Daniel Kahneman: The Marvels and the Flaws of...

Amira Skomorowska's notes

"Everything you can imagine is real."— Pablo Picasso

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Sep
12th

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Daniel Kahneman: The Marvels and the Flaws of Intuitive Thinking

“The power of settings, the power of priming, and the power of unconscious thinking, all of those are a major change in psychology. I can’t think of a bigger change in my lifetime. You were asking what’s exciting? That’s exciting, to me.”

“If you want to characterize how something is done, then one of the most powerful ways of characterizing the way the mind does anything is by looking at the errors that the mind produces while it’s doing it because the errors tell you what it is doing. Correct performance tells you much less about the procedure than the errors do.

We focused on errors. We became completely identified with the idea that people are generally wrong. We became like prophets of irrationality. We demonstrated that people are not rational. (…)

That was 40 years ago, and a fair amount has happened in the last 40 years. Not so much, I would say, about the work that we did in terms of the findings that we had. Those pretty much have stood, but it’s the interpretation of them that has changed quite a bit. It is now easier than it was to speak about the mechanisms that we had very little idea about, and to speak about, to put in balance the flaws that we were talking about with the marvels of intuition. (…)

Flows

This is something that happens quite a lot, at least in psychology, and I suppose it may happen in other sciences as well. You get an impression of the relative importance of two topics by how much time is spent on them when you’re teaching them. But you’re teaching what’s happening now, you’re teaching what’s recent, what’s current, what’s considered interesting, and so there is a lot more to say about flaws than about marvels. (…)

We understand the flaws and the marvels a little better than we did. (…)

One way a thought can come to mind involves orderly computation, and doing things in stages, and remembering rules, and applying rules. Then there is another way that thoughts come to mind. You see this lady, and she’s angry, and you know that she’s angry as quickly as you know that her hair is dark. There is no sharp line between intuition and perception. You perceive her as angry. Perception is predictive. You know what she’s going to say, or at least you know something about what it’s going to sound like, and so perception and intuition are very closely linked. In my mind, there never was a very clean separation between perception and intuition. Because of the social context we’re in here, you can’t ignore evolution in anything that you do or say. But for us, certainly for me, the main thing in the evolutionary story about intuition, is whether intuition grew out of perception, whether it grew out of the predictive aspects of perception.

If you want to understand intuition, it is very useful to understand perception, because so many of the rules that apply to perception apply as well to intuitive thinking. Intuitive thinking is quite different from perception. Intuitive thinking has language. Intuitive thinking has a lot of world knowledge organized in different ways than mere perception. But some very basic characteristics that we’ll talk about of perception are extended almost directly into intuitive thinking.

What we understand today much better than what we did then is that there are, crudely speaking, two families of mental operations, and I’ll call them “Type 1” and “Type 2” for the time being because this is the cleaner language. Then I’ll adopt a language that is less clean, and much more useful.

Type 1 is automatic, effortless, often unconscious, and associatively coherent, and I’ll talk about that. And Type 2 is controlled, effortful, usually conscious, tends to be logically coherent, rule-governed. Perception and intuition are Type 1— it’s a rough and crude characterization. Practiced skill is Type 1, that’s essential, the thing that we know how to do like driving, or speaking, or understanding language and so on, they’re Type 1. That makes them automatic and largely effortless, and essentially impossible to control.

Type 2 is more controlled, slower, is more deliberate. (…) Type 2 is who we think we are. I would say that, if one made a film on this, Type 2 would be a secondary character who thinks that he is the hero because that’s who we think we are, but in fact, it’s Type 1 that does most of the work, and it’s most of the work that is completely hidden from us. (…)

‘Associative coherence’

Everything reinforces everything else, and that is something that we know. You make people recoil; they turn negative. You make people shake their heads (you put earphones on people’s heads, and you tell them we’re testing those earphones for integrity, so we would like you to move your head while listening to a message, and you have them move their head this way, or move their head that way, and you give them a political message) they believe it if they’re doing “this”, and they don’t believe it if they’re doing “that”. Those are not huge effects, but they are effects. They are easily shown with a conventional number of subjects. It’s highly reliable.

