice.  Normally the judges would have made extremely similar 
judgments, but those who had just rolled nine proposed an average 
of eight months while those who had rolled three proposed an 
average of only five months.  All were unaware of the anchoring 
effect.

The same goes for all of us, almost all the time.  We think we're 
smart; we're confident we won't be unconsciously swayed by the 
high list price of a house.  We're wrong.  (Kahneman admits his 
own inability to counter some of these effects.) We're also 
hopelessly subject to the "focusing illusion", which can be 
conveyed in one sentence: "Nothing in life is as important as you 
think it is when you're thinking about it." Whatever we focus on, 
it bulges in the heat of our attention until we assume its role 
in our life as a whole is greater than it is.  Another systematic 
error involves "duration neglect" and the "peak-end rule".  
Looking back on our experience of pain, we prefer a larger, 
longer amount to a shorter, smaller amount, just so long as the 
closing stages of the greater pain were easier to bear than the 
closing stages of the lesser one.

Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel prize for economics in 2002 and he 
is, with Amos Tversky, one of a famous pair.  For many in the 
humanities, their names are fused together, like Laurel and Hardy 
or Crick and Watson.  Thinking, Fast and Slow has its roots in 
their joint work, and is dedicated to Tversky, who died in 1996.  
It is an outstanding book, distinguished by beauty and clarity of 
detail, precision of presentation and gentleness of manner.  Its 
truths are open to all those whose System 2 is not completely 
defunct; I have hardly touched on its richness.  Some chapters 
are more taxing than others, but all are gratefully short, and 
none requires any special learning.

* Galen Strawson's Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics is 
published by Oxford University Press.