Of 2 Minds - How Fast and Slow Thinking Shape Perception and Choice (Excerpt) - Scientific American

10/24/2020 Of 2 Minds: How Fast and Slow Thinking Shape Perception and Choice [Excerpt] - Scientific American
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Of 2 Minds: How Fast and Slow Thinking Shape Perception

and Choice [Excerpt]
In psychologist Daniel Kahneman's recent book, he reveals the dual systems of your brain, their
pitfalls and their power
By Daniel Kahneman on June 15, 2012
To survive
A D V E R T physically
ISEMENT or psychologically, we sometimes need to react automatically to
a speeding taxi as we step off the curb or to the subtle facial cues of an angry boss.
That automatic mode of thinking, not under voluntary control, contrasts with the need
to slow down and deliberately fiddle with pencil and paper when working through an
algebra problem. These two systems that the brain uses to process information are the
focus of Nobelist Daniel Kahneman's new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, LLC., 2011). The following excerpt is the first chapter, entitled "The
Characters of the Story," which introduces readers to these systems. (Used with
permission.)
Understanding fast and slow thinking could help us find more rational solutions to
problems that we as a society face. For example, a commentary in the March issue of
the journal Nature Climate Change outlined how carbon labeling that appeals to both
systems could be more successful than previous efforts to change consumer habits.
(Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) Understanding how we think
can also guide more personal decisions. Last month, Kahneman highlighted in a
lecture given at the National Academy of Sciences "The Science of Science
Communication" conference how realizing the limitations of each system can help us
catch our own mistakes.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/kahneman-excerpt-thinking-fast-and-slow/ 1/15
To observe your mind in automatic mode, glance at the image below.
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Your experience as you look at the woman’s face seamlessly combines what we normally
call seeing and intuitive thinking. As surely and quickly as you saw that the young
woman’s hair is dark, you knew she is angry. Furthermore, what you saw extended into
the future. You sensed that this woman is about to say some very unkind words,
probably in a loud and strident voice. A premonition of what she was going to do next
came to mind automatically and effortlessly. You did not intend to assess her mood or to
anticipate what she might do, and your reaction to the picture did not have the feel of
something you did. It just happened to you. It was an instance of fast thinking.
Now look at the following problem:
17 × 24
You knew immediately that this is a multiplication problem, and probably knew that you
could solve it, with paper and pencil, if not without. You also had some vague intuitive
knowledge of the range of possible results. You would be quick to recognize that both
12,609 and 123 are implausible. Without spending some time on the problem, however,
you would not be certain that the answer is not 568. A precise solution did not come to
mind, and you felt that you could choose whether or not to engage in the computation. If
you have not done so yet, you should attempt the multiplication problem now,
completing at least part of it.
You experienced slow thinking as you proceeded through a sequence of steps. You first
retrieved from memory the cognitive program for multiplication that you learned in
school, then you implemented it. Carrying out the computation was a strain. You felt the
burden of holding much material in memory, as you needed to keep track of where you
were and of where you were going, while holding on to the intermediate result. The
process was mental work: deliberate, effortful, and orderly—a prototype of slow
thinking. The computation was not only an event in your mind; your body was also
involved. Your muscles tensed up, your blood pressure rose, and your heart rate
increased. Someone looking closely at your eyes while you tackled this problem would
have seen your pupils dilate. Your pupils contracted back to normal size as soon as you
ended your work—when you found the answer (which is 408, by the way) or when you
gave up.
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TWO SYSTEMS
Psychologists have been intensely interested for several decades in the two modes of
thinking evoked by the picture of the angry woman and by the multiplication problem,
and have offered many labels for them. I adopt terms originally proposed by the
psychologists Keith Stanovich and Richard West, and will refer to two systems in the
mind, System 1 and System 2.
• System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of
voluntary control.
• System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including
complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the
subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.
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The labels of System 1 and System 2 are widely used in psychology, but I go further than
most in this book, which you can read as a psychodrama with two characters.
When we think of ourselves, we identify with System 2, the conscious, reasoning self
that has beliefs, makes choices, and decides what to think about and what to do.
Although System 2 believes itself to be where the action is, the automatic System 1 is the
hero of the book. I describe System 1 as effortlessly originating impressions and feelings
that are the main sources of the explicit beliefs and deliberate choices of System 2. The
automatic operations of System 1 generate surprisingly complex patterns of ideas, but
only the slower System 2 can construct thoughts in an orderly series of steps. I also
describe circumstances in which System 2 takes over, overruling the freewheeling
impulses and associations of System 1. You will be invited to think of the two systems as
agents with their individual abilities, limitations, and functions.
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In rough order of complexity, here are some examples of the automatic activities that are
attributed to System 1:
• Detect that one object is more distant than another.

