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Speaker 1

00:01

All right, I'm John Boyd. It is my great pleasure to introduce Professor Kahneman today. And I just want to give you a brief background on his outstanding career. He started in 1954, received his bachelor's in experimental psychology and mathematics from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Speaker 1

00:20

In 1961, he was awarded his PhD from University of California, Berkeley, right across the bay in experimental psychology. In 1979, he and his co-author Amos Tversky published their seminal paper on prospect theory, which started to change the way that people reframed the argument around gains, losses, and decision-making under uncertainty. Several years later, in 2002, Professor Kahneman was awarded the Nobel Prize largely for the work on prospect theory. And Nobel Prizes I think are always impressive.

Speaker 1

00:54

His perhaps more so because there actually isn't a Nobel Prize in psychology. He had to win his Nobel Prize in economics. And as far as I know, I think there's only 1 other person, 1 other psychologist, who has won a Nobel Prize and that's Ivan Pavlov. He may be a physiologist, we could argue about that.

Speaker 1

01:13

Years later, in 2007, psychologists tried to reclaim Professor Kahneman as 1 of our own when the American Psychological Association awarded him a Lifetime Distinguished Contribution Award. And today he is a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. And he's here to talk about his new book, Thinking Fast and Slow. And Google's mission, which we all know, is to take the world's information and to make it more useful and universally accessible.

Speaker 1

01:45

And all information, all knowledge is important, but I think some, again, is more important than others because the information that he'll present today, I think it's very personal. It's about each of us. And if you listen carefully and really understand what he says, it's gonna change the way that you think about yourself and the world around you. So please join me in welcoming Professor Kahneman to Google.

Speaker 1

02:06

Thank you.

Speaker 2

02:06

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Speaker 2

02:09

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Speaker 3

02:17

Well, I think intuition has been discussed a lot in recent years, and I'll be talking about intuition. There are 2 camps in this discussion, naturally. There is the pro and the con.

Speaker 3

02:33

And of course, many people here will have read Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, which although it's not an unconditional defense of intuition, certainly gave people the impression that Sometimes we magically know things without knowing why we know them. Within the discipline of psychology and judgment and decision making there is a group and it's headed by a very interesting figure called Gary Klein who wrote a book that I recommend. It's Sources of Power is the 1 of his books that I would recommend the most warmly. And they are great believers in expert intuition.

Speaker 3

03:18

On the other side, there are skeptics about intuition in general and including expert intuition. And I have long been counted as 1 of the skeptics because my early work with Emma Stavroski was about intuitive errors and flaws and biases of intuitive thinking. Today you find that discussion in many places, for example in medicine among the popular writers, 2 writers, both of whom write for the New Yorker, Jerome Groopman and Atul Gawande, and they clearly differ. Atul Gawande is in favor of formal systems, very skeptical about human judgment and wanting to improve it all the time.

Speaker 3

04:03

And Jerome Groupman being in fact, although he doesn't quite admit it, he really likes good old-fashioned medical intuition. Of course he would like the physicians well-educated, But he doesn't like formal system. And the issue in medicine is the issue of what is the role of evidence-based medicine, and how do you allocate functions between that and intuition? The background, actually, part of the background for what I'll talk today is a strange collaboration in which I engaged for about 8 years with Gary Klein, whom I mentioned.

Speaker 3

04:40

So he is the guru of a group of people who really, I wouldn't say they despise what I do but they certainly don't like what I do because they think that the emphasis on biases of judgment has drawn an unjustly unfavorable picture of the human mind. And by and large I'm inclined to agree. So 7 or 8 years ago I invited him and we worked together for a number of years trying to figure out what are the boundaries? Where is intuition marvelous and where is it flawed and can we tell?

Speaker 3

05:12

And I think we can tell. And We wrote a paper at the end of 6 or 7 years with a lot of vicissitudes that we went through since we basically don't agree. We wrote a paper the title of which was on a failure to disagree because on the substance I think we know and we both agree where you can trust intuition and where you cannot. Emotionally, we haven't changed.

