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Arguably, one of the best chapters from Thinking, Fast and Slow is the one where Kanheman explains why we tend to jump to conclusions. 

It is a phenomenon that all of us experience on a daily basis when forming opinions about people or issues based on limited information, often clouded by existing beliefs and at times during conversations when we don’t listen properly before engaging. 

Kanheman offers the following insight into why jumping to conclusions can be a double-edged sword. 

“Jumping to conclusions is efficient if the conclusions are likely to be correct and the costs of an occasional mistake acceptable, and if the jump saves much time and effort. Jumping to conclusions is risky when the situation is unfamiliar, the stakes are high, and there is no time to collect more information. These are the circumstances in which intuitive errors are probable, which may be prevented by a deliberate intervention of System 2.” 

The tendency to believe in certain ideas based off on your belief system is an attribute of System 1. The act of unbelieving, so to speak, i.e. refuting the belief is an act of System 2. It has been shown that a busy System 2 means that people are more likely to fall for false information. This effect can be clearly seen as a direct consequence of media-frenzy, where System 2 is fatigued trying to process information from multiple sources, while System 1 is being misled into accepting incorrect news. 

Jumping to conclusions is responsible for a host of other cognitive biases such as the confirmation bias and the halo effect. 

Confirmation bias is the tendency to look for positive evidence that supports an underlying belief while overlooking and rationalizing our dismissal of contrary evidence. It is confirmation bias that often leads to polarization and second order effects that arise from it. 

The learning here is that our primitive minds are susceptible to accepting any information that feeds our existing beliefs. We need to be vigilant and allow for skepticism when considering information, especially when it contrasts with our own beliefs. 

This apocryphal saying attributed to Socrates would be a good way to conclude this blog. 

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”

While there are many interpretations of this statement, the reader is free to form his/her own, keeping in mind its intention of inspiring epistemic humility. 

A characteristic feature of System 1 is its ability to conjure up relevant words and imagery whenever you read something or even casually glance at text; it has been observed that even seemingly unrelated words elicit a coherent response in your mind.

Earlier schools of thought considered ideas as a linear sequence of thoughts built on a seed idea but our understanding of how these work has changed radically. It is now believed that ideas act like nodes in a network. Each node activates a bunch of other nodes which in turn activate others, thus triggering a chain reaction. Most of this is silent; meaning it goes unnoticed and not a by-product of conscious effort, hence a System 1 attribute.

Every sentence you read or image you take in gives rise to a response similar to this. Now consider being bombarded by hundreds of different ideas and opinions each starting off a different set of thoughts. It can be tiring. If you’ve wondered why it is so difficult to focus, this is one reason why. It is difficult to tame System 1, which is on all the time and which runs amok every time you have a new idea in your head.

I recently gave my GRE and for those of you who are familiar with it might know that it has a verbal section. The preparation for this section requires you to have decent vocabulary, something that I lacked. Like every other aspirant, I started mugging up words to rectify this. The way I remembered these words was to associate them with either a certain connotation (positive or negative) and then recall its meaning or its usage in a sentence. This is an excellent example of how our associative machinery works. While it was difficult to remember each word and its meaning, looking at the word nonetheless conjured up a unique train of thought in my head.

An extension of this idea of associative memory is that of priming. In essence, different types of words prime us to recall certain ideas over others and this subconsciously affects our decision making and actions.

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kanheman discusses the following example to illustrate the effects of priming:

Complete the following word  SO_P

If you’ve recently seen the word EAT, then SOUP will come to you easier but if you’ve seen the word WASH then SOAP would be easier to recall.

It has also been recorded that words influence our actions, although subliminally.

“This remarkable priming phenomenon – the influencing of an action by the idea – is known as the ideomotor effect.”  A reverse linkage has also been observed.

Kanheman says the following about priming effects and why it might affect our sense of self.

“Studies of priming effects have yielded discoveries that threaten our self-image as conscious and autonomous authors of our judgments and choices.”

The takeaway here is that System 1 is prone to priming and performs its associative processes without our being aware of it. This in turn influences our actions, sometimes insidiously. We should factor in priming when making decisions and use System 2 to counter its effects when trying to make a dispassionate decision. There is also potential upside in exploiting the reverse linkage in the ideomotor effect.

Kanheman ends this chapter on this insightful note:

“You have now been introduced to the stranger in you, which may be in control of much of what you do, although you rarely have a glimpse of it. System 1 provides the impressions that often turn into beliefs, and it is the source of the impulses that often become your choices and actions. It offers a tacit interpretation of what happens to you and around you, linking the present with the recent past and with expectations about the near future. It contains the model of the world that instantly evaluates events as normal or surprising. It is the source of your rapid and often precise intuitive judgments. And it does most of this without your conscious awareness of its activities.”

 

A quick refresher on System 1 and System 2:

System 1 – intuitive; automatic; switched on all the time.

System 2 – lazy; deliberate; called upon when greater mental effort is needed.

You can read The Two Modes of Thinking for an better understanding of how they work.

“It is now a well-established proposition that both self-control and cognitive effort are forms of mental work.”

We discussed earlier about attention being a limited resource in The Invisible Gorilla. This idea has ramifications for our day-to-day decision making, since a person who is cognitively busy may resort to using System 1 to make impulsive decisions which may or may not align with System 2.

