So far in the course, we've been talking about essentially the way that the mind doesn't work.
It doesn't work like a video camera. You can't go back in time and review what
it is that you experienced again. We don't have any sort of privileged access into the
workings of our own memory, and we're not very good at predicting other people's behavior
under most circumstances. We're not great at doing this sort of thing.
That's right, and I think we could spend episode after episode just going through each of these
myths and trying to shatter them. I mean, some common examples are: we only use 10 percent
of our brains, or right-brained people are more creative than left-brained people, or
you can tell whether someone's lying from a polygraph test. We dealt with subliminal
messages in rock music a couple of weeks ago. The thing is there's very little empirical
evidence for these claims. It seems that they don't do what we think they might.
But as well as shattering these myths, I think it's important that we replace our beliefs
with something. So one of the things we're trying to do in this course is give a realistic
idea about how the mind is actually working. We can take that and use it to improve our everyday thinking.
I think you're exactly right, but we also need to—in order to understand the way that
the mind is working and give people a realistic idea about the kind of processes and so on
that happen, we need to understand the environment that we're operating in—specifically, when
we're making everyday sorts of decisions.
What sorts of decisions do we make every day? What to wear, or whether to buy a lawnmower
or not, or what kind of brand that you should buy, whether to buy a latex mattress or a
box-spring mattress, or whether to stay in the same job that you have, choosing a mate,
going through a grocery store, what sort of things that you purchase at the grocery store,
and so on, whether to spank your child, whether to be a vegetarian or not—the list goes
on. These are the sorts of things that we're dealing with.
If that's the case, most of these decisions that we make aren't under ideal conditions.
Most of the time, we're kind of rushed in order to make them. Ideally, in the best-case
scenario, you'd have all the time in the world. You'd have a big desk completely empty, with
paper; you could have a pros and cons list, and you can weigh out whether to spank your
child or not. You can do some research. You'd have all of the information available to you,
about the latest studies, for example, about spanking and the benefits. We just don't have that time.
I mentioned the latex mattress. Recently, we were going to buy a mattress. It's kind
of a big purchase, right? You can go as high as tens of thousands of dollars and as low
as sleeping on the floor, but I couldn't find any sort of really good evidence for sleeping
on a latex mattress versus a box-spring mattress. If you go into The Sleep Store, they would
absolutely say that there's a massive difference between them and try to upsell you, but I
don't have all day to sit and do the necessary research to be able to make this sort of decisions.
The thing that gets me, though, is that even if you do have the time to be really deliberate
and think about this decision like you said, after you've made the decision, it's really
hard to get good feedback about the quality of that decision. Whether you decided to go
to the movies instead of going to dinner, whether you decided to become a vegetarian,
how can you possibly, with a sample size of one, evaluate the quality of that decision?
How do you know you are right?
Yes. Especially in hindsight as well. I mean, anything could happen.
The other thing is, though, even if somebody does have the right answer, if somebody knows
whether it was the right decision or not, people aren't going to tell you because we
have these strange social ideas that you shouldn't critique people too much, so feedback is terrible.
The feedback that we get from the world about the basis of our decisions, the feedback that
we get from our friends and family and society, is terrible as well.
The world is extremely complex and extremely ambiguous, right? Most of the decisions that
we're making aren't immediately apparent, so when we're talking about complex, any of
ambiguity, I mean—we gave a few toy examples in the beginning, in episode two, where we
were talking about different illusions and how you see them differently. Most of these
examples, there's two ways of seeing it maybe.
But when we're talking in realistic terms, if you talk about something like, I don't
know, talent—when you're talking about talent, think of how multifaceted that concept is.
When you're determining whether somebody is talented or not, you can look at that notion
in a million different sorts of ways. If that's the case, then under most decision-making
circumstances, there are billions of ways that it could be, so it's very ambiguous as
to whether something is going to be perceived in one way or another. In terms of how we
act, there's a million different ways of acting. So it's not an easy task, making these sorts of everyday decisions.
It's clear that the world is complex and ambiguous, so we have to use shortcuts. It's not ideal,
so we have to rely on easier ways of doing things, rules of thumb. Heuristics is what
they're called, and we're going to talk about that later in the episode. But first, we're
going to start with a distinction that Daniel Kahneman makes in his book "Thinking, Fast
and Slow," and we're going to talk to him in this episode. He makes a really nice distinction
between system one and system two, and he talks about them as though they're characters
in his book. System one is it's fast; it's effortless; it's automatic. System 2 is the opposite.
It's slow; it's deliberative; and it's very effortful. This is a really nice distinction,
and we're going to provide a bunch of examples of these because I think
it really does a nice job at characterizing the way that the mind works in the way that
we're going to be thinking about these everyday sorts of problems that we just mentioned.