Speaker 3

05:39

He still hates the idea of biases and doesn't think that errors of experts are very funny, and I think that errors of experts are quite funny. So that's a difference right there. There are 2 modes of thinking that all of us are familiar with. And there is 1 mode, 1 way for thoughts that come to mind.

Speaker 3

06:04

And this is this. I mean, you know about this lady that she's angry just as quickly as you know that her hair is dark. And it's interesting to dwell a bit about this. This is not something, the judgment that she's angry or the impression that she's angry doesn't feel like something you did.

Speaker 3

06:22

It feels like something that happens. It happens to me. We have the basic experience is a passive experience in those judgments. And that is true of perception.

Speaker 3

06:34

When we see the world we don't decide to see it. It is true of impressions and it is true in general what we call intuitive thinking. It just happens. It comes from somewhere and we are not the author of it.

Speaker 3

06:49

Now there is another way that thoughts come to mind and here I suppose essentially nothing came to your mind but the answer is

Speaker 1

07:00

408.

Speaker 3

07:01

To produce the 408 requires a completely different kind of operation. You have to retrieve a program that you learned in school. The program consists of steps.

Speaker 3

07:12

You have to go through the steps. You've got to pay attention successively to partial products and so on and keep things in mind and keep the whole program in mind. And this is hard work. This is something that you do.

Speaker 3

07:24

It is not something that happens to you. And there are many indications that this is hard work. 1 is that physiology indicates that this is hard work. The pupil dilates.

Speaker 3

07:40

This is something that I studied many, many years ago. The pupil really, on a program like that, if you're going to do it in your head, your pupil will dilate. The area will increase by about

Speaker 1

07:53

50%

Speaker 3

07:56

as soon as you engage in that. And it will stay dilated as long as you're working. And it will sort of collapse back to normal size either when you quit or when you find the answer.

Speaker 3

08:09

So this is another way thoughts come to mind and this is definitely not the intuitive way. Here we are, we feel a sense of agency, we feel something deliberate is happening And a very important aspect of it, this is effortful. And what psychologists mean by effort is basically, if you want a quick introduction to what effort is, this is something you cannot do while making a left turn into traffic. You cannot do it and you shouldn't try.

Speaker 3

08:40

And the reason is that there is limited capacity to exert effort. And if you're in, engage that capacity of those resources in 1 task, less is available for another task. Now, there is another function of system 2 and here I'm going to tell you a riddle. Most of you are familiar with it.

Speaker 3

09:04

A bat and a ball together cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. And of course, how much does the ball cost? How many people know this riddle, by the way?

Speaker 3

09:15

Oh, OK. So it's still usable. The point about this riddle is that the number came to your mind and the number is 10 cents and everybody just, I think, you know, maybe here, maybe there are exceptions, very few exceptions people confess that the number 10 cents immediately came to mind. Now it's wrong.

Speaker 3

09:37

I mean, 10 cents and the dollar 10 is a dollar 20, so that's not the solution. The solution is 5 cents. But what is interesting here is that at Princeton, at MIT, at Harvard, and I don't know about Stanford or Caltech, but about 50% of students ask this question of undergraduates say 10 cents. And we learned something very interesting when somebody says 10 cents.

Speaker 3

10:08

We learned that they didn't check. Because if they had checked, they wouldn't say 10 cents. So there is a sense of confidence that people have, that these people in particular have, and it brings us to another function of what I'll call System 2. System 1 is the intuitive 1.

Speaker 3

10:29

It performs those automatic activities, and System 2 is the effortful 1, the 1 that's the deliberate 1. And the reason that I classify this as a system 2 operation is that self-control and controlling your attention and deliberate exertion of effort are impaired when by other activities. So if for example, to give you a trivial example, If somebody is asked to retain 7 digits in their head and is then given a choice between chocolate cake, sinful chocolate cake, and virtuous fruit salad, they are more likely to choose the chocolate cake than they would if they were asked without 7 digits in their head. It takes some effort to control your impulses, even such mild impulses as a preference for chocolate.

