Daniel Kahneman on The Machinery of the Mind

let me begin actually from the beginning by introducing you to somebody who in some ways would have been or should have been the cause of this material this a few years before he died and you can see a very distinguished gentleman and obviously very smart and brilliant and so on and this is Amos Tversky as he looked when he and I did our work and and this is I like showing this picture because it does several things I think it it reminds you of how how innovative science is really done and it's done having a lot of fun we were exceptionally lucky because we had fun together so we liked each other's company and we spent about five or six hours a day together for many years just having fun basically and doing the research that led to the material that I'll be talking about today I'll be talking about two modes of thinking obviously the fast and the slow and our associate two names with it with them the system 1 and system 2 and let me illustrate one way that thoughts come to mind so you know this lady is angry and it's notice how that happened to you and I use the word happened advisedly you didn't have to compute you didn't have to have an intention she just looks angry if I say 2+2 a number comes into your head it comes into your head immediately you don't have to intend you don't have to make an effort it happens so there are many thoughts impressions beliefs emotions that have that character they come to mind unbidden and we have we feel passive with respect to them it's something that happens mostly as I'll talk the nominal I'll talk about happen in a place of in a place in the brain they happen in a system and that system made the associative memory system 2+2 is very strongly associated with a number 4 and so you're here to brush 2 and the number four pops up in in your mind and this lady brings anger and here is another way that thoughts come to your mind so well actually let's analyze what came to your mind here because no number came to your mind you know unless you have misspent your youth learning too much of the multiplication table you know nothing comes to mind but you immediately recognize there's a lot actually that you knew very quickly you immediately recognize that as a multiplication system you probably knew about yourself something about yourself whether you could do it in your head or couldn't if and and there were a few other things actually that you knew because you knew that very roughly a range of possible answers so you knew it was less than 25,000 and you knew it was more than 75 so somewhere and that that happened but the number which happens to be 408 for those of you who are very curious about such things that number didn't come to mind to produce it you would have to do something entirely different from what I described so far to produce it you'd have to retrieve the program that you learned in high school and you'd have to run that program and that program is sequential and it involves finding you know products and storing them and then going back and finding more products and and remembering where you are this is hard work and so the second type of thinking though that I'll talk about is effortful the first type is automatic it happens by itself the second type is typically associated with a sense of agency you feel you're doing it you feel you're the author are those thoughts that come into your head and there is something else that system to does it's in effect it is it controls in control what is deliberate most of us by the way we feel we are our system - we don't know much about what's going on in our system one in the associative system because so much of it happens very quickly and outside the reach of awareness but system - we're normally aware of of what's going on at that second mode of thinking and we're aware of the work that is being done by the way the work is actual work it consumes glucose in the brain and it's associated with physiological consumes an unusual a remarkable amount of work glucose in the brain apparently and it's associated with many many physiological manifestations so if you were to compute to really try to compute 17 times 24 your heart rate would increase by several beats your pupil would dilates possibly by 40 or 50 percent of its initial area so those are that's what mental work is like now to give you a general view of you know how they work those two systems you might think that system two is in charge because that in effect is how I've described it because we can inhibit thoughts and we certainly can inhibit action so you know you don't tell everyone everything you think about them you monitor and and sometimes you stop yourself or you adjust what you were going to say you sometimes even stop yourself from going along a certain path of thoughts so you deliberately turn your thoughts away from a topic and move to another so in that sense all these are system - all these are the deliberate and effortful and they involve some mental work so in that sense system - would appear to be in control but the picture that I draw and that I will sort of elaborate on in the remainder of our time the picture is a little more complex because I will describe system two basically as lazy as I was doing as little as it and we have a lot of evidence that system two is lazy and I'll give you some evidence actually I'll give you some evidence now okay this is a riddle a bat and a ball together it costs a dollar ten the bat costs a dollar more than the ball how much does the ball cost don't try to solve it because that's not the point the point is that a solution came to your mind immediately and that solution with ten cents the number ten cents occurred to you it occurs to everybody when they first see that problem it is not the correct solution to the problem the correct solution by the waist five cents because sometimes I completely lose the audience at this point but so it's it's five cents you know it's five