Category: Daniel Kahneman – Thinking Fast and Slow

Mood, Creativity, & Cognitive Errors

Mood, Creativity, & Cognitive Errors

Posted on by jabittan
In Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman comments on research studying people’s mood and cognitive performance. He writes the following about how we think when we are in a good mood, “when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors.”

 

We think differently when we are in different moods. When we are relaxed and happy, our minds are more creative and our intuitions tend to be more accurate. Kahneman suggests that when we are happy and when we don’t sense threats, our rational and logical part of the brain lets up, allowing our mind to flow more freely. When we are not worried about our safety, our mind doesn’t have to examine and interrogate everything in our environment as thoroughly, hence the tendency toward logical errors. A sense of threat activates our deep thinking, making us more logical, but also diminishing the capacity of our intuitive thinking and making us less creative, less willing to take risks with our ideas and thoughts.

 

The research from Kahneman about mood, creativity, and cognitive errors reminds me of the research Daniel Pink shares in his book When. Pink finds that we tend to be more creative in the afternoons, once our affect has recovered from the afternoon trough when we all need a nap. Once our mood has improved toward the end of the day, Pink suggest that we are more creative. Our minds are able to return to important cognitive work, but are still easily distracted, allowing for more creative thinking.  This seems to tie in with the research from Kahneman. We become more relaxed, and are willing to let ideas flow across the logical boundaries that had previously separated ideas and categories of thought in our minds.

 

It is important that we think about our mood and the tasks we have at hand. If we need to do creative work, we should save it for the afternoon, when our moods improve and we have more capacity for drawing on previously disconnected thoughts and ideas in new ways. We shouldn’t try to cram work that requires logical coherence into times when we are happy and bubbly, our minds simply won’t be operating in the right way to handle the task. When we do work is as important as the mood we bring to work, and both the when and the mood may seriously impact the output.
Performance and Mood

Performance and Mood

Posted on by jabittan
We are in the middle of a global health pandemic, but it comes at a time when companies are starting to radically re-think the work environments they set up for their employees. I worked for a time for a tech company based out of the San Francisco Bay Area, and saw first hand the changing thoughts in how companies relate to their employees. Every day wasn’t a party, but companies like the one I worked for were beginning to recognize how important a healthy, happy, and agreeable workforce is to productivity and good outcomes as whole. The pandemic has forced companies to think even more deeply about these things, and some blend of remote and office work schedules will likely remain for a huge number of employees. Hopefully, we will walk away from the pandemic with workplaces that better align with the demands placed on people today, and hopefully we will be more happy in our work environments.

 

Research that Daniel Kahneman presents in his book Thinking Fast and Slow suggest that adapting workplaces to better accommodate employees and help them be more happy with their work could have huge positive impacts for our futures. Regarding tests for intuitive accuracy, Kahneman shares the following about people’s performance on tests and their mood:

 

“Putting participants in a good mood before the test by having them think happy thoughts more than doubled accuracy. An even more striking result is that unhappy subjects were completely incapable of performing the intuitive task accurately; their guesses were no better than random.”

 

Our mood impacts our thoughts and our thinking processes. When we are happy, we are better at making intuitive connections and associations. If we need to be productive, accurate, and intuitive, then we better have an environment that supports a relatively high level of happiness.

 

If our work environment does the opposite, if we are overwhelmed by stress and must deal with toxic culture issues, then it is likely that we will be less accurate with our tasks. We won’t perform as well, and those who depend on our work will receive sub-par products.

 

There is likely a self-perpetuating effect with both scenarios. A happy person is likely to perform better, and they will likely be praised for their good outcomes, improving their happiness and reinforcing their good work. But someone who is unhappy will likely have poor performance and is more likely to be reprimanded, leading to more unhappiness and continued unsatisfactory performance. For these reasons it is important that companies take steps to help put their employees in a good mood while working. This requires more than motivational posters, it requires real relationships and inclusion in important decisions around the workspace. In the long run, boosting mood among employees can have a huge impact, especially if the good results reinforce more positive feeling and continued high quality output. Changing work schedules and locations as forced upon employers by the pandemic can provide an opportunity for employers to think about the demands they place on employees, and what they can do to ensure their employees have healthy, safe workplaces that encourage positive moods and productivity.
Guided by Impressions of System 1

Guided by Impressions of System 1

Posted on by jabittan
In Thinking Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman shares research showing how easily people can be tricked or influenced by factors that seem to be completely irrelevant to the mental task that the people are asked to carry out. People will remember rhyming proverbs better than non-rhyming proverbs. People will trust a cited research source with an easy to say name over a difficult and foreign sounding name. People will also be influenced by the quality of paper and colors used in advertising materials. No one would admit that rhymes, easy to say names, or paper quality is why they made a certain decision, but statistics show that these things can strongly influence how we decide.