Speaker 3

11:30

So You should be aware of that difference between system 1 operations, the automatic ones, and system 2 operations, the deliberate ones. It comes very clearly when in driving. So Driving is a skill and any skilled activity, measure of skill, is that things begin to happen automatically. So you can drive and conduct a conversation.

Speaker 3

11:57

You cannot make a left turn into traffic but by and large we can drive and talk. So driving is largely automatic. Braking, when there is any sign of danger, braking is completely automatic. That is, you can notice while you are braking that you first respond, so that the response is immediate, it is fully automatic.

Speaker 3

12:19

Now in some places, not here, where people drive in snow or ice, they learn about skids. And then occasionally You'll find yourself as a driver in a skid and then system 2 will be mobilized because in a skid you're not supposed to do anything that comes naturally to you. You shouldn't brake and you shouldn't steer away from the skid. You should leave the brakes alone and steer into the skid.

Speaker 3

12:47

Completely non-intuitive. Now when people have a lot of practice with skids, that too becomes automatic. So 1 thing that we can tell about system 1 and system 2, those 2 types of operations, is some of the basic innate operations, functions that we have such as perceiving things, having emotional reactions to things. All this is system 1.

Speaker 3

13:15

We don't choose to do it, it just happens to us. But also system 1 is where skill is. That is when we get to be skilled at something it becomes automatic and it demands fewer resources and we get to be very good at it. Now the issue of intuition, and here I'm not sure that, but I suspect that Malcolm Gladwell really did us a disservice by giving that sense that there is a magic to intuition.

Speaker 3

13:45

There really is no magic at all, and we should understand how it works. Intuition and Herbert Simon, who was a psychologist, then an economist, then a political scientist, then a Nobel laureate. Herbert Simon gave a very good definition of what intuition is. It is simply recognition.

Speaker 3

14:04

There is really no difference between the physician recognizing a disease, you know, a particular disease from a facial expression or something, And a little child learning pointing to something and saying doggy. The little child has no idea what the clues are but he just said, he just knows this is dog without knowing why he knows. And once you think about it this way, this really demystifies intuition to a very considerable extent. And it also leads you to a sort of a solution to the problem that Gary Klein and I were trying to solve.

Speaker 3

14:46

When can you trust intuition and when can't you? And then it becomes an issue of is the world regular enough so that you can learn to recognize things? Or, And then did that particular individual have an opportunity to learn the regularities of the world? And so the world of chess players is highly regular.

Speaker 3

15:11

And statistically even the world of poker players is regular. So they can be an element of chance. But there are rules. And the mind is so set that if there are rules in the environment and we're exposed to them for a long time, and we get immediate feedback on what is right and wrong, or fairly immediate feedback, We will acquire those rules.

Speaker 3

15:35

So all of us have expert intuitions. Even if we're not physicians and we're not chess players, master chess players, I recognize my wife's mood from 1 word on the telephone. Most of you can do that. There are people that you know very well.

Speaker 3

15:56

All of us recognize a dangerous driver on the next lane. We get cues and we don't necessarily know what is the cue but that this person is driving erratically and could do something dangerous. And this is a lot of reinforced practice and we're very good at that. We can learn about those.

Speaker 3

16:18

We can learn about those, there are differences among experts, among professionals, in the level of expertise that they have. And they depend in the level of intuitive expertise that they can develop. So for example, compare anesthesiologists to radiologists. Anesthesiologists get very good feedback, and immediate feedback, whenever they do anything wrong.

Speaker 3

16:48

They have all those measurements that are in real time and they get the feedback. Radiologists get really miserable feedback about whether they're right or wrong. So you could expect an anesthesiologist to develop intuition much more than you would expect radiologists to develop intuition. And so that is part of the answer about intuitive expertise.

Speaker 3

17:13

We don't need to disagree about that because we know pretty much when intuitive expertise is likely to develop. And as I said, we also, that means that intuitive expertise is not going to develop in a chaotic universe or in a chaotic world. So for example, I personally do not believe in it, that stock pickers, people who pick stocks to invest in, can develop intuition. Because simply the market takes care of it, there isn't enough regularity in what's going to happen to prices for intuitions to develop.