cents and a dollar five gives you a dollar ten but ten cents and the dollar ten gives you a dollar twenty so ten cents is wrong but it occurs to everybody and then there is an interesting fact when you present that riddle to students at universities about 50% of students at Princeton Harvard and Yale n MIT actually say ten cents and we learned something very important about the people who say themselves because anyone who writes ten cents has not checked because if you trick it's immediate that ten cents is the wrong answer so if you put down ten cents as you know and in some universities that I will remain nameless it gets to 85 percent who fail decided so Prince Princeton and is actually quite good in that respect but we know that anyone who makes that mistake hasn't tricked it tells us something about system two it tells us us and that's very typical and what happens that system one comes up with an answer pretty much like two plus two equals four but in this case the answer was wrong and system two and door and passed it on and expressed it in over behavior in the kind of thing that system to controls so that is roughly the picture of the mind you know as I'm going to describe it and it means something it means that we want to know what are the immediate inclinations you know we want to know how system one works that is where does it come up with in different situations and then we want to know her system to works in the sense of when will system to not endorse because endorsing in the default mode when will system to not endorse the impressions the immediate associations of system one will also see as we develop that scheme where errors come from we're seen first of all before I talk of errors let me talk about which system when does extremely well most of our skilled behavior is in system one it's automatic so if you drive you can talk and drive at the same time you can't you can't have a serious conversation while you're making a left turn into traffic that is the meaning of effort and a characteristic of effort and a characteristic of system two in that its overall capacity is limited so if it's employed or deployed in one task it is not available for the performance of other tasks so that's a characteristic how that works our skills we have well we have admire skills and the intuition of experts a lot many people here have read Malcolm Gladwell's book blink and where you know people have a intuitions and experts of intuition and it is indeed the fact experts do have intuitions which have often very impressive that is when you see a tres master you know walk past the pose and say you know white mates in three or something the Tres massive views or sees tress situations differently from the rest of us that comes from reinforced practice and with reinforced practice skill develops this is how we learn how to take a turn on the road without really thinking that is there are cues and those cues directly activate a motor response through the memory system but automatically and we don't have to invest effort in though now we had my the skills of experts but all of us are skilled we are skilled at most of the thing that we do so we're skilled at driving that were also skilled at talking chatting leisurely my first actually I think you know the first time that I thought along these lines was a very long time ago when I was studying where the pupil of the eye does when people are engaged in mental effort turns are the pupil dilates enormously with mental effort but I was once watching we had a set up that displayed the pupil of the eye in the corridor of the laboratory and you know you could see that thing pulsing and increasing in diameter when people were thinking and working and somebody had stayed in the chin rest with her pupil being imaged as free during a break in the experiment and she was sort of chatting with other people in the laboratory you know and I really stunned I remember because very little happened to her pupil so it turns out she was chatting and not working her mind was not doing very much work at all but she was chatting entirely normally so remembering six did Ritz parking you know in a narrow space if except possibly you know for garage attendants but filling a tax form all of these are hard work chatting it turns out just responding routinely without thinking very much that is a skill we have that comes off almost automatically and essentially does not demand effort now I have a purposeful for doing this let me focus well you have already focus on those words and let me tell you a few things that happen to you while you were looking at these words because they are very characteristic of how system one works the first place you you read the word you didn't have control over that you knew where the words were immediately so reading is in that sense so highly skilled that it is automatic you tell people not to read and unless you really direct their attention elsewhere they're going to read the words now images came to your mind and the images were not nice and something else happened you made a disgust face and mildly but you made a disgust face and we know what a disgust face looks like and you can show pictures of people's faces when they have seen that when word and that's the response you felt some disgust mild not like the real thing but a mild replica of the real thing you moved that's hard to believe because you know you didn't sense yourself moving but you can actually be measured and it has been measured in recent years so people recoil when they see a threatening world now an interesting aspect of us which has been very influential in my own thinking in those contexts if that most of these responses tend to reinforce each other that is you'll get a coherent response because of that neutral reinforcement what do I mean by this when you feel disgust you make a disgust face but when you make a disgust face you feel disgust so you the influences go both ways and you know we know