“The measure of success for System 1 is the coherence of the story it manages to create.”
Daniel Kahneman writes that in his book Thinking Fast and Slow when discussing the quick conclusions of our System 1, the mental processing part of our brain that is fast, intuitive, and operates based on simple associations and heuristics.
System 1 stitches together a picture of the world and environment around us with incomplete information. It makes assumptions and quick estimates about what we are seeing and compiles a coherent story for us. And what is important for System 1 is that the story be coherent, not that the story be accurate.
System 2, the part of our brain which is more rational, calculating, and slower, is the part of the brain that is required for making detailed assessments on the information that System 1 takes in. But normally we don’t activate System 2 unless we really need to. If we judge that System 1 is making coherent connections and associations, then we don’t give it more attention and scrutiny from System 2.
It is important that we understand this about our minds. We can go about acting intuitively and believing that our simple narrative is correct, but we risk believing our own thoughts simply because they feel true and coherent to us and in line with our past experiences. Our thoughts will necessarily be inadequate, however, to fully encompass the reality around us. Other people will have different backgrounds, different histories, and different narratives knitted together in their own minds. It’s important that we find a way to engage System 2 when the stakes are high to make more thoughtful considerations than System 1 can generate. Simply because a narrative feels intuitively correct doesn’t mean that it accurately reflects the world around us, or creates a picture of the world that will work within the narrative frameworks that other people create.
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