Speaker 3

17:53

We also know about political forecasters. When they forecast long term, they are really no better than, you know, a dart-throwing monkey. And they're certainly not better than the average reader of the New York Times. In intuitions, and the reason it's not the pundits' fault, and that research has been done with pundits and with CIA analysts and with regional experts, it is really not their fault that they can't predict the long-range future 10 or 15 years.

Speaker 3

18:26

They're quite good at short-term predictions. They're really not very good at all in long-term predictions. It's not their fault. It's the fault of the world.

Speaker 3

18:34

The world is probably not predictable. And if the world is not predictable, you are not going to predict it. When there are marginal situations where there is some predictability but poor formulas do better than individuals. That is the domain where formulas beat individuals regularly is a domain of fairly low predictability because when there are weak cues people are not very good at picking them up and are not good at using them consistently.

Speaker 3

19:08

But formulas can be generated on the basis of experience and they will do a better job than individual judgment. Okay. Now I've introduced you to system 1 and system 2, and I've told you something about skill and about skill in system 1. Now I'd like to point out something that we sometimes have intuitions and that applies to political forecasters and to stock pickers and to all of us.

Speaker 3

19:46

We quite frequently have intuitions that are false. And they come up and come to mind, and they are subjectively undistinguishable from expert intuition. So I'm now talking of people who have intuitions that are not based on expertise. And they come, they're system 1 in the sense that they are effortless and automatic.

Speaker 3

20:10

And where do they come from? And that is what I'm going to try to illuminate, shed some light on in the rest of the talk. So I want to introduce you to System

Speaker 1

20:22

1.

Speaker 3

20:25

And first of all, let me get 1 thing clear because I might forget. I use System 1 and System 2, those terms, they're very shocking terms in my discipline. You're really not supposed to do that.

Speaker 3

20:40

Because every psychologist gets taught fairly early, you're not supposed to explain what happens in the mind by invoking little agents inside the mind and explain what the mind does by what the little agents do. Those are homunculi and that's a bad word in psychology. I'm going to use system 1 and system 2 absolutely as homunculi. Now what do I have to say in my defense?

Speaker 3

21:08

First of all, well, I'm warning you, those are fictitious characters. They don't exist. I don't believe that there is such a thing as system 1 and system 2. Don't look for them in the brain because they are not 2 systems in the brain of which 1 does 1 and the other does the other.

Speaker 3

21:23

So why am I using this terrible language? I'm using it because I think that is helpful. It fits the way our minds work. And to explain the background of that decision of why I use System 1 and System 2, I refer you to a very good book that I really recommend because it's, in addition to its being formative, it's very entertaining.

Speaker 3

21:46

It's by Joshua Furr and it's called Moonwalking with Einstein and it came out earlier this year. And what the book is about, Joshua Furr went, he's a science writer, and he went to the memory championship of the United States. You might not know there is such a thing, but there is. So people memorized decks of cards and a very, very long list of things and performed feats that we think are completely extraordinary.

Speaker 3

22:18

Joshua Furr decided to find out what happens and a year later he was actually the champion, the memory champion of the United States. The book is the story of how he did it. And Basically the story which was known to the Greeks in some form is that memory is very, very good at some things and terrible at other things. Memory is terrible at remembering lists.

Speaker 3

22:44

We're really not good at remembering lists. Memory is superb at remembering routes through space. That evolution has endowed us with an ability to remember routes and not lists. So now you can trick yourself.

Speaker 3

23:02

If you mentally you have a list and you want to remember the list, then you create a mental route and you distribute the items on your list along the route and then when you want to remember the deck of cards or whatever it is, Then you go through your route and you pick out the items 1 after the other because that you can do. It turns out that something very similar happens in another context. People are very good thinking about agents. The mind is set really beautifully to think about agents.

Speaker 3

23:36

Agents have traits, agents have behaviors. We understand agents. We form global impressions of their personalities. We are really not very good at remembering sentences where the subject of the sentence is an abstract notion.

