UNDERSTANDING THE TEXT
What point is Carr making with the story about Joseph Weizenbaum and the ELIZA computer program? What do the reactions that people had to ELIZA suggest about human nature?
Why does Carr believe that people attributed special intelligence to a program that asked seemingly unintelligent questions?
What is a "Turing Test"? How well do you think a program like ELIZA would do in such a test under experimental conditions?
What other technologies does Carr point out as examples of tools that changed the way human beings think and perceive themselves? Why does he think that the computer will bring about the same kinds of changes?
How does Carr believe that tools shape human cognition and behavior? What kinds of limitations do tools impose as a consequence of the limitations they remove?
How does Carr's quote from Psalms 115 support his argument? What "technology" is discussed in this biblical poem?
Why, according to Carr, do researchers think it would be a bad thing for taxi drivers to use GPS devices?
MAKING CONNECTIONS
Does Carr have a view of the brain that is similar to John Locke's view in "Of Ideas" (p. 100)? Is "neuroplasticity" the same thing as a "blank slate"?
Can you relate Carr's view of technology use to Margaret Mead's view (p. 500) that war is a human invention and not an innate part of human psychology? In what way might war be a tool in the same way that the internet is a tool?
In what ways do Zeynep Tufekci's views of the role of social networking (p. 225) confirm Carr's predictions? In what ways might they fail to do so? How does the tool of social networking alter the way we understand ourselves and our relationships to others?
WRITING ABOUT THE TEXT
Think of an important tool or invention that Carr does not mention in this selection and write a paper about how it has shaped human behavior and cognition.
Examine the technologies that you use in your everyday life and compare them to the technologies of your parents and grandparents. Show how different technological tools create different assumptions about the proper way to live.
Write a paper comparing the "nature v. nurture" assumptions in the selections by Carr, Benedict (p. 500), and Wilson (p. 356). To what degree does each thinker believe that environment affects human psychology?
daniel kahneman
from Thinking, Fast and Slow [2011]
DANIEL KAHNEMAN (b. 1934) is an Israeli-American psychologist and professor emeritus at Princeton University. Kahneman was born in Tel Aviv in 1934 and grew up in Paris. During the Nazi occupation of France (1940-1944), he and his family lived in constant fear of persecution because of their Jewish identity. When the war ended, they immigrated to the newly created nation of Israel. Kahneman received a bachelor's degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1954, and in 1958 moved to the United States to pursue a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California at Berkeley. He has held positions at a number of universities, including Hebrew University, the University of British Columbia, and the University of California at Berkeley before moving to Princeton in 1993.
Though a psychologist, Kahneman was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2002 for his theories about the way people make decisions in uncertain conditions. Kahneman's work demonstrated the flaws in traditional economic theories that assume consumers will always act rationally. The human mind, Kahneman argued, contains a number of built-in irrational biases that prevent us from acting like the rational consumers that our traditional economic theories assume us to be.
In 2011, Kahneman compiled the results of much of his life's academic work into a book aimed at general readers, Thinking, Fast and Slow, which became a bestseller. The book's overall argument is that the human mind has two different systems for processing information. The first system is fast, effortless, instinctive, emotional, and largely subconscious. The second system is slow, logical, difficult, plodding, and the product of conscious effort. According to Kahneman, we are unable to avoid certain cognitive biases because so much of our thinking happens automatically in ways that do not activate the logical centers of our brain.
The following example comes from the first chapter of Thinking, Fast and Slow. Here, Kahneman introduces the two cognitive systems, which are the centerpieces of his book, as though they were characters in a play. Rather than simply explaining the two systems, he uses a series of images and puzzles to activate both systems in the minds of his readers: a picture of a scowling woman, for example, immediately activates our System 1 mechanism for judging people's moods, while a math problem that we cannot solve quickly forces us to move into System 2 and begin the slower work of figuring it out. These images and problems become rhetorically powerful as they allow the reader to engage firsthand with the two systems he describes.
Figure 1
To observe your mind in automatic mode, glance at the image below.
Your experience as you look at the woman's face seamlessly combines what we normally call seeing and intuitive thinking. As surely and quickly as you saw that the young woman's hair is dark, you knew she is angry. Furthermore, what you saw extended into the future. You sensed that this woman is about to say some very unkind words, probably in a loud and strident voice. A premonition of what she was going to do next came to mind automatically and effortlessly. You did not intend to assess her mood or to anticipate what she might do, and your reaction to the picture did not have the feel of something you did. It just happened to you. It was an instance of fast thinking.
Now look at the following problem:of slow thinking. The computation was not only an event in your mind; your body was also involved. Your muscles tensed up, your blood pressure rose, and your heart rate increased. Someone looking closely at your eyes while you tackled this problem would have seen your pupils dilate. Your pupils contracted back to normal size as soon as you ended your work—when you found the answer (which is 408, by the way) or when you gave up.
TWO SYSTEMS
Psychologists have been intensely interested for several decades in the two modes of thinking evoked by the picture of the angry woman and by the multiplication problem, and have offered many labels for them. I adopt terms originally proposed by the psychologists Keith Stanovich and Richard West, and will refer to two systems in the mind, System 1 and System 2.
System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.
System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.
The labels of System 1 and System 2 are widely used in psychology, but I go further than most in this book, which you can read as a psychodrama with two characters.
When we think of ourselves, we identify with System 2, the conscious, reasoning self that has beliefs, makes choices, and decides what to think about and what to do. Although System 2 believes itself to be where the action is, the automatic System 1 is the hero of the book. I describe System 1 as effortlessly originating impressions and feelings that are the main sources of the explicit beliefs and deliberate choices of System 2. The automatic operations of System 1 generate surprisingly complex patterns of ideas, but only the slower System 2 can construct thoughts in an orderly series of steps. I also describe circumstances in which System 2 takes over, overruling the freewheeling impulses and associations of System 1. You will be invited to think of the two systems as agents with their individual abilities, limitations, and functions.