How do we think? Kahneman's 2 systems of thought

According to author Shanon M. Koening, people have 60,000 thoughts a day and most of them are negative. Such an impressive figure makes us wonder how little we know about thinking and the great influence it has on our behavior and decision-making.

Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist

A renowned American psychologist realized the importance of thinking and his research led him to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001. To explain the theory that led him to win the Nobel Prize, Kahneman begins by posing the following riddle to his students:

Don't try to solve this exercise and try to use your intuition:

A bat and a ball cost 1.10. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

The 10 cent answer comes across as a quick, powerful, and engaging intuition, but it's wrong.

To arrive at the correct solution, 5 cents, many of us will have to turn to pencil and paper, transforming the puzzle into a mathematical equation. We will have to resort to the slowest and most tiring way of thinking that our brain allows. Some psychologists consider that

this type of test is a more valid predictor of intelligence than current IQ tests. In this case, it serves to illustrate that intuitions can be wrong, no matter how powerful they seem.

Kahneman uses this example to describe the two different ways the mind creates thought.

First of all, he finds the System 1 or implicit. This way of thinking is fast, automatic, frequent, emotional, stereotyped and subconscious. On the other hand, you will find the System 2 or explicit. It is slow, lazy, infrequent, logical, calculating, and is accompanied by the awareness of solving a problem.

These two systems of antagonistic nature are found in the day to day of all the decisions of our life.

How do the 2 systems of thought work?

The quick 10-cent solution you hit at the beginning of the exercise is due to the operation of System 1 offering you a reasonable answer. However, when you used the pen and paper, you used System 2 which on this occasion offered you the 5 cent correct solution, slower and more expensive solution but the answer after all correct.

This is so because system 1, moved by intuition and the heuristics, allows us to do simple tasks like walking or brushing our teeth effortlessly. On the contrary, system 2 will be in play when we are doing the most complicated tasks, such as learning to drive.

Both System 1 and System 2 are continuously active and in communication. System 1 determines our thoughts with external perceptions, visual and associative memory, and then develops a framed conclusion, and that we do not even question ourselves, thus avoiding any other story alternative. The challenge is that he usually does a good job, so that we can trust him.

Intuitions guide our day to day

Using the theory of heuristics, Kahneman claims that System 1 associates new information with existing patterns, or thoughts, rather than creating new patterns for each new experience.to. This leads to different types of biases. System 1, by generating narrow and framed thinking, tries to show that it leads right to a confirmation bias. Confirmation bias leads people to ignore some evidence that contradicts such thinking, and it is one of the biggest individual problems when companies make decisions.

Ultimately, people tend to seek information that validates their initial hypothesis. Kahneman details a series of experiments that aim to highlight the differences between these two thought processes and how they arrive at different results even though they receive the same information.

Now you know a little more about those products that your brain generates an average of 60,000 times a day, and about how many of them are generated quickly and without taking into account all the information present, giving rise to conclusions wrong.

So, next time you make a bad decision, don't blame yourself. Now you know that system 1 is acting automatically and that the best decision you can make is to take a pen and paper so that the thinking system 2 is activated and leads you to make decisions correct.