Speaker 3

23:53

But an agent is very, very good. So just remember whenever I say system 1 does X, What I mean is that X is a mental activity that can be performed automatically and without effort. You'll remember a lot more about System 1 if you think of it as doing things than if you think of those mental activities. It helps me think and I think it helps other people understand.

Speaker 3

24:16

Okay, so let me introduce you to System 1. I'll begin with a study, just an extreme case. This study was done at the university in the UK, and like in many, the Department of Biology, actually. And like many places in the UK, they have a small room, which is a tea room or coffee room, where people can make themselves tea or coffee and get some biscuits and there is an honesty box and they pay into the honesty box.

Speaker 3

24:52

And somebody had the bright idea of sticking a poster on right on top of the honesty box and of changing the poster once a week. And so this is week 1 and that's the poster. Week 2 is flowers. Week 3 is eyes and so on.

Speaker 3

25:16

Now what is remarkable about this is this is something that happens to people. They have no idea it's happening to them. In fact, they have no idea about the posters. They're barely aware that there are posters there.

Speaker 3

25:29

They certainly don't know that the posters change systematically. They have no idea that the posters influence their behavior. System 1 can do those things. Those things we, a lot is happening in our mind that we're not fully aware of.

Speaker 3

25:45

That we're not aware of at all in fact. And there is a link between eyes and being watched, and being watched and not wanting to do bad things or wanting to do good things. All of this is deep in our associative memory and it gets activated. You see eyes, especially those large eyes on week 1, and it does something to you that you may not be aware it does.

Speaker 3

26:17

Now let me show you something else. Okay. This, I just want to enumerate very briefly what happened to you in the couple of seconds, the first couple of seconds when I put this on the screen. And first of all you read them.

Speaker 3

26:37

You read the words. Now you didn't intend to read the words. You didn't have to decide. I mean you had to read them.

Speaker 3

26:44

You had no choice in the matter. Second, ideas and images and memories came to mind, probably none of them very pleasant. So that's the second thing that happened. Another thing that happened is physical.

Speaker 3

26:58

You recoil. This has actually been measured. I mean, when people are exposed to a threatening word, they move back. So the threat is to some extent, to some slight extent, taken to be real.

Speaker 3

27:12

The symbolic threat is taken to be real. You made a disgust face. You experienced disgust. And that is getting to be interesting because those things are reciprocally reinforcing.

Speaker 3

27:28

So if you make a disgust face you're more likely to feel disgust. If you make a smiling face, you are more likely to think that things are funny. So 1 of my favorite experiments along those lines is you take a pencil, you stick it in your mouth like that, and cartoons will appear funnier to you because when you stick a pencil into your mouth like that you are making a smile and just the sheer muscular change is enough to feed back into our emotions and our feelings. This is all fairly important because what it means is you can think of, well let me add something and then I'll pull it together.

Speaker 3

28:17

I think of system 1 very largely in terms of what happens in associative memory. And to think of associative memory, you can think of a gigantic network of ideas and the Ideas are linked to each other in various ways associatively. Some of them are causes of other things or categories or example instances of there are many different links. But you have that huge representation of ideas that we have in our mind.

Speaker 3

28:47

And at any 1 time, a stimulus occurs, it activates a subset of those nodes in that representation in memory, and then activation spreads through the associative network. Not a lot, but it spreads some. So for example, you're now, and we can know that it spreads because we become sensitized to other ideas that have been activated in this fashion. So for example, right now, if somebody whispered words in your ears, you would be much more likely to detect and recognize words like sickness and smell and stink and nausea and hangover and a lot of associations have been activated.

Speaker 3

29:37

You're not aware of any of them. You're not aware of anything. Those are not conscious activations. But they are activations nonetheless and because those ideas are partially activated, weak stimulus is going to be sufficient to bring them over threshold.

Speaker 3

29:55

This again is a very important function of system 1 or associative memory. We are prepared basically by the spreading activation prepares things for what might come next. You will be able to recognize and respond to things more easily than before. Then something else happens.

Speaker 3

30:24

And this is, there are 2 words here, banana vomit, and you made a story. I mean, what happens, you know, there is really no need to do that, but in effect, this was sufficient to create a causal link so that somehow the bananas cause the vomit. You didn't make a conscious decision for that to happen, but we know that's the kind of thing that happens. As soon as a stimulus is presented, we look back for causes.