• Orient to the source of a sudden sound.
• Complete the phrase “bread and . . .”
• Make a “disgust face” when shown a horrible picture.
• Detect hostility in a voice.
• Answer to 2 + 2 = ?
• Read words on large billboards.
• Drive a car on an empty road.
• Find a strong move in chess (if you are a chess master).
• Understand simple sentences.
• Recognize that a “meek and tidy soul with a passion for detail” resembles an
occupational stereotype.
All these mental events belong with the angry woman—they occur automatically and
require little or no effort. The capabilities of System 1 include innate skills that we share
with other animals. We are born prepared to perceive the world around us, recognize
objects, orient attention, avoid losses, and fear spiders. Other mental activities become
fast and automatic through prolonged practice. System 1 has learned associations
between ideas (the capital of France?); it has also learned skills such as reading and
understanding nuances of social situations. Some skills, such as finding strong chess
moves, are acquired only by specialized experts. Others are widely shared. Detecting the
similarity of a personality sketch to an occupational stereotype requires broad
knowledge of the language and the culture, which most of us possess. The knowledge is
stored in memory and accessed without intention and without effort.
Several of the mental actions in the list are completely involuntary. You cannot refrain
from understanding simple sentences in your own language or from orienting to a loud
unexpected sound, nor can you prevent yourself from knowing that 2 + 2 = 4 or from
thinking of Paris when the capital of France is mentioned. Other activities, such as
chewing, are susceptible to voluntary control but normally run on automatic pilot. The
control of attention is shared by the two systems. Orienting to a loud sound is normally
an involuntary operation of System 1, which immediately mobilizes the voluntary
attention of System 2. You may be able to resist turning toward the source of a loud and
offensive comment at a crowded party, but even if your head does not move, your
attention is initially directed to it, at least for a while. However, attention can be moved
away from an unwanted focus, primarily by focusing intently on another target.
The highly diverse operations of System 2 have one feature in common: they require
attention and are disrupted when attention is drawn away. Here are some examples:
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• Brace for the starter gun in a race.