that from many different experiments but one of my favorite ones involves taking a pencil and sticking the pencil in your mouth like this and then you show people cartoons and the cartoons are funny they're funnier than they are normally for somebody who holds a pencil like this they give higher ratings to how funny the cartoons are and the reason is that although they are not aware that anything is funny they are making a funny face they are making a smile when by and you force people to make a smart by sticking a pencil in their mouth in this direction you stick a pencil in their mouth in this direction that makes a frown and then cartoons are less funny than usual so we have influences that work both ways and what you begin to get here is a reaction to the word which is a bit of a replica of the reaction to the real thing your something else happens to you when you will many many other things happen but when you see this it changes it changes the activity in your associative memory in the far in in a very interesting way suppose after seeing the spare of words you would expose to a tape with whispered words that are very difficult to recognize so most of the words sounds just like a whisper undistinguishable but some words would sound loud and clear you would recognize them very easily and these would be words like smell and stink and ill and hangover and nausea and a lot of words that are related to vomit what happens is that single stimulus activates a whole range of ideas your associative memory you're not conscious of them they don't actually come to your mind but you're prepared for them and because you are prepared for them you will react more quickly forward is exposed plainly and you will react to a word that is presented faintly you will respond to it as if it had been presented more clearly because you are ready for it so what happens and it's it happens really within a second when you see the word vomit I haven't spoken bananas yet but what happens when you see that single word you are prepared you're in a state you're prepared for emergency you are prepared in a particular direction by the way people after that word will be generally more vigilant for a while because they have responded as if this were a threat now there's something else that happens and that's the word banana here the two words as I show them here are really not linked there is no reason for you to make up a story but system one the automatic system makes up a story out of these two words and it makes up a causal story the banana caused the vomit and you know for a short time you're off bananas because because they have that that effect and I won't last long but this this connection has been made and what happens and this is quite a general theme when we talk about the two systems in that system one is a storyteller it generates interpretations fairly complete interpretations which if possible include the cause when know causes found it's a problem and that cause in general will bring about system to here there is a possible cause it's not that the cause is obvious but it's the only candidate cause that is present and the causal connection is clearly made between those two words so you have a reaction that interprets the past interprets the present and prepares for the future all of this happening within a fraction of a second and without your intending to do anything this is what associative memory does this is what system one does so it provides a coherent interpretation and a potential response to events now let me give you a few characteristics of system one all right you read that that's obvious you read that pretty obvious too so I've showed you ABC I showed you 12 13 14 some of you may know what's coming next what's coming next is that the B and the 13 are exactly the same they are precisely the same thing so now you can see it that's those are the beasts now what happened here what this is telling us is telling us an important fact about system 1 it really produces a coherent interpretation so in the context of letters that shape is read as a letter in a context of numbers it is read as a number you don't intend to do that this is just something that happens and it happens automatically and it it happens because if you will have the tendency of that system to produce coherence now what I'm talking about the marvels of system 1 it contains our world knowledge and it represents our world knowledge and I have an example that I cite all the time and it's it's also in the book actually it's an experiment in which people listen to sentences well events in their brain are recorded and they hear a sentence spoken in an upper class British male voice which I will not try to imitate and it says I have large tattoos all down my back within approximately 3/10 of a second the brain responds surprise and and there is a characteristic signature to the surprise response and it's full-blown within a fraction of a second now if you stop to think about it this is pretty wonderful because the associative memory has computed that it has recognized the voice as an upper class British male voice it has consulted it's world knowledge about upper class British males it has found that not many of them have large tattoos down their back it's not a typical behavior for upper class British male incongruity is detected a surprise that happens immediately so one of the major functions of system one is to use a world knowledge so that we are prepared for events in the world and we can classify events in the world as they happen as normal or abnormal now I want to show you something else that system one does this is an experiment results of an experiment that was conducted in in England in a laboratory actually not a psychology laboratory where there is an honesty box that's very common in British University there is a little room with tea and coffee and milk available and biscuits and and an enormous tea box where people pay for the tea they buy somebody