Speaker 3

30:56

The associative machinery looks back and latches on possible causes. Here it's very simple to find a cause and you know it this has an effect so temporarily you know you don't like bananas because an association has been created and that happens because of the causal search. So the causal search. So this should give you a sense of 1 of the functions of system 1.

Speaker 3

31:37

And to complete that, let me show you something else. So this is a famous psychological demonstration, but many of you might not have seen it. You read that as ABC. You read this as

Speaker 1

31:52

12, 13, 14.

Speaker 3

31:54

But the B and the 13 are physically identical. So this tells us something quite important about the way that associative machinery and system 1 work on new stimuli. Everything is made coherent.

Speaker 3

32:11

So in the context of letters, that ambiguous stimulus is going to be read as a letter. In the context of numbers,

Speaker 2

32:17

it is going to be read as a letter. In the

Speaker 3

32:17

context of numbers, it is going to be read as a number. What is quite important, there are 2 aspects here. 1 is the coherence and the other is that you're not aware of the ambiguity.

Speaker 3

32:29

The ambiguity is suppressed. That is, you just get 1 interpretation, in this case it's a coherent interpretation, and that is the way that the system works. It generates associatively coherent representations or reactions to situations. Associative memory, or system 1, is also the repository of our world knowledge.

Speaker 3

32:56

So when an event occurs, our reaction to it is informed by a lot of things that we know. And I'll give you my favorite example of this. This is people are listening to sentences while the events in their brain are recorded. And an upper class male British voice says, I have large tattoos all down my back.

Speaker 3

33:24

And approximately 3 10th of a second later, the brain responds with a characteristic signature surprise. This is astonishing if you stop to think about it. I mean, there was that voice. You have to classify it as an upper class British voice.

Speaker 3

33:41

Now upper class British men don't have tattoos down their back. Something is odd and you get a surprise reaction. You get a mobilization of system 2 because system 2 is the 1 that pays attention. Surprise calls attention to the event.

Speaker 3

34:02

A male voice saying, I believe I'm pregnant, of course same thing. So this system holds a world knowledge and uses a world knowledge to classify situations as normal or abnormal and it does this at top speed. And it updates very quickly. Well, I'll tell you a story about updating.

Speaker 3

34:30

It updates what it considers normal. Now this is an anecdote, you're free not to believe me. I believe it because it's a personal experience. We were some years ago on vacation in Australia in a resort that has all of

Speaker 1

34:45

40

Speaker 3

34:47

little villas and in the evening we go to have dinner, first evening, and we meet a psychologist from Stanford. Oh, surprise, coincidence, and we're very delighted to meet each other. Now, 2 weeks later we're in the theater in London and it goes dark and we watch and then the lights come back on and next to me, same guy.

Speaker 3

35:18

Now, the important point is that I was less surprised the second time than the first. Because, oh, John, you know, he is the guy I meet everywhere. I mean, it takes very little time to create what we call a norm. So 1 event, the second event links back to the first.

Speaker 3

35:41

If I had met anybody else, that is what's impressed me. If I had met anybody else, I would have been more surprised. And that's odd. If you think about it statistically, it is crazy.

Speaker 3

35:55

But in fact, it was very clear that, and I wouldn't say that I consciously expect to see John wherever I go. But if I'm going to meet someone, I'd be prepared to meet John. Now, I've mentioned something about causal thinking. And I want to give you some sense of how that works.

Speaker 3

36:19

So it's a question which is more probable, that a mother has blue eyes if her daughter has blue eyes, or that a daughter has blue eyes if her mother has blue eyes. Now again, as in the bat and ball, there is an intuitive response. And the intuitive response is that it's more probable that a daughter has blue eyes if her mother has blue eyes than the other way around. If you stop to do the math on the assumption that the incidence of blue eyes are the same in the 2 generations, the probabilities are strictly equal.

