Thinking, Fast and Slow

The normal state of our minds is to have intuitive feelings about almost everything, often having answers to questions that we do not completely understand and relying on evidence that we cannot explain. When we are faced with difficult questions that we cannot answer quickly, we substitute that question with an easier one.

Kahneman presents a set of difficult questions and the easier questions we often substitute for them. “How much would you contribute to save an endangered species?” is replaced with “How much emotion do I feel when I think of dying dolphins?” “How happy are you with your life these days?” is replaced with “What is my mood right now?” “How popular will the president be six months from now?” is replaced with “How popular is the president right now?”

The mental shotgun makes it easy to generate quick answers to difficult questions. We also couple this with System 1’s ability to compare across different dimensions. In the example question about the dolphins, we find the intensity of our emotions about dolphins and pick a financial contribution that matches that feeling.

Kahneman includes another visual illusion: three men walking down a road. Due to the perspective of the image, it appears that the man on the right is much bigger and the man on the left is much smaller, but in reality they are the same size. When asked if the figure on the right is taller than the figure on the left, System 1 actually answers the question “how tall are the three people?” and uses the cues that make the image look three-dimensional to determine that the man on the right is very tall and the man on the left is short.

The question, “How happy are you with your life these days?” came from a survey of German students. They were asked this question, and then asked how many dates they had last month. Their answers to these questions were uncorrelated. But another group saw the two questions in reverse order. This time there were huge correlations between number of dates and happiness.

What happens with these students is the same as what happens with the visual illusion. They do not want to spend time on precise calculations, and so they substituted the question with one for which they had already calculated their answer. This is also an example of WYSIATI. The present state of mind looms very large when people evaluate happiness.

Particularly when emotions are involved, people often use their preexisting beliefs to come to conclusions, rather than considering new arguments. Psychologist Paul Slovic has proposed an “affect heuristic,” in which people let their likes and dislikes determine their beliefs about the world. If we like the current health policy, we believe its benefits are substantial and its costs more manageable than alternatives. In this way, System 2 becomes “an apologist for the emotions of System 1.” It searches for information and arguments that are consistent with existing beliefs.

Kahneman concludes Part 1 by summing up the features and activities attributed to System 1 that he has introduced: generating impressions, operating automatically, creating patterns of ideas, inferring causes, exaggerating consistency (the halo effect), focusing on existing evidence (WYSIATI), matching intensities across scales (e.g., size to loudness), computing more than intended, substituting easy questions for hard ones.