Thinking Like a Grown-up
Thanks to Nancy LeTourneau at Political Animal for reminding us of the virtue of thinking like the Tortoise (slowly and consciously) rather than the Hare (fast, emotionally and subconsciously). We can benefit from that kind of thinking as citizens and voters (and human beings), and we can hope for it in our office-holders. Here’s her nice consideration from the other day:
May 23, 2016 10:00 AM
Tortoise Thinking in a Hare World
One of my favorite fairy tales is the one about the tortoise and the hare. For a lot of reasons I won’t bore you with, I’ve found that the old adage, “slow and steady wins the race,” is most often true. That’s why I was so interested to learn about a book by Daniel Kahneman titled: Thinking, Fast and Slow.
First of all, Kahneman has an interesting biography.
In 2002, Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel in economic science. What made this unusual is that Kahneman is a psychologist. Specifically, he is one-half of a pair of psychologists who, beginning in the early 1970s, set out to dismantle an entity long dear to economic theorists: that arch-rational decision maker known as Homo economicus. The other half of the dismantling duo, Amos Tversky, died in 1996 at the age of 59. Had Tversky lived, he would certainly have shared the Nobel with Kahneman, his longtime collaborator and dear friend.
Human irrationality is Kahneman’s great theme.In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman captures what is going on today in our politics, crisis journalism, and social media by identifying the two ways that our brains develop thoughts.
System 1: Fast, automatic, frequent, emotional, stereotypic, subconscious
System 2: Slow, effortful, infrequent, logical, calculating, consciousI can think of no better way to demonstrate these two systems than an interchange between President Obama and Ed Henry at a press conference back in 2009.
Ed Henry was looking for a System 1 response while the President insisted on waiting for System 2 to do its work.
In reviewing Kahneman’s book, Tim Holt gives us some additional insights.
More generally, System 1 uses association and metaphor to produce a quick and dirty draft of reality, which System 2 draws on to arrive at explicit beliefs and reasoned choices. System 1 proposes, System 2 disposes. So System 2 would seem to be the boss, right? In principle, yes. But System 2, in addition to being more deliberate and rational, is also lazy. And it tires easily. (The vogue term for this is “ego depletion.”) Too often, instead of slowing things down and analyzing them, System 2 is content to accept the easy but unreliable story about the world that System 1 feeds to it.
Donald Trump’s appeal to his supporters is reliant on engaging only System 1. His success in gaining a lot of media attention is also dependent on their addiction to it. Engaging System 2 doesn’t generate enough clicks and eyeballs. Purveyors of System 1 responses also gain the most traction on social media – particularly twitter.
Here is the danger we invite with an over-reliance on System 1:
System 1 jumps to an intuitive conclusion based on a “heuristic” — an easy but imperfect way of answering hard questions — and System 2 lazily endorses this heuristic answer without bothering to scrutinize whether it is logical.
That is exactly what is captured in this cartoon by Wiley Miller.
In order to entice people into System 2 thinking, we need to wake up that lazy SOB by spurring interest in curiosity and creativity.