Speaker 3

36:53

But even before you do the math, your reasoning flows along causal lines. Your thinking flows along causal lines. This happens intuitively. And 1 of these feels okay.

Speaker 3

37:07

It feels more coherent. And the coherence that we experience can be turned into a judgment of probability. That is, the confidence that we experience is the judgment of probability. Now I'm going to skip the other example.

Speaker 3

37:32

And I said earlier that people have intuitions that are not necessarily true and that people are confident in judgments that are not necessarily true. And I would like to sort of present a tentative theory about how that happens. And the general idea is very straightforward. When we're asked a question that we cannot answer, typically system 1 is going to come up with the answer to a related question that is easier.

Speaker 3

38:09

And it's going to use that answer to the wrong question, the question that hasn't been asked, in place of the question that was asked. We call that a mechanism of substitution. It's substituting an easier question for a hard 1. It happens automatically.

Speaker 3

38:27

People are not aware that it happens. And it is the source of many intuitions that don't come from expertise and they're much less likely to be correct than the intuition that do come from expertise, but they come with equal confidence or just about. So there are several mechanisms that take part in this substitution thing and I'd like to introduce them. 1 of them, which I call the mental shotgun, is that when you are trying to instruct it to perform an operation, you typically perform other operations as well that are related to it associatively, are related to the target operation, but they are different.

Speaker 3

39:06

And my favorite example is, I'll say words, and you are to judge as quickly as possible whether the words rhyme or not. And The first pair of words is vote note. It's easy. The second pair of questions is vote goat.

Speaker 3

39:23

And vote goat is substantially harder than vote note. Why? Because although nobody asked you to, you spelled. And vote goat, there's a mismatch in spelling.

Speaker 3

39:36

And although they rhyme, at least as I pronounce them, just as well as vote note, you have a conflict and the conflict slows you down. So typically we compute more than we intend to compute. And we can, and that allows for substitutions to take place. So let me give you an example of a substitution here.

Speaker 3

40:05

The question here would be, which of the 3 figures is larger on the screen? And the answer is, they're equal. All 3 figures on the screen are of equal size. But it's a very powerful illusion.

Speaker 3

40:29

We see the figure on the right as larger than the figure on the left. And we see it because you cannot help it. Although you were told to think of it as a two-dimensional object, you compute the three-dimensional solution in which the object on the right is in fact larger than the object on the left, and that is what you see. There are many other examples of this general process.

Speaker 3

40:55

Another 1 I like is, I call that the dating heuristic. Students are asked in a survey, they are asked 2 questions. 1 is how happy are you and the other is how many dates did you have last month. And if you ask the questions in that order, the correlation is essentially 0.

Speaker 3

41:16

Turns out that there are many things in life that determine happiness and dating is not particularly important. You invert the order. So you ask people how many dates did you have last month and how happy are you with your life as a whole? Correlation is

Speaker 1

41:31

.66.

Speaker 3

41:34

What has happened and this is both a heuristic and an example of what I call the focusing illusion, that you have an emotional reaction to the student, has an emotional reaction to the question about number of dates. That emotional reaction is sitting there. Then you're asked a related question about happiness and without knowing that you're doing this, you substitute 1 for the other.

Speaker 3

41:59

And you can do it with many different questions. Now, it's not that people are confused about what happiness is. They know that happiness is not the same as satisfaction with the number of dates. It's just that this is the answer that comes to mind to the happiness question.

Speaker 3

42:15

There has been substitution, and you're not aware of it. Now there is a process that is essential to this and this is another strange ability of system 1. We can map intensities across different dimensions. I'll give you my standard example for this.

Speaker 3

42:40

It's about Julie, who is a graduating senior, and she read fluently when she was age 4, And the question is, what is her GPA? And the odd thing is that you know what her GPA is pretty much. At least you have an idea. It's clearly about 3.2.

Speaker 3

42:58

It's clearly less than

Speaker 1

42:59

4.

Speaker 3

43:01

About 3.7, which is ridiculous, of course. But how do people get to 3.7 or somewhere like that? Well, here is how it goes.