 

Kahneman describes the research this way, “The psychologists who do these experiments do not believe that people are stupid or infinitely gullible. What psychologists do believe is that all of us live much of our life guided by the impressions of System 1 – and we often do not know the source of these impressions.”

 

Making tough and important decisions requires a lot of energy. In many instances, we have to make tough decisions that require a lot of mental effort in a relatively short time. We don’t always have a great pen and paper template to follow for decision-making, and sometimes we have to come to a conclusion in the presence of others, upping the stakes and increasing the pressure as we try to think through our options. As a result, the brain turns to heuristics reliant on System 1. The brain uses intuition, quick impressions, and substitutes questions for an easier decision.

 

We might not know why we intuitively favored one option over the other. When we ask our brain to think back on the decision we made, we are engaging System 2 to think deeply, and it is likely going to overlook and not consider inconsequential factors such as the color of the paper for the option we picked. It won’t remember that the first sales person didn’t make much eye contact with us and that the second person did, but it will substitute some other aspect of competence to give us a reason for trusting sales person number two more.

 

What is important to remember is that System 1 guides a lot of our lives. We don’t always realize it, but System 1 is passing along information to System 2 that isn’t always relevant for the decision that System 2 has to make. Intuitions and quick impressions can be biased and formed by unimportant factors, but even if we don’t consciously recognize them, they get passed along and calculated into our final choice.
Familiarity vs Truth

Familiarity vs Truth

Posted on by jabittan
People who wish to spread disinformation don’t have to try very hard to get people to believe that what they are saying is true, or that their BS at least has some element of truth to it. All it takes, is frequent repetition. “A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods,” writes Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, “is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.”

 

Having accurate and correct representations of the world feels important to me. I really love science. I listen to lots of science based podcasts, love sciency discussions with family members and friends, and enjoy reading science books. By accurately understanding how the world operates, by seeking to better understand the truth of the universe, and by developing better models and systems to represent the way nature works, I believe we can find a better future. I try not to fall unthinkingly into techno-utopianism thinking, but I do think that having accurate beliefs and understandings are important for improving the lives of people across the planet.

 

Unfortunately, for many people, I don’t think that accurate and correct understandings of the worlds have such high priority in their lives. I fear that religion and science may be incompatible or at odds with each other, and there may be a willingness to accept inaccurate science or beliefs to support religious doctrine. I also fear that people in extractive industries may discount science, preferring to hold an inaccurate belief that supports their ability to profit through their extractive practices. Additionally, the findings, conclusions, and recommendations from science may just be scary for many ordinary people, and accepting what science says might be inconvenient or might require changes in lifestyles that people don’t want to make. When we are in this situations, it isn’t hard to imagine why we might turn away from scientific consensus in favor of something comfortable but wrong.

 

And this is where accurate representations of the universe face and uphill battle. Inaccuracies don’t need to be convincing, don’t really need to sound plausible, and don’t need to to come from credible authorities. They just need to be repeated on a regular basis. When we hear something over and over, we start to become familiar with the argument, and we start to have trouble telling the truth and falsehood apart. This happened in 2016 when the number one word associated with Hillary Clinton was Emails. It happened with global warming when enough people suggested that human related CO2 emissions were not related to the climate change we see. And it happens every day in trite sayings and ideas from trickle down economics to popping your knuckles causes arthritis.

 

I don’t think that disproving inaccuracies is the best route to solving the problem of familiarity vs truth. I think the only thing we can hope to do is amplify those ideas, conclusions, experiments, and findings which accurately reflect the true nature of reality. We have to focus on what is true, not on all the misleading nonsense that gets repeated. We must repeat accurate statements about the universe so that they are what become familiar, rather than the mistaken ideas that become hard to distinguish from the truth.
Thoughts on Biases

Thoughts on Biases

Posted on by jabittan
“Anything that makes it easier for the associative machine to run smoothly will also bias beliefs,” writes Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking Fast and Slow. Biases are an unavoidable part of our thinking. They can lead to terrible prejudices, habits, and meaningless preferences, but they can also help save us a lot of time, reduce the cognitive demand on our brains, and help us move smoothly through the world. There are too many decision points in our lives and too much information for us to absorb at any one moment for us to not develop shortcuts and heuristics to help our brain think quicker. Quick rules for associative thinking are part of the process of helping us actually exist in the world, and they necessarily create biases.

