System One, or Gut, is unconscious thought, and its defining quality is speed. Gut doesn’t need an encyclopedia to figure out what to do when something moves in the long grass. It makes a snap judgment and sounds the alarm instantly. There’s a twinge in your stomach. Your heart beats a little faster. Your eyes zero in.
“The heart has its reasons,” Blaise Pascal wrote more than three centuries ago, “which reason knows nothing of.” So it is with the conscious and unconscious minds. Head cannot look into Gut, so it has no idea how Gut assembles its judgments, which is why psychologists believe that focus groups are far less insightful than some marketers think. If you put people together in a room, show them a car commercial, and ask them how they feel about the car, you will get clear answers. “I don’t care for it,” a man may say. Fine. Why not? He frowns. “Um, the styling on the front is ugly. And I want a more powerful engine.” That looks like good insight, just the sort of thing a company can use to design and market its products. But it’s not. This man’s snap judgment—“I don’t like that car”—came from Gut. But the interviewer is talking to Head. And Head doesn’t have a clue why Gut doesn’t like the car. So Head rationalizes. It looks at the conclusion and cobbles together an explanation that is both plausible and, quite possibly, wrong.
So we have, in effect, two minds working semi-independently of each other. Further complicating our thoughts is the constant, complex interaction between the two. It’s possible, for example, that knowledge learned and used consciously by Head can sink into the unconscious mind, to be used by Gut. Every veteran golfer has experienced this process. When you first pick up a club, you consciously follow instructions. Keep the head back, knees bent, right arm straight. Beginners think about each of these points consciously and carefully. They can’t just step up to the tee and swing. But do this often and long enough, and you no longer have to think about it. Proper form just feels right, and it happens much more quickly and fluidly. In fact, once it has been internalized, consciously thinking about what you’re doing can interrupt the flow and hurt performance—which is why professional athletes are taught by sports psychologists to avoid thinking about the motions they have done thousands of times before.
Even the most cerebral actions can undergo this shift from Head to Gut. Neophyte doctors faced with a common ailment consciously and carefully think about the checklist of symptoms before making a diagnosis, but old hands “feel” the answer in an instant. Art historians whose job is to authenticate antiquities make the same transition. In the now-famous anecdote that opens Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink, a Greek statue that had supposedly been authenticated by a battery of scientific tests was nonetheless instantly dismissed as a fraud by several art historians. Why? The experts couldn’t say. They just felt that something was wrong—one called it “intuitive repulsion.” Testing later confirmed that the statue was indeed a fraud, a truth the experts were able to feel in an instant because they had studied and analyzed Greek statues for so long that their knowledge and skills had been absorbed into the unconscious operations of Gut.
Figuring out how those unconscious operations work is the job of cognitive psychologists. Over the last several decades, they’ve made enormous advances and learned many things that will forever change the way we think about thinking.
“Heuristics and biases” is the rather opaque name for one of the most exciting efforts to tease out the secrets of thinking. In this case, “bias” isn’t meant to be an insult. It’s a tendency, nothing more. If you read a shopping list on which one of the items is written in green ink while all the rest are blue, you will tend to remember the one green item. That’s the Von Restorff effect—a bias in favor of remembering the unusual. It’s only one of a long list of biases uncovered by psychologists. Some—like the Von Restorff effect—are pretty obvious. Others are more surprising, as we will see.
As for “heuristics,” they’re rules of thumb. One we’ve already encountered is the appearance-equals-reality rule. If it looks like a lion, it is a lion. Nice and simple. Instead of getting bogged down in information, Gut uses just a few observations and a handy rule to instantly conclude that the large catlike animal walking this way is indeed a lion, and perhaps it would be best if you were to depart forthwith. That’s the kind of quick thinking that can keep you alive. Unfortunately, the same rule can also lead to the conclusionthat the snapshot in your wallet is much more than a mere piece of paper and must be found even if that means wandering around an African slum after midnight. That’s the kind of thinking that can get you killed. So Gut is good, but not perfect.
Fortunately, Gut isn’t the only one trying to make decisions and get us to act accordingly. There’s also Head. It monitors Gut’s decisions and it can at least try to adjust or overrule them when it thinks Gut is wrong. Gut decides, Head reviews: This process is how most of our thoughts and decisions are made. “One of psychology’s fundamental insights,” writes Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, “is that judgments are generally the products of nonconscious systems that operate quickly, on the basis of scant evidence, and in a routine manner, and then pass their hurried approximations to consciousness, which slowly and deliberately adjusts them.”
Standing on a wide plain and looking at a mountain in the distance—to use an illustration devised by Daniel Kahneman—you will have an intuitive sense of how far away the mountain is. Where did that intuition come from? What is it based on? You won’t know. You probably won’t even know that you have an intuition, at least you won’t think about it that way. You’ll just look at the mountain and you’ll have a rough sense of how far away the mountain is. As long as you don’t have other information that suggests the intuition is completely out of whack, you’ll accept it as a good measure of reality and act on it.
Unknown to you, that estimate came from the unconscious operation of Gut. It used a simple rule of thumb to come up with it: Objects appear increasingly blurry the farther away they are, so if the mountain looks very blurry, it is very far away. It’s a good rule that generally provides reliable information in an instant. If it weren’t, natural selection wouldn’t have hardwired it into our brains.
And yet, it can go wrong. What if the day happens to be particularly hot and humid? That will make the air hazy and all objects will appear more blurred than they would on a clear day. To get an accurate estimate of the distance, we have to adjust for that. But Gut doesn’t adjust. It just applies the rule of thumb. And in this case, that will result in an error. So Head has to step in and tweak Gut’s estimate to account for the hazy air.
But will it? Unfortunately, there’s a good chance it won’t.