Thinking Fast and Slow
How Understanding Your Brain, Will Allow You to Understand the World
“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it.”
So over the past few weeks, I have been reading this book Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman and it is amazing. This book is all about how the human mind perceives its surroundings within the context of statistics, psychology, and economics. Daniel Kahneman is a Nobel prize laureate himself for his work in behavioral economics. Everything written below is derived from his work.
There are two systems to your brain.
System 1 (autonomic): Operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.
System 1 is impulsive. It is the system you use when you enter a room and flip on the lights or when you flush the toilet. These are behaviors that we have adopted automatically. System 1 is a remnant from our past, and it’s crucial to our survival. Not having to think before jumping away from a car when it honks at you is quite useful.
System 2 (conscious): Allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.
System 2 is the system we use to deliberately focus our attention on something. System 2 is very thoughtfull and regulated. This is the system that you would use when trying to identify Waldo in a picture.
Waldo is in the center behind a red and white striped towel. System 2 is only a recent addition to our brain. It has only developed within the past millennium. System 2 is what allows us to strive in our hectic world today. System 2 regulates priorities earning money, creating opportunities, and solving intricate problems.
Kahneman coined the terms system 1 and system 2, which he uses regularly throughout the text. The point of distinguishing these two systems is to identify when to trust your own thoughts and ideas. Kahneman throughout his book reinforces the idea that the brain is consistently looking for the easiest ways to complete tasks, which in some cases leads us not using the entirety of our brain. The greatest example of this would be represented through the Muller-Lyer illusion.
“This picture is unremarkable: two horizontal lines of different lengths, with fins, appended, pointing in different directions. The bottom line is obviously longer than the one above it. That is what we all see, and we naturally believe what we see. As you can easily confirm by measuring them with a ruler, the horizontal lines are in fact identical in length.”
There is a myriad of lessons that I learned from this book, and I am going to show you how you can apply these to your everyday life.
Lesson 1: Priming
Priming: Exposure to a stimulus influences your response to a later stimulus
Example:
Look at this photo and then quickly fill out the missing letters from this word:
S_ _ P
Did you think about Soap? The image of the bathtub primed your brain so that your associative memory would envoke something relating to it i.e soap.
However, if you saw an image of a restaurant perhaps you would have said soup.
Application of priming in our daily lives:
You can use priming to make your day better. Even by forcing your self to smile you are creating the same mild senses that an actual smile would induce thus making you happier.
Lesson 2: Loss Aversion
Loss Aversion: refers to people’s preferences to avoid losing compared to gaining the equivalent amount.
Example:
“The graph has two distinct parts, to the right and to the left of a neutral reference point. A salient feature is that it is S-shaped, which represents diminishing sensitivity for both gains and losses. Finally, the two curves of the S are not symmetrical. The slope of the function changes abruptly at the reference point: the response to losses is stronger than the response to corresponding gains”.
This is loss aversion.
- You’re given $1,000. Then you have the choice between receiving another, fixed $500, or taking a 50% gamble to win another $1,000.
- You’re given $2,000. Then you have the choice between losing $500, fixed, or taking a gamble with a 50% chance of losing another $1,000.
Which choice would you make for each one?
If you’re like most people, you would rather take the safe $500 in scenario 1, and not the gamble in scenario 2. Yet the odds of ending up at $1,000, $1,500 or $2,000 are the exact same in both.
The reason has to do with loss aversion. We’re a lot more afraid to lose what we already have, as we are keen on getting more.
Application of loss aversion in our daily lives: Be less emotional with your money, and more statistical.
Lesson 3: Cognitive Ease
Cognitive Ease: is essentially how easily our brains can process information.
Cognitive ease can range from anywhere between ease (fairly relaxed, good mood, and trust intuitions) to strained (stressful, more effort, fewer errors, but also less creative).
Example:
Conveying a message using rhymes can be easily remembered. This stylistic device is a good way to stay longer in the minds of your “consumers”.
Medium itself uses cognitive ease because it only allows writers to put their pictures on the left side, or the center of the article. Visual elements positioned on the left side are processed by the right hemisphere of the brain, which is better suited for image processing. People will “digest” the page more quickly and easily, and it will have a more pleasing effect on them.
Application of cognitive ease in our daily lives:
One can implore cognitive ease by creating less cognitive strain, making it more likely for someone to believe one's message without questioning them. For example, “I averaged a 2.3 GPA in high school”. “I averaged a 3.8 GPA in high school”. The former should be easier to believe because it is made easier to view for the reader thus reducing any cognitive strain. The less cognitive strain a person has to face the more likely they are to accept ideas without thinking, evoking system 1.
Lesson Four: The Law of Small Numbers
The Law of small numbers is a bias to believe the characteristics of a sample population can be estimated from a small number of observations or data points.
Example:
“When people observe a basketball player make several baskets in a row, they assume it must because he or she is “hot”. They forget that because the sample size is small, such coincidences are not only unsurprising, they are inevitable. In fact, when a group of scientists examined the shooting pattern of professional players, they found something remarkable — there is no such thing as the “hot hand” in basketball. That is, players are no more likely to make a shot after making the previous shot (or shots) than after missing the previous shot (or shots). Despite this fact, people continue to believe in the hot hand, one of several by-products of the mistaken belief in the law of small numbers”.
Application of the law of small numbers in our daily lives:
People expect there to be many more alternations than would be expected by chance. In other words, they expect not only the entire sequence to contain approximately 50%, but each portion of the sequence to contain approximately 50% as well. Try not to be hoodwinked by the law of small numbers and examine each situation or scenario in there entirety (relatively speaking).
These examples are only a fraction of what I learned through this book. I have linked below a website where you can read Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman in its entirety for FREE
https://b-ok.cc/book/1214612/224dc