The thing about the system is that it settles into a stable representation of reality, and that is just a marvelous accomplishment. That’s a marvel. This is not. That’s not a flaw, that’s a marvel. Now, coherence has its cost. Coherence means that you’re going to adopt one interpretation in general. Ambiguity tends to be suppressed. This is part of the mechanism that you have here that ideas activate other ideas and the more coherent they are, the more likely they are to activate to each other. Other things that don’t fit fall by the wayside. We’re enforcing coherent interpretation. We see the world as much more coherent than it is.

That is something that we see in perception, as well. You show people ambiguous stimuli. They’re not aware of the ambiguity. I’ll give you an example. You hear the word “bank”, and most people interpret “bank”, as a place with vaults, and money, and so on. But in the context, if you’re reading about streams and fishing, “bank” means something else. You’re not conscious when you’re getting one that you are not getting the other. If you are, you’re not conscious ever, but it’s possible that both meanings are activated, but that one gets quickly suppressed. That mechanism of creating coherent interpretations is something that happens, and subjectively what happens (I keep using the word “happens” - this is not something we do, this is something that happens to us). The same is true for perception. For Plato it was ideas sort of thrusting themselves into our eyes, and that’s the way we feel. We are passive when it comes to System 1. When it comes to System 2, and to deliberate thoughts, we are the authors of our own actions, and so the phenomenology of it is radically different. (…)

‘What you see is all there is’

It is a mechanism that tends not to not be sensitive to information it does not have. It’s very important to have a mechanism like that. (…) This is a mechanism that takes whatever information is available, and makes the best possible story out of the information currently available, and tells you very little about information it doesn’t have. So what you can get are people jumping to conclusions.

‘Machine for jumping to conclusions’

The jumping to conclusions is immediate, and very small samples, and furthermore from unreliable information. You can give details and say this information is probably not reliable, and unless it is rejected as a lie, people will draw full inferences from it. What you see is all there is. (…)

Overconfidence

The confidence that people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence, it is not a judgment of the quality of the evidence but it is a judgment of the coherence of the story that the mind has managed to construct. Quite often you can construct very good stories out of very little evidence, when there is little evidence, no conflict, and the story is going to end up good. People tend to have great belief, great faith in stories that are based on very little evidence. It generates what Amos [Tversky] and I call “natural assessments”, that is, there are computations that get performed automatically. For example, we get computations of the distance between us and other objects, because that’s something that we intend to do, this is something that happens to us in the normal run of perception.

But we don’t compute everything. There is a subset of computations that we perform, and other computations we don’t.

You see this array of lines.

There is evidence among others, and my wife has collected some evidence, that people register the average length of these lines effortlessly, in one glance, while doing something else. The extraction of information about a prototype is immediate. But if you were asked, what is the sum, what is the total length of these lines? You can’t do this. You got the average for free; you didn’t get the sum for free. In order to get the sum, you’d have to get an estimate of the number, and an estimate of the average, and multiply the average by the number, and then you’ll get something. But you did not get that as a natural assessment. So there is a really important distinction between natural assessment and things that are not naturally assessed. There are questions that are easy for the organism to answer, and other questions that are difficult for the organism to answer, and that makes a lot of difference.

While I’m at it, the difference between average and sums is an important difference because there are variables that have the characteristic that I will call “sum-like.” They’re extensional. They’re sum-like variables. Economic value is a sum-like variable. (…)”

— Daniel Kahneman, Israeli-American psychologist and Nobel laureate. He is notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, behavioral economics and hedonic psychology., To see and read full lecture click The Marvels and the Flaws of Intuitive Thinking Edge Master Class 2011, Edge, Jul 17, 2011 (Illustration: Maija Hurme)

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