• Focus attention on the clowns in the circus.
• Focus on the voice of a particular person in a crowded and noisy room.
• Look for a woman with white hair.
• Search memory to identify a surprising sound.
• Maintain a faster walking speed than is natural for you.
• Monitor the appropriateness of your behavior in a social situation.
• Count the occurrences of the letter a in a page of text.
• Tell someone your phone number.
• Park in a narrow space (for most people except garage attendants).
• Compare two washing machines for overall value.
• Fill out a tax form.
• Check the validity of a complex logical argument.
In all these situations you must pay attention, and you will perform less well, or not at
all, if you are not ready or if your attention is directed inappropriately. System 2 has
some ability to change the way System 1 works, by programming the normally automatic
functions of attention and memory. When waiting for a relative at a busy train station,
for example, you can set yourself at will to look for a white-haired woman or a bearded
man, and thereby increase the likelihood of detecting your relative from a distance. You
can set your memory to search for capital cities that start with N or for French
existentialist novels. And when you rent a car at London’s Heathrow Airport, the
attendant will probably remind you that “we drive on the left side of the road over here.”
In all these cases, you are asked to do something that does not come naturally, and you
will find that the consistent maintenance of a set requires continuous exertion of at least
some effort.
The often-used phrase “pay attention” is apt: you dispose of a limited budget of attention
that you can allocate to activities, and if you try to go beyond your budget, you will fail. It
is the mark of effortful activities that they interfere with each other, which is why it is
difficult or impossible to conduct several at once. You could not compute the product of
17 × 24 while making a left turn into dense traffic, and you certainly should not try. You
can do several things at once, but only if they are easy and undemanding. You are
probably safe carrying on a conversation with a passenger while driving on an empty
highway, and many parents have discovered, perhaps with some guilt, that they can read
a story to a child while thinking of something else.
Everyone has some awareness of the limited capacity of attention, and our social
behavior makes allowances for these limitations. When the driver of a car is overtaking a
truck on a narrow road, for example, adult passengers quite sensibly stop talking. They
know that distracting the driver is not a good idea, and they also suspect that he is
temporarily deaf and will not hear what they say.
Intense focusing on a task can make people effectively blind, even to stimuli that
normally attract attention. The most dramatic demonstration was offered by
Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons in their book The Invisible Gorilla. They
constructed a short film of two teams passing basketballs, one team wearing white
shirts, the other wearing black. The viewers of the film are instructed to count the
number of passes made by the white team, ignoring the black players. This task is
difficult and completely absorbing. Halfway through the video, a woman wearing a
gorilla suit appears, crosses the court, thumps her chest, and moves on. The gorilla is in
view for 9 seconds. Many thousands of people have seen the video, and about half of
them do not notice anything unusual. It is the counting task—and especially the
instruction to ignore one of the teams—that causes the blindness. No one who watches
the video without that task would miss the gorilla. Seeing and orienting are automatic
functions of System 1, but they depend on the allocation of some attention to the
relevant stimulus. The authors note that the most remarkable observation of their study
is that people find its results very surprising. Indeed, the viewers who fail to see the
gorilla are initially sure that it was not there—they cannot imagine missing such a
striking event. The gorilla study illustrates two important facts about our minds: we can
be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.
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PLOT SYNOPSIS
The interaction of the two systems is a recurrent theme of the book, and a brief synopsis
of the plot is in order. In the story I will tell, Systems 1 and 2 are both active whenever
we are awake. System 1 runs automatically and System 2 is normally in a comfortable
low-effort mode, in which only a fraction of its capacity is engaged. System 1
continuously generates suggestions for System 2: impressions, intuitions, intentions,
and feelings. If endorsed by System 2, impressions and intuitions turn into beliefs, and
impulses turn into voluntary actions. When all goes smoothly, which is most of the time,
System 2 adopts the suggestions of System 1 with little or no modification. You generally
believe your impressions and act on your desires, and that is fine—usually.
When System 1 runs into difficulty, it calls on System 2 to support more detailed and
specific processing that may solve the problem of the moment. System 2 is mobilized
when a question arises for which System 1 does not offer an answer, as probably
happened to you when you encountered the multiplication problem 17 × 24. You can
also feel a surge of conscious attention whenever you are surprised. System 2 is activated
when an event is detected that violates the model of the world that System 1 maintains.
In that world, lamps do not jump, cats do not bark, and gorillas do not cross basketball
courts. The gorilla experiment demonstrates that some attention is needed for the
surprising stimulus to be detected. Surprise then activates and orients your attention:
you will stare, and you will search your memory for a story that makes sense of the
surprising event. System 2 is also credited with the continuous monitoring of your own
behavior—the control that keeps you polite when you are angry, and alert when you are
driving at night. System 2 is mobilized to increased effort when it detects an error about
to be made. Remember a time when you almost blurted out an offensive remark and
note how hard you worked to restore control. In summary, most of what you (your
System 2) think and do originates in your System 1, but System 2 takes over when things
get difficult, and it normally has the last word.
The division of labor between System 1 and System 2 is highly efficient: it minimizes
effort and optimizes performance. The arrangement works well most of the time because
System 1 is generally very good at what it does: its models of familiar situations are
accurate, its short-term predictions are usually accurate as well, and its initial reactions
to challenges are swift and generally appropriate. System 1 has biases, however,
systematic errors that it is prone to make in specified circumstances. As we shall see, it
sometimes answers easier questions than the one it was asked, and it has little
understanding of logic and statistics. One further limitation of System 1 is that it cannot
be turned off. If you are shown a word on the screen in a language you know, you will
read it—unless your attention is totally focused elsewhere.
CONFLICT
Figure 2 is a variant of a classic experiment that produces a conflict between the two
systems. You should try the exercise before reading on.
You were almost certainly successful in saying the correct words in both tasks, and you
surely discovered that some parts of each task were much easier than others. When you
identified upper- and lowercase, the left-hand column was easy and the right-hand
column caused you to slow down and perhaps to stammer or stumble. When you named
the position of words, the left-hand column was difficult and the right-hand column was
much easier.
These tasks engage System 2, because saying “upper/lower” or “right/ left” is not what
you routinely do when looking down a column of words. One of the things you did to set
yourself for the task was to program your memory so that the relevant words (upper and
lower for the first task) were “on the tip of your tongue.” The prioritizing of the chosen
words is effective and the mild temptation to read other words was fairly easy to resist
when you went through the first column. But the second column was different, because
it contained words for which you were set, and you could not ignore them. You were
mostly able to respond correctly, but overcoming the competing response was a strain,
and it slowed you down. You experienced a conflict between a task that you intended to
carry out and an automatic response that interfered with it.
Conflict between an automatic reaction and an intention to control it is common in our

