Opinion 45
A Tale of Two Systems Written by William Urbanski
Perhaps at some time in your life, you have looked up to the starry cosmos at night and wondered how people can simultaneously be so breathtakingly clever and preposterously daft. How is it that someone with a PhD in physics will forget his car keys? What about a champion chess player who walks smack into a telephone pole because she is not paying attention? At some time or other, we have all made silly mistakes that we are not proud of and leave us wondering what was going through our minds.
That little stressful feeling you get when you try to do a complex task like this is a sign that System Two is engaged. System Two handles all sorts of stuff, like doing math, but also takes over when it is necessary to exercise self-restraint or during strenuous physical activity. Where System One can be thought of as an impulsive child (or a dirty, lazy hippy), System Two is like a slow, deliberate Terminator (the T-800, not that silly Rev-9 model from Dark Fate). Using System Two is cognitively expensive and often physically draining, so, not surprisingly, humans actually hate using it and therefore avoid using it whenever possible. As a consequence, often when encountering a problem or situation where System Two should be engaged, people resist activating it and instead rely on System One, which for the above mentioned reasons is ill-equipped for many problems and can lead us to making errors. So what does that mean for us? The knowledge of dual thought systems allows us to gain greater insight into why certain decisions are made and why people behave in certain ways. Here are some examples.
That being said, using System One for all daily tasks though is extremely problematic because, when System One encounters a problem it has never faced, it often
When I first heard that the big-box stores were going to stop providing tape, ribbons, and boxes to customers, I was furious. Although this was done ostensibly to “help the environment,” I could not help but feel this was just a big cost-cutting measure by the greedy CEOs. I mean,
March 2020
Big-Box Store’s Decision to Stop Providing Tape and Ribbon to Assemble Boxes
www.gwangjunewsgic.com
His conclusion, which is more or less accepted as fact in the academic community, is that the human mind switches between two modes of thinking, aptly named System One and System Two. System One (sometimes referred to as the “intuitive” or “automatic” system) handles everyday, ho-hum responses to various phenomena. Actions carried out by this system are: walking, chatting, putting on a sweater, changing channels on your TV, and removing your hand quickly from a hot stove. The automatic system is extremely useful because it does not tie up our cognitive resources dealing with trivial things, and once it learns basic tasks well enough, it performs them quickly.
System Two is the rational, reflective system responsible for critical and complex thought processes. To see the difference between the two systems, try this simple experiment: Recite the alphabet from A to Z. Easy, right? Reciting this sequence of letters is a task handled by System One. Now, as quickly as you can, try saying the alphabet backwards from Z to A. Except for the select handful of people in the world who have memorized the alphabet backwards, this sequence should be somewhat difficult because the automatic system simply cannot handle it. OPINION
Fortunately, the field of psychology has discovered a conceptual framework that can act as an analytical tool to decipher otherwise inexplicable behavior, situations, and phenomena.The idea that the human mind contains two different and sometimes competing cognitive systems is an idea championed by Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman. In his book Thinking Fast and Slow, Kahneman details the ingenious reasoning and methods he used to essentially prove his theories.
relies on heuristics (rules of thumb) which can be ineffective or provide sub-optimal results. Many tasks require a different mode of thinking: System Two.
