Reading

The idea that we are ignorant of our true selves surged in the 20th century and became common. It’s still a commonplace, but it’s changing shape. These days, the bulk of the explanation is done by something else: the ‘dual-process’ model of the brain. We now know that we apprehend the world in two radically opposed ways, employing two fundamentally different modes of thought: ‘System 1’ and ‘System 2’. System 1 is fast; it’s intuitive, associative and automatic and it can’t be switched off. Its operations involve no sense of intentional control, but it’s the “secret author of many of the choices and judgments you make” and it’s the hero of Daniel Kahneman’s alarming, intellectually stimulating book Thinking, Fast and Slow. System 2 is slow, deliberate and effortful. Its operations require attention. (To set it going now, ask yourself the question “What is 13 x 27?”). System 2 takes over, rather unwillingly, when things get tricky. It’s “the conscious being you call ‘I'”, and one of Kahneman’s main points is that this is a mistake. You’re wrong to identify with System 2, for you are also and equally and profoundly System 1. Kahneman compares System 2 to a supporting character who believes herself to be the lead actor and often has little idea of what’s going on.

System 2 is slothful, and tires easily (a process called ‘ego depletion’) – so it usually accepts what System 1 tells it. It’s often right to do so, because System 1 is for the most part pretty good at what it does; it’s highly sensitive to subtle environmental cues, signs of danger, and so on. It does, however, pay a high price for speed. It loves to simplify, to assume WYSIATI (‘what you see is all there is’). It’s hopelessly bad at the kind of statistical thinking often required for good decisions, it jumps wildly to conclusions and it’s subject to a fantastic range of irrational cognitive biases and interference effects, such as confirmation bias and hindsight bias, to name but two. The general point about our self-ignorance extends beyond the details of Systems 1 and 2. We’re astonishingly susceptible to being influenced by features of our surroundings. One famous (pre-mobile phone) experiment centred on a New York City phone booth. Each time a person came out of the booth after having made a call, an accident was staged – someone dropped all her papers on the pavement. Sometimes a dime had been placed in the phone booth, sometimes not (a dime was then enough to make a call). If there was no dime in the phone booth, only 4% of the exiting callers helped to pick up the papers. If there was a dime, no fewer than 88% helped. Since then, thousands of other experiments have been conducted, all to the same general effect. We don’t know who we are or what we’re like, we don’t know what we’re really doing and we don’t know why we’re doing it. For example, Judges think they make considered decisions about parole based strictly on the facts of the case. It turns out (to simplify only slightly) that it is their blood-sugar levels really sitting in judgment. If you hold a pencil between your teeth, forcing your mouth into the shape of a smile, you’ll find a cartoon funnier than if you hold the pencil pointing forward, by pursing your lips round it in a frown-inducing way. In an experiment designed to test the ‘anchoring effect’, highly experienced judges were given a description of a shoplifting offence. They were then ‘anchored’ to different numbers by being asked to roll a pair of dice that had been secretly loaded to produce only two totals – three or nine. Finally, they were asked whether the prison sentence for the shoplifting offence should be greater or fewer, in months, than the total showing on the dice. Normally the judges would have made extremely similar judgments, but those who had just rolled nine proposed an average of eight months while those who had rolled three proposed an average of only five months. All were unaware of the anchoring effect. The same goes for all of us, almost all the time. We think we’re smart; we’re confident we won’t be unconsciously swayed by the high list price of a house. We’re wrong. (Kahneman admits his own inability to counter some of these effects.) For example, another systematic error involves ‘duration neglect’ and the ‘peak-end rule’. Looking back on our experience of pain, we prefer a larger, longer amount to a shorter, smaller amount, just so long as the closing stages of the greater pain were easier to bear than the closing stages of the lesser one.