had the bright idea of hanging posters right on top of the honesty box and you read that graph from the bottom so this is the amount that people paid in pounds per liter of milk the first week the poster of those two large eyes staring at you they really pay a lot the next week it's flowers the next week it's eyes the next week it's flowers again this is a very powerful effect on behavior of something that nobody registered it's absurd I mean you know why there is a connection and this is really the way that system works the associative system it is highly symbolic in its responses there is a connection between eyes being watched and a tendency to behave rather well rather better than usual to be wary people are completely unaware of it there were no awareness that people didn't know that that they were posters or probably they did know that there was a poster they had no idea what the posters were or that they would change or the significance of the of the eyes the effect still occurred so this is this is system one you know I'm just giving you a vague sense but but I hope I'm giving you the flavor of that pretty marvelous machinery we have in our head that generates a lot of our behavior a lot of it without our being aware of what is happening and without our having the sense that we are doing it there's we're system to is the one that made the contribution but the impulse to make the contribution that came clearly from system one without without any awareness of what was going on now you may be wondering how you know I have the reputation of being very interested in errors so you may be wondering when am I finally going to talk about errors how the system won't go wrong and and I think well there's more than one answer but but I'll give you what I consider one of the important parts of the answer when system one when asked a single question and it can be asked from the outside or it can be a question that you generate for yourself that is you develop the goal of finding an answer to a question if the question is too difficult system one answers a simpler that is what happens is typically we don't compute when we face a question we don't compute a single answer many computations go on I call that the mental shotgun you're not it's not a single bullet it's just many pellets are sent many computations go on I'll give you an example of that suppose you are told to respond as quickly as possible if a pair of words rhyme so you will you know you raise one hand say if the if the words rhyme and the other hand if the words don't try and psychologists do that kind of thing and they measure the speed at which people respond so I say vote note that's very easy those two words rhyme I say vote gold those two words rhyme people are much slower saying that they rhyme now why it is because they have carried out a computation that nobody asked them to carry out that they did not intend to carry out they spell the words they spell the words and there is a mismatch in the spelling between vote and gold that creates a no response a tendency to answer no that's a mismatch which interferes with the response that you really intend to produce which is a response to whether the words rhyme or not that is highly typical we generate answers to multiple questions immediately in our head when we are asked a single one in many cases and in some cases the answer to the correct question doesn't come up at all you're never aware of it but the answer to another question comes up if people are asked the question how tall are the three figures how large are the three figures on the screen this experiment has been run many times people think the figure on the right is larger than the figure on the left on the screen it is not if you took a ruler the three figures are absolutely identical what happens is we answer a question that we're not asked to answer we compute the three-dimensional size of those figures not on the screen but if this were a three-dimensional image who would be taller it's the guy on the right and that's what happens now people are not confused you know that you've been asked to think about the screen but there is an another answer which was quite powerful and it distorts what you will say to that direct question here is another example of the same kind of mechanism of answering a question because the answer to a simple one is a to a simpler one is available so this was done with students and in a survey students were asked two questions an immediate succession how happy are you and how many dates did you have last month when people are asked those two questions in that sequence they essentially uncorrelated turns out dating is not what determines students happiness now you invert the order of the questions so you ask them how many dates did you have last month how happy are you now the correlation jumps to point 66 it's very very high in effect what they do the question how happy are you is a difficult question but they have an answer there is an answer available in system one you have the question how many dates then you have last month created an emotional response which presumably is a happy one if you had many and it is not a happy one if you didn't have any and so that emotional tone is available when the question how happy are you comes up that's the answer that gets generated so we call that the substitution principal and the substitution principle means that you answer a question that is simpler than the one you're asked this happens all over the place and in effect it serves us extremely well because much of the time you know there'll be a relationship you'll answer not exactly the question you were asked but you'll do something you won't be stumped system one is really stumped it produces something most of the time 17 times 24 no but in many other cases yes let me give you an example I'm trying to remember the Canadians grading system but which I should know because I thought that UBC for eight years but let