Fast Thinking is Normal Thinking but Dangerous Thinking

Guess what. We’re all biased.

Last time I mentioned our potentially implicit social biases. This time around, it’s cognitive biases. We’re good at thinking says cognitive psychologist Dr. Daniel Willingham but we’re lazy thinkers. We don’t like to think harder than we have to. Plus, the mental cost of agonizing over every little decision using the full strength of our cognitive capabilities is a handicap — we’d not get much done in a day if we carefully and thoughtfully deliberated over every choice we had to make. And so we often make many of our decisions by gut instinct.

Gut instinct is driven by feelings that are generated from our intuition. We make a decision because we feel it in our gut that it is the right choice. The gut-brain connection is no joke. Have a big presentation to do? Does it make you feel nauseous? How about a food you’ve eaten so much you’re now sick of it? Does the mere thought of it turn your stomach? It could even be that the physical symptoms you currently manifest in your belly day to day, like heartburn or cramps, are related to mental stress.

Many a good decision has been made with gut feeling. So have many bad ones.

When we make a decision by gut instinct, we are using, what Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, refers to as System 1 thinking. This is the fast system. It’s the system that allows us to get through our day without being paralyzed by the indecision of overthinking things. System 2, the slow system, is deliberate and rational. It’s the system we use when we take the time to ponder a big decision. And it’s also the lazy system, the one that Dr. Willingham refers to when he says we are good at thinking but we don’t like to think too hard if we can help it.

Therefore, while System 2 might think itself in cognitive command, it’s actually System 1 that drives our decision making ship. Hopefully though, System 2 checks up on the many snap decisions that System 1 makes. Unfortunately, that isn’t always the case as can been seen in the first few minutes of this excellent video on our two thinking systems.

In that video, we see people being asked relatively easy questions to answer. All it takes to answer them is a little mental math or fact checking before stating a correct answer. But that doesn’t’ happen. System 1 jumps into action and makes a snap decision without considering all the facts. How long does it take the earth to revolve around the sun? “Oh, the answer is one day,” says System 1 confidently.

Something that seems or sounds familiar — in this case, how long it takes the earth to revolve around the sun — causes us to jump to a conclusion using a heuristic, which is a simple but fallible way of answering a question. However, something doesn’t feel quite right about that answer so System 2 kicks in to do some fact checking. “Wait a minute, says System 2, ‘the earth doesn’t take a day to go around the sun. It takes a whole year!”

When System 2 lazily endorses System 1’s use of heuristics, this can sometimes get us into trouble in our daily decision making duties. We make quick choices without, for example, considering all the information involved or getting all the facts. When heuristics become harmful instead of helpful to us, they become known as cognitive biases.

Next time around I’ll talk about some of the most common cognitive biases that effect us all.