lives. We are all familiar with the experience of trying not to stare at the oddly dressed
couple at the neighboring table in a restaurant. We also know what it is like to force our
attention on a boring book, when we constantly find ourselves returning to the point at
which the reading lost its meaning. Where winters are hard, many drivers have
memories of their car skidding out of control on the ice and of the struggle to follow
well-rehearsed instructions that negate what they would naturally do: “Steer into the
skid, and whatever you do, do not touch the brakes!” And every human being has had
the experience of not telling someone to go to hell. One of the tasks of System 2 is to
overcome the impulses of System 1. In other words, System 2 is in charge of self-control.
ILLUSIONS
To appreciate the autonomy of System 1, as well as the distinction between impressions

and beliefs, take a good look at figure 3.
This picture is unremarkable: two horizontal lines of different lengths, with fins
appended, pointing in different directions. The bottom line is obviously longer than the
one above it. That is what we all see, and we naturally believe what we see. If you have
already encountered this image, however, you recognize it as the famous Müller-Lyer
illusion. As you can easily confirm by measuring them with a ruler, the horizontal lines
are in fact identical in length.
Now that you have measured the lines, you—your System 2, the conscious being you call
“I”—have a new belief: you know that the lines are equally long. If asked about their
length, you will say what you know. But you still see the bottom line as longer. You have
chosen to believe the measurement, but you cannot prevent System 1 from doing its
thing; you cannot decide to see the lines as equal, although you know they are. To resist
the illusion, there is only one thing you can do: you must learn to mistrust your
impressions of the length of lines when fins are attached to them. To implement that
rule, you must be able to recognize the illusory pattern and recall what you know about
it. If you can do this, you will never again be fooled by the Müller-Lyer illusion. But you
will still see one line as longer than the other.
Not all illusions are visual. There are illusions of thought, which we call cognitive
illusions. As a graduate student, I attended some courses on the art and science of
psychotherapy. During one of these lectures, our teacher imparted a morsel of clinical
wisdom. This is what he told us: “You will from time to time meet a patient who shares a
disturbing tale of multiple mistakes in his previous treatment. He has been seen by
several clinicians, and all failed him. The patient can lucidly describe how his therapists
misunderstood him, but he has quickly perceived that you are different. You share the
same feeling, are convinced that you understand him, and will be able to help.” At this
point my teacher raised his voice as he said, “Do not even think of taking on this patient!
Throw him out of the office! He is most likely a psychopath and you will not be able to
help him.”
Many years later I learned that the teacher had warned us against psychopathic
charm,and the leading authority in the study of psychopathy confirmed that the
teacher’s advice was sound. The analogy to the Müller-Lyer illusion is close. What we
were being taught was not how to feel about that patient. Our teacher took it for granted
that the sympathy we would feel for the patient would not be under our control; it would
arise from System 1. Furthermore, we were not being taught to be generally suspicious
of our feelings about patients. We were told that a strong attraction to a patient with a
repeated history of failed treatment is a danger sign—like the fins on the parallel lines. It
is an illusion—a cognitive illusion—and I (System 2) was taught how to recognize it and
advised not to believe it or act on it.
The question that is most often asked about cognitive illusions is whether they can be
overcome. The message of these examples is not encouraging. Because System 1
operates automatically and cannot be turned off at will, errors of intuitive thought are
often difficult to prevent. Biases cannot always be avoided, because System 2 may have
no clue to the error. Even when cues to likely errors are available, errors can be
prevented only by the enhanced monitoring and effortful activity of System 2. As a way
to live your life, however, continuous vigilance is not necessarily good, and it is certainly
impractical. Constantly questioning our own thinking would be impossibly tedious, and
System 2 is much too slow and inefficient to serve as a substitute for System 1 in making
routine decisions. The best we can do is a compromise: learn to recognize situations in
which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes
are high. The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people’s mistakes
than our own.
USEFUL FICTIONS
You have been invited to think of the two systems as agents within the mind, with their
individual personalities, abilities, and limitations. I will often use sentences in which the
systems are the subjects, such as, “System 2 calculates products.”
The use of such language is considered a sin in the professional circles in which I travel,
because it seems to explain the thoughts and actions of a person by the thoughts and
actions of little people inside the person’s head. Grammatically the sentence about
System 2 is similar to “The butler steals the petty cash.” My colleagues would point out
that the butler’s action actually explains the disappearance of the cash, and they rightly
question whether the sentence about System 2 explains how products are calculated. My
answer is that the brief active sentence that attributes calculation to System 2 is
intended as a description, not an explanation. It is meaningful only because of what you
already know about System 2. It is shorthand for the following: “Mental arithmetic is a
voluntary activity that requires effort, should not be performed while making a left turn,
and is associated with dilated pupils and an accelerated heart rate.”
Similarly, the statement that “highway driving under routine conditions is left to System
1” means that steering the car around a bend is automatic and almost effortless. It also
implies that an experienced driver can drive on an empty highway while conducting a
conversation. Finally, “System 2 prevented James from reacting foolishly to the insult”
means that James would have been more aggressive in his response if his capacity for
effortful control had been disrupted (for example, if he had been drunk).
System 1 and System 2 are so central to the story I tell in this book that I must make it
absolutely clear that they are fictitious characters. Systems 1 and 2 are not systems in the
standard sense of entities with interacting aspects or parts. And there is no one part of
the brain that either of the systems would call home. You may well ask: What is the
point of introducing fictitious characters with ugly names into a serious book? The
answer is that the characters are useful because of some quirks of our minds, yours and
mine. A sentence is understood more easily if it describes what an agent (System 2) does
than if it describes what something is, what properties it has. In other words, “System 2”
is a better subject for a sentence than “mental arithmetic.” The mind—especially System
1—appears to have a special aptitude for the construction and interpretation of stories
about active agents, who have personalities, habits, and abilities. You quickly formed a
bad opinion of the thieving butler, you expect more bad behavior from him, and you will
remember him for a while. This is also my hope for the language of systems.
Why call them System 1 and System 2 rather than the more descriptive “automatic
system” and “effortful system”? The reason is simple: “Automatic system” takes longer
to say than “System 1” and therefore takes more space in your working memory. This
matters, because anything that occupies your working memory reduces your ability to
think. You should treat “System 1” and “System 2” as nicknames, like Bob and Joe,
identifying characters that you will get to know over the course of this book. The
fictitious systems make it easier for me to think about judgment and choice, and will
make it easier for you to understand what I say.
SPEAKING OF SYSTEM 1 AND SYSTEM 2
“He had an impression, but some of his impressions are illusions.”
“This was a pure System 1 response. She reacted to the threat before she recognized it.”
“This is your System 1 talking. Slow down and let your System 2 take control.”
Reprinted from Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, published by Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2011 by Daniel Kahneman. All rights reserved.
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10/24/2020 Of 2 Minds: How Fast and Slow Thinking Shape Perception and Choice [Excerpt] - Scientific American