me tell you about a student her name is Julie and I'll give you one fact about Julie she read fluently when she was aged four and I asked you what is a great point average and the odd thing is like in the other cases that I mentioned a number came to your mind your mind produced a number it's the wrong number by the way but and let me explain how the number came to your mind the fact Julie read fluently when she was aged four creates an impression you have an impression of how bright she is how priek actually how bright she is or something else you have an impression of how precocious she was in acquiring reading she was quite precocious not exceptionally precocious some people read at age two or less but you know quite precocious so you have some vague idea it's not very precise but you have an idea of in percentile terms how many people read earlier than age four not many what did you do with a question what is a grade point average you actually match the percentile you produced an answer a grade point average which is about as extreme as your impression of a grade point average that's the way intuition works it is absurd actually in usually you know very very little about Julie you know one fact but you predict in effect as this the correlation between reading age and grade point average was perfect it is not perfect you know virtually nothing about Julie you should stay very close to the average in predicting her grade point average in in statistical terms you should be very regressive our intuitions are completely non regressive this is a major characteristic of system one it is extremely poor dealing with statistics and it is prone to tell stories and the stories are told the stories are generated even with very little information so you get one fact about Julie and and you have an idea I give you another example Steve is a meek and tidy soul with a passion for detail now Steve has been you know selected at random from the population of Canada what is the probability that Steve is a librarian rather than former now one fact drums immediately to mine which is Steve looks like a librarian the stereotype the matter of the stereotypes comes immediately to mind there is a bit of statistics that's relevant here I know the statistics of the United States for Canada it would be more extreme in the United States there are twenty times as many male farmers as male variant so in effect any calculation that is sensible Steve is significantly more likely to be a farmer than a librarian even if even though he is a meek and tidy soul there are many meek and tidy souls among farmers not only among librarians that's the way a correct system would compute it our intuitive system does not so it tells a story even when there is little information furthermore the confidence we have in that story in those stories is determined by how coherent they are by how much sense you can make of the information and the conclusion if it's a coherent story we believe it if we have difficulty generating a story without system one generates produces the most coherent story possible the result is massive overconfidence why because we are really good storytellers we tells we tell ourselves stories when with very little information and if the stories are good we believe them system to believes them and the result is that system too has much greater belief in you know its opinions its beliefs the correctness of its decisions then it really should have and that is because of the way that system one works so let me wrap up and open this up to questions during a period this study was done in the 1990s not by me and that was during a period where there were significant terrorist activity in Europe and people were asked to actually imagine that they were traveling and were asked how much they would be willing to pay for insurance that pays $100,000 in case of death for any reason okay other people were asked how much would you pay for insurance that pays $100,000 in case of death in a terrorist accident well I got I got that backward but the first one was in a terrorist incident the second one is death for any reason can you guess what happened people pay a lot more for the second insurance than for the first now this is ridiculous because okay let me not elaborate why it's ridiculous it is ridiculous but what happens is very simple we don't you know it's a very difficult question how much do you pay for insurance but there is something that cost that comes to your mind readily how afraid am i and people are more afraid of dying in a terrorist incident than they're afraid of dying and that makes perfect sense the idea that you will die on a trip that feels quite remote the idea that you will die in a terrorist incident that's a vivid image of explosions and mangled bodies and so on and people pay more for insurance so this is this is the way that system one will violate logic I'm done almost I've described two systems system two is nominally in charge but system one really is the hero of this story because system two typically endorses with system one suggests it's this arrangement is marvelous and it is flawed it is marvelous because system one is marvelous system two is so-so by the way I mean it's not it's slow and it's cranky and it's lazy and and it has limited capacity and it doesn't know that usually doesn't know statistics so that it endorses the mistake suggested by system one but that's the arrangement it's marvelous and it is flawed and it is flawed because very often the answer that system one generates are not the correct answers and even when they are not the correct answers they are likely to be endorsed by system two so that's basically well I still would like it to read the book but that's basic you know that's basically what the book is about thank you is there a way to to target a system to learn okay very difficult there are two things about system one it's very difficult to change its mode of operation you know you're not going