Speaker 3

43:13

She read fluently at age 4. That gives us an impression of precocity. You know, how precocious was she as a reader? And that, people could express that in percentiles.

Speaker 3

43:25

You know, how many, what is the likelihood that you'll meet a child that reads faster than that? Then, when you're asked the question, what is her GPA, without your knowing you're doing it, you're matching the percentiles. And you get the GPA that is about as extreme in the distribution of GPA as reading at age 4 is in the distribution of reading age. Completely unaware, statistically completely absurd, you should be much more aggressive.

Speaker 3

43:55

This is not the correct answer. But this is a compelling subjective answer. This is 1 of the mechanisms that lead to intuitive errors, this mechanism of substitution. And I'll give you 1 more example.

Speaker 3

44:11

International travelers, this is an experiment. The experiment was run during a period when there were many terrorist incidents in Europe. So that's the background. How much would you pay for insurance that pays $100, 000 in case of death for any reason?

Speaker 3

44:30

And how much would you pay for insurance that pays $100, 000 in case of death in a terror incident? People pay much more for the second than for the first. And the reason that they do is that there is an immediate response, which is how afraid am I? And I'm more afraid, most people are, are more afraid of the idea of dying in a terrorist incident than they're afraid of dying.

Speaker 3

44:57

And that is the mapping that takes place. Again, that's the way it works. This is the associative machinery. And 1 beautiful thing about it, it doesn't get stumped.

Speaker 3

45:10

It produces an answer to questions that it doesn't know how to answer. But it produces them by answering easier questions and a lot of our mental life is conducted in just this way.

Speaker 2

45:25

So

Speaker 3

45:31

let me complete the circle and talk a little bit about subjective confidence. Subjective confidence, which is closely related to the probability of being correct, is actually not a judgment at all. It is a feeling.

Speaker 3

45:50

It is a feeling that people have. And I think we know what the origin of that feeling is and it is system 1, if you will, Assessing the fluency of its own processing, assessing the coherence of the story that it has created to deal with the current situation. And if the story is coherent, confidence is high. Now this is disastrous in some ways because you can make a very coherent story out of very little information and out of information that is in fact not reliable.

Speaker 3

46:25

The quality of the story depends very little on the quality and quantity of the information. So people can be very confident with very little reason. Confidence is therefore not a good diagnostic for when you can trust either yourself or somebody else. And If you are to evaluate whether you can trust somebody with a lot of confidence, that's not the way to do it.

Speaker 3

46:51

The way to do it is, as I was saying earlier, is to ask what environment have they been in and have they had an opportunity to learn its regularities. Subjective confidence is not a good indicator. So that's the story I could tell in about 45 minutes about the 2 systems. So let me remind you they don't exist, but I think you should feel free to think in those terms because what you may be beginning to do is you may be beginning to have an idea of the personalities of system 1 and system 2.

Speaker 3

47:33

Now this is ridiculous, but having an idea of those personalities will actually enable you to think better about psychological events than if you just had a long list of unrelated phenomena. Those ideas, those personalities, they have a certain coherence. And they're worth something in the coin of being able to make judgments. OK, I think we should open for questions.

Speaker 3

48:04

So

Speaker 2

48:05

let's see. Thank you. Thank you.

Speaker 2

48:08

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We have the mic up there, and I also have handheld mics if somebody has some questions.

Speaker 2

48:22

Somebody's got to ask the first question. There.

Speaker 4

48:28

Hey, how fixed or plastic are the system 1 processes? And are there things like mindfulness or other emotional regulation that have any effect?

Speaker 3

48:43

As I have described it, system 1 can be updated in terms of content very readily. So you can learn in 1 trial what is normal and what is not normal. What is very difficult to do is to get control over how it works, over the rules of its operation.

Speaker 3

49:04

And so I do not know a lot of evidence that people, that system 1 can change unless you have acquired skills which requires reinforced practice. What you can do and what people clearly can do is you can educate your system too and you can educate and you can learn to recognize situations in which system 2 takes over and takes control of the reactions, thereby avoid some mistakes. It can't be done too much. But if I don't sound optimistic about training system 1, it's because I'm not.