The question that is most often asked about cognitive illusions is whether they can be overcome. The message of these examples is not encouraging. Because System 1 operates automatically and cannot be turned off at will, errors of intuitive thought are often difficult to prevent. Biases cannot always be avoided, because System 2 may have no clue to the error. Even when cues to likely errors are available, errors can be prevented only by the enhanced monitoring and effortful activity of System 2. As a way to live your life, however, continuous vigilance is not necessarily good, and it is certainly impractical. Constantly questioning our own thinking would be impossibly tedious, and System 2 is much too slow and inefficient to serve as a substitute for System 1 in making routine decisions. The best we can do is a compromise: learn to
recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant
mistakes when the stakes are high.
UNDERSTANDING THE TEXT
How do the opening examples—the picture and the math problem—work to illustrate System 1 and System 2? Do you feel that you understand both of these systems after working through these examples?
Why does Kahneman talk about System 1 and System 2 as characters in a play? What element of the relationship between these two cognitive processes does he illuminate with this metaphor?
Which system can be equated with "paying attention"? How does the concept of "attention" figure into Kahneman's theory?
How does Kahneman use the example of the "invisible gorilla"? What is demonstrated by the fact that many people, when working on a cognitively demanding task, are unable to perceive a gorilla on a basketball court?
How, in Kahneman's view, does System 2 process information from System 1? How are our quick judgments incorporated into our logical thinking?
What does the optical illusion on p. 141 demonstrate? How are "cognitive illusions" similar to "optical illusions"? How can we best compensate for the mistakes that cognitive illusions lead us into?
MAKING CONNECTIONS
How might the thought processes Kahneman describes as System 1 be related to the Jungian view of the archetype (p. 108)?
How does Kahneman's System 2 correspond to the neurologically plastic mind that Nicholas Carr describes in "A Thing Like Me" (p. 123)? Do you think that System 2 can adapt in the same way?
What are the best ways to convince somebody by appealing to System 1? How about by appealing to System 2? Which of Kahneman's systems would you appeal to if you wanted to convince somebody of something they did not already believe? Would Kahneman answer this question the same way that Wayne Booth (p. 198) would?
Which elements of System 1 might have provided evolutionary advantages in the model that Edward Wilson explains in "The Fitness of Human Nature"(p. 356)?
WRITING ABOUT THE TEXT
1. Compare and contrast Kahneman's two systems, emphasizing how arguments can be structured to appeal to each system.
Examine several optical illusions other than the one on p. 141 and explain how they trick the mind. How do these illusions appeal to System 1 and cause us to see things incorrectly?
Write a paragraph about a controversial topic designed to appeal to System 1. Then write another version of the same paragraph designed to appeal to System 2. After writing both paragraphs, reflect on the way that your own understanding of "persuasion" changed from one paragraph to the next.
LANGUAGE AND RHETORIC
How Do We Use Language to Communicate Persuasively?
Rhetoric is useful . . . because things that are true and things that are just have a natural tendency to prevail over their opposites.
—Aristotle
i he discipline of rhetoric includes all the elements involved in using language persuasively. Rhetoricians study logic, style, audience awareness, methods of delivery, strategies for generating ideas, models of organization, and many other topics related to the creation of persuasive arguments. In short, rhetoric covers precisely the things that most college students learn about in composition classes. Indeed, most colleges and universities that offer courses in writing and in teaching others how to write do so in a program or department called Rhetoric and Composition.
The roots of rhetoric stretch back to the fifth century bce in Athens, Greece, the world's first democracy. We begin this chapter with an illustration and text of one of the founding myths of Athens, as illustrated by an anonymous Athenian painter and told by the great poet Aeschylus. In this myth, Athena, the goddess for whom the city is named, secures the cooperation of the Furies—dangerous immortals who were preventing her from establishing the city—by using her rhetorical skills to persuade them to abandon their objections. While nearly every other city or state in Greece traced its roots back to spectacular acts of violence, Athens alone claimed to have been founded by an act of persuasion.
And persuasion remained at the heart of the Athenian city-state. The Athenians' democratic system included a forum for debating issues and voting on them, which in turn produced one of the world's first marketplaces for persuasive speaking. People were willing to pay large sums of money to be instructed in the art of writing and delivering persuasive speeches that could help them gain support for their ideas.
The traveling teachers who came to Athens to meet this new need were collectively known as the Sophists. Sophists taught their students how to win arguments, and they believed that a speech's success was measured by persuasiveness, rather than inherent justice or truthfulness. They found many willing students, but they also earned the enmity of another group of teachers—philosophers, such as Socrates and Plato, who believed that seeking truth was far more important than learning techniques of persuasion.
Very few of the Sophists' writings have survived, but several of Plato's major dialogues fictionally dramatize debates between Sophists and Socrates. This chapter includes a selection from Gorgias, the most famous of these dialogues. In it Socrates compels Gorgias, the most successful Sophist of his day, to admit that the study of rhetoric can only mimic genuine philosophy. The arguments against rhetoric that Plato outlines—that it produces no knowledge and that it shows contempt for truth—have followed the study of rhetoric for millennia and are answered, in different forms, by all the readings in this chapter that follow. An example of the kind of rhetoric that Plato despised is found in Pericles's "The Funeral Oration," which celebrates Athens and asks its citizens to make every sacrifice necessary to keep it free.
The first rebuttal to Plato, which remains one of the most influential, comes from his own student Aristotle. In his treatise Rhetoric, Aristotle uses a Platonic argument to refute Plato's dismissal of rhetoric. "Rhetoric is useful," he argues, "because things that are true and things that are just have a natural tendency to prevail over their opposites." For Aristotle, truth is inherently superior and will always prevail in equal contests. Since those making bad arguments study rhetoric, Aristotle reasons, those who make good arguments must study it too; otherwise the contest will not be equal. Aristotle saw rhetoric as valuable far beyond its function in political deliberations, in judicial affairs, public celebrations, and community speeches. Understanding the basic principles of persuasion, he believed, was part of being an educated member of a society.