it's the association's are where they are and and it's very easy to update system one that is you can update what you know about the world I have a story to tell that I love to I'll tell you the story of hell and steal two minutes from you but it's it's instructive about system one we're on a vacation in Australia my wife and I on a the resort just 40 rooms in the resort and that evening we meet a colleague from Stanford and you know what a coincidence were all very surprised and so on and two weeks later we're in London at the theatre the lights go off somebody comes in Sydney sits next to me and the light come back on it's it's John from stand for the same guy and what is instructive about system one is that I was much less surprised the second time than the first because John you know my my system one had already concluded John that's the guy I meet all over the place now if if I had met anyone else I would have been much more surprised that would have been although that would have been less of a coincidence so that's the way that system one can learn by and lord if you want to improve your thinking it's my improving system - it's by learning statistics and it's by using system which is that when the stakes are very high you want to slow down you can't use system to all the time because it's too slow inefficient and costly you must go on relying on your intuition but when the stakes are high all right to what extent the different individuals have different things in systems remaining systems - its what extent is this valuable is it valuable you said there are there individual differences in system - in part one range of individual differences is in intelligence so system two is correlated with intelligence and and all the standard intelligence tests or most of the senate intelligence tests are tests of the abilities of system two we don't have more in the pity we don't have tests of the intelligence of system 1 that are systemic and you and useful another aspect of system 2 where there are large individual differences in the amount of self control and that is a very significant characteristic and it's by the way related to that bat and ball test that I mentioned earlier the people fail that test and many others like it are different from the people who trick themselves in quite predictable and interesting way front row hi my name is Bank a question about whether or not you've seen any brain imaging studies relate to whether or not system water system 2 is activated whether an MRI or anything like that well I doubt very much ok there's an apology I should make I don't believe that their systems it's just the language it's a I I call that a psychodrama between two fictitious characters because it's much easier to think of system 1 and system 2 than to think about sentences like mental arithmetic is effortful and causes pupils to dilate so when you say system 2 does mental arithmetic and you have the general idea of when system to is it's just easier to store so they're not systems system one I'm not sure maps on to anything in particular in the brain I mean just too many operations of the brain or automatic system to apparently there are now there is now a lot of research on localizations or system to and and the same system seems to be involved in moral reasoning and moral behavior and in and in tracking yourself and and in making yourself computing in the control of attention and so this is this is happening that several system that seem to be shared between these my question is that I I see people sometimes you answer questions very quickly and I see other people who they'll pause and think about it and in fact they're a little annoying and I'm wondering if people actually have that characteristic of ignoring and controlling system one I mean my my guess would be that you're right that the people pause of figuring out whether they really want to do what came to their mind whereas other people say what they what came to their mind without wondering about it my guess is you're right but i patrick sue i was wondering if you were associates system one and system two with different parts of the brain like the the in the new part i don't think that system one could be just the old part of the brain it includes the old part of the brain in the sense that we share part of system one with animals I mean emotions are clearly within system one emotions are experiences something that happens to us many innate tendencies you know fear of spiders that's in system one perception is in system one but on the other hand driving is also system one and you know talking a system one so it's not in a single place system two as I mentioned earlier is much more likely to be localized and we know a bit about its localization last question front row this my name is Janine Gleaner this may be a related question Marketing we often craft messages with a logical benefit as well as an emotional appeal are we really working with system two and system one when we do that that's the idea I would think by and large you know it's very clear that marketing and political speech are mostly directed at system one and they are intended to evoke emotional responses and and you know tendencies to react in particular directions some people you know the more educated people I think tend to prefer advertisements that are targeted that's involve some thinking or require some thinking or provide some information so what you're talking about is an ad that attempts to talk to both systems at once and we have those two thank you very much support Ontario's public television donate at TV org

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Keywords: TVO, TVOntario, TVOKids, polka, dot, door, polkaroo, education, public, television, Elwy, Yost, Steve, Paikin, big, back, yard, ideas, Canada, Big Ideas, Daniel Kahnemn, Psychology, Brain, Economics

Id: DUpqr7nWc3s

Length: 47min 26sec (2846 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 30 2012