Read Our Latest Issue Read Now

Of 2 Minds: How Fast and Slow Thinking Shape Perception

By Daniel Kahneman on June 15, 2012

To observe your mind in automatic mode, glance at the image below.

Now look at the following problem:

Read Our Latest Issue Read Now

• Detect that one object is more distant than another.

• Brace for the starter gun in a race.

Conflict between an automatic reaction and an intention to control it is common in our

To appreciate the autonomy of System 1, as well as the distinction between impressions

SPEAKING OF SYSTEM 1 AND SYSTEM 2

“He had an impression, but some of his impressions are illusions.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

READ THIS NEXT

30 under 30: A World-Traveling Scholar of Nanophotonics

Small Comfort: Nanomedicine Able to Penetrate Bodily Defenses

How to Age Well

E-Motive Response: Electric Car Owners Dish on Their Real-World EV Experiences

June 12, 2012 — Nick Chambers

Evolution Explains Why Politics Is So Tribal

Get smart. Sign up for our email newsletter.

Support Science Journalism

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ARABIC

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Press Room Site Map

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SA Custom Media California Consumer Privacy Statement

Terms of Use Use of cookies/Do not sell my data

© 20 20 SCIEN TI FIC AM ERICA N, A D IV ISI ON O F SP RI NGER N A TU RE A M ERI C A, I N C .

ALL R IG HT S R ESER VED .

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