An interesting paper, titled ‘Heart and Mind in Conflict: The Interplay of Affect and Cognition in Consumer Decision Making‘, concludes the following (edited for brevity):

“The characterization of the consumer in previous decision-making research as a ‘thinking machine,’ driven purely by cognition, is a poor reflection of reality. Moreover, examining how consumers actually make decisions in various shopping contexts, suggests that consumers are more often mindless rather than mindful decision makers.”

The researchers used chocolate cake and salad as two options that participants could choose. Participants who were asked to remember a 7-digit number, i.e. were cognitively busy, were more likely to choose the chocolate cake because System 1 made that decision. Furthermore, when asked about whether they would change their decision if presented again with the same choices, ~90% said no, which is an interesting observation, one we will delve into later.

“The conclusion is straightforward: self-control requires attention and effort. Another way of saying this is that controlling thoughts and behaviors is one of the tasks that System 2 performs.”

Ego depletion, or when exerting self-control leads to fatigue and loss of motivation to continue with it, is a controversial theory, but has been studied for decades with many studies indicating positive results. A summary of what’s transpired recently in this area of research can be found here: The End of Ego-Depletion Theory?

It should be noted that ego depletion and cognitive load are different concepts.

“One of the main functions of System 2 is to monitor and control thoughts and actions ‘suggested’ by System 1, allowing some to be expressed directly in behavior and suppressing or modifying others.”

It essentially acts as a filter, allowing thoughts and behaviors you deem in alignment with your belief system and rejecting primal or instinctive thoughts and behaviors that might go against it.

System 2 requires effort to reject intuitive answers and this process can be infuriating and even physically tiring in a fast paced world where information is being constantly bombarded at you from all sides, each eliciting a variety of emotions and thoughts.

The takeaway here is to avoid making important decisions when you feel that you’re running low on self-control, especially after you’ve engaged in high mental effort activities.

 

In the book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kanheman describes the idea of attention being a limited resource and observes how people engaged in an intense, high mental effort activity are effectively blind in such instances.

“The defining feature of System 2, in this story, is that its operations are effortful, and one of its main characteristics is laziness, a reluctance to invest more effort than is strictly necessary. As a consequence, the thoughts and actions that System 2 believes it has chosen are often guided by the figure at the center of the story, System 1. However, there are vital tasks that only System 2 can perform because they require effort and acts of self-control in which the intuitions and impulses of System 1 are overcome.”

In a famous experiment conducted by two researchers at Harvard, they performed the following exercise:

Students were asked to watch a video where two teams were passing a ball around and asked to count the number of passes that a particular team completes. Focusing on the ball is an activity that requires significant attention and renders some viewers oblivious to other things that are happening in the video.

The Invisible Gorilla Video

In the video, a person in gorilla costume moves across the screen and yet remains invisible to around 50% of the participants. This is because when you’re intensely focused on a single activity, you’re prone to missing out on other details.

You can find out more about the experiment and subsequent book they wrote titled “The Invisible Gorilla” on their website.

The second observation is that as you become skilled at a task, its demand for energy decreases, meaning that lesser attention is required for its completion.

“A general ‘law of least effort’ applies to cognitive as well as physical exertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature.”

I’ll share a few examples where I’ve observed how engaging in a high-attention activity blinds me to my surroundings and where an increase in skill level corresponds directly with lesser need for attention.

When I’d started learning how to drive a car, driving in traffic meant that my attention was fully on the road and I had almost zero awareness of what was going on in the car. I was working at my maximum cognitive load capacity. Compare this with people who are experienced drivers and you’ll see how they require much lesser attention when driving. 

The second example that comes to mind is when I started learning how to play football. Keeping the ball near your feet under control, moving with it and looking for players to pass requires a tremendous amount of concentration. In the initial stages, moving with the ball while looking up is a difficult task. You are concerned with keeping the ball close to your feet so you don’t lose it and that activity takes up almost all of your attention. This means that looking up for a pass becomes difficult. In this case as well, greater skill equates to less attention. With time, moving with the ball becomes easier. Experienced footballers rarely need to look down while playing. They focus their attention on looking for the perfect pass.

This inability to perceive everything that you’re physically looking at is called as inattentional blindness.

The lesson here is that we should be aware of the possibility of missing out on minor, yet important details when we’re focusing our attention narrowly on a task.

The second is to treat attention as a commodity available only in limited quantity and to realize that at times when the cognitive load is high and we’re stretched, we should avoid doing multiple tasks at the same time. It is only when you’re sufficiently skilled at a task, should you attempt to multitask. 

In colloquial terms, these details are often referred to as hiding in plain sight. A great article on how Nolan uses this technique of misdirection in The Prestige can be found here. 

In fact, almost all magic tricks are based on exploiting this defect. A line from the movie Now You See Me sums it up nicely.

“Come in close. Closer. Because the more you think you see, the easier it’ll be to fool you, because, what is seeing? You’re looking, but what you’re really doing is filtering, interpreting, searching for meaning. My job, (is) to take that most precious of gifts you give me, your attention, and use it against you. Because the closer you look, the less you see.”