Part 1-4: How We Make Judgments

System 1 continuously monitors what’s going on outside and inside the mind and generates assessments with little effort and without intention. The basic assessments include language, facial recognition, social hierarchy, similarity, causality, associations, and exemplars.

• In this way, you can look at a male face and consider him competent (for instance, if he has a strong chin and a slight confident smile).
• The survival purpose is to monitor surroundings for threats.

However, not every attribute of the situation is measured. System 1 is much better at determining comparisons between things and the average of things, not the sum of things. Here’s an example:

In the below picture, try to quickly determine what the average length of the lines is.

Now try to determine the sum of the length of the lines. This is less intuitive and requires System 2.

Unlike System 2 thinking, these basic assessments of System 1 are not impaired when the observer is cognitively busy.

In addition to basic assessments: System 1 also has two other characteristics:

1) Translating Values Across Dimensions, or Intensity Matching

System 1 is good at comparing values on two entirely different scales. Here’s an example.

Consider a minor league baseball player. Compared to the rest of the population, how athletic is this player?

Now compare your judgment to a different scale: If you had to convert how athletic the player is into a year-round weather temperature, what temperature would you choose?

Just as a minor league player is above average but not the top tier, the temperature you chose might be something like 80 Fahrenheit.

As another example, consider comparing crimes and punishments, each expressed as musical volume. If a soft-sounding crime is followed by a piercingly loud punishment, then this means a large mismatch that might indicate injustice.

2) Mental Shotgun

System 1 often carries out more computations than are needed. Kahneman calls this “mental shotgun.”

For example, consider whether each of the following three statements is literally true:

• Some roads are snakes.
• Some jobs are snakes.
• Some jobs are jails.

All three statements are literally false. The second statement likely registered more quickly as false to you, while the other two took more time to think about because they are metaphorically true. But even though finding metaphors was irrelevant to the task, you couldn’t help noticing them - and so the mental shotgun slowed you down. Your System-1 brain made more calculations than it had to.

Heuristics: Answering an Easier Question

Despite all the complexities of life, notice that you’re rarely stumped. You rarely face situations as mentally taxing as having to solve 9382 x 7491 in your head.

Isn’t it profound how we can make decisions at all without realizing it? You like or dislike people before you know much about them; you feel a company will succeed or fail without really analyzing it.

When faced with a difficult question, System 1 substitutes an easier question, or the heuristic question. The answer is often adequate, though imperfect.

Consider the following examples of heuristics:

• Target question: How much is saving an endangered species worth to me?
  • Heuristic question: How much emotion do I feel when I think of dying dolphins?
• Target question: How happy are you with your life?
  • Heuristic question: What’s my current mood?
• Target question: How should financial advisers who commit fraud be punished?
  • Heuristic question: How much anger would I feel if I were ripped off?
• Target question: How far will this political candidate get in her party?
  • Heuristic question: Does this person look like a political winner?

Based on what we learned previously about characteristics of System 1, here’s how heuristics are generated:

• System 1 applies a mental shotgun with a slew of basic assessments and heuristics about the problem. These impressions are readily available without thought.
  • Many impressions are more emotion-based than we would like.
• Next, System 1 uses intensity matching to scale the relevant assessments to the target question.
  • How painful the image of a dying dolphin feels is scaled to how much money you’re willing to contribute.
  • Note that this doesn’t actually directly answer the question - sometimes, the heuristic is actually asking a completely different question.

When System 1 produces an imperfect answer, System 2 has the opportunity to reject this answer, but a lazy System 2 often endorses the heuristic without much scrutiny.

Even more insidiously, a lazy System 2 will feel as though it’s applied tremendous brainpower to the question.

Example: Order Matters

In one experiment, students were asked:

• How happy are you these days?

• How many dates did you have last month?

When presented in that order, there was no correlation between the answers.

When the questions were reversed, the correlation was very high. The first question prompted an emotional response, which was then used to answer the happiness question. Here the heuristic of “how many dates did I go on?” was used to scale to the very different question, “how happy am I?”