 

A bad sushi roll might bias us against sushi for the rest of our life. A jump-scare movie experience as a child might bias us toward romcoms and away from horror movies. And being bullied by a beefy kid in elementary school might bias us against muscular dudes and sports. In each instance, a negative experience is associated in our brains with some category of thing (food, entertainment, people) and our memory is helping us move toward things we are more likely to like (or at least less likely to bring us harm). The consequences can be low stakes, like not going to horror movies, but can also be high stakes, like not hiring someone because their physical appearance reminds you of a kid who bullied you as a child.

 

What is important to note here is that biases are natural and to some extent unavoidable. They develop from our experiences and the associations we make as move through life and try to understand the world. They can be defining parts of our personality (I only drink black coffee), they can be incidental pieces of us that we barely notice (my doughnut choice order is buttermilk bar, maple covered anything, chocolate, plain glaze), and they could also be far more dangerous (I have an impulse to think terrible things about anyone with a bumper sticker for a certain political figure – and I have to consciously fight the impulse). Ultimately, we develop biases because it helps us make easier decisions that will match our preferences and minimize our chances of being upset. They are mental shortcuts, saving us from having to make tough decisions and helping us reach conclusions about entire groups of things more quickly.

 

The goal for our society shouldn’t be to completely eliminate all instances of bias in our lives. That would require too much thought and effort for each of us, and we don’t really have the mental capacity to make so many decisions. It is OK if we are biased toward Starbucks rather than having to make a decision about what coffee shop to go to each morning, or which new coffee shop to try in a town we have never visited.

 

What we should do, is work hard to recognize biases that can really impact our lives and have negative consequences. We have to acknowledge that we have negative impulses toward certain kids of people, and we have to think deeply about those biases and work to be aware of how we treat people. Don’t pretend that you move through the world free from problematic biases. Instead, work to see those biases, and work to push against your initial negative reaction and think about ways that you could have more positive interactions with others, and how you can find empathy and shared humanity with them. Allow biases to remain when helpful or insignificant (be biased toward vegetarian take-out for example), but think critically about biases that could have real impacts in your life and in the lives of others.
Money Priming

Money Priming

Posted on by jabittan
An idea I have been a little obsessed with for the last several months is the importance of community in the lives of human beings. We are social creatures, and we depend on social structures for support, connection, joy, and meaning. During the Pandemic, we have had to face an absence of community, pulling back even more from the social groups and settings of our lives. America was already isolated in many ways, and I am worried for the long-term consequences of what we will lose in terms of community from this Pandemic.

 

One reason why the United States has dealt with diminishing senses of community may be related to our pursuit of wealth. Our culture values money and success so much that we elected a man with no political experience, with a history of bankruptcy, but with extraordinary bravado around his personal wealth to be our president. We elected President Trump because many of us wanted to feel a sense of greater wealth, or at least a possibility of greater financial success, and liked the ways in which he represented those ideas.

 

(I will pause for a minute to note that I think the president is reprehensible and I am glad I did not and never will vote for him. I also want to recognize that I am viewing supporters of the president in the general sense, applying a more positive lens toward them than others might. I recognize and understand that many of his supporters have dangerous and disgusting racial views that should be abhorred, but I also recognize that many of his supporters generally don’t think about politics much and like the presentation of wealth and the possibility of wealth that he presents.)

 

In his book Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman presents information about how money priming impacts our brains. Factors related to money seem to trigger specific responses and behaviors in people. As he writes, “The general theme of these findings is that the idea of money primes individualism: a reluctance to be involved with others, to depend on others, or to accept demands from others.” Money, in other words, works against community.

 

Individualism itself is not terrible. I don’t know where the balance should lie between community and individualism, and I feel myself pulled in separate directions regarding both. However, I believe it is our connections to each other and our shared goals and purposes that will help us feel a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives. Living in suburban homes (as I do), parking in our garages, and withdrawing into our homes to stream shows (also guilty!) is individualistic and exclusionary. It doesn’t help us have meaningful relationships with our friends, families, neighbors, and fellow citizens. It doesn’t help us work toward shared goals, doesn’t help us develop sustainable futures, and doesn’t help us better understand each other.

 

We need more community in our lives to tackle major problems in our society. Unfortunately, America is committed to ideas of wealth creation to an extent that limits our ability to build the community we need. Money priming influences how we behave in relation to each other, and it is not helping rebuild the communities that we have allowed to atrophy over the decades.
Autonomous Actors

Autonomous Actors

Posted on by jabittan
“We now know that the effects of priming can reach into every corner of our lives.” Daniel Kahneman writes this in his book Thinking Fast and Slow while demonstrating the power of priming factors. An example he uses in the book to demonstrate the power of priming has to do with voting and school support. A study from Arizona showed that people are more likely to support ballot propositions to increase school funding when their polling place is in a school. The difference between supporting the proposition or not was greater for people voting within a school building versus those who voted elsewhere than the difference was between parents of school aged children and non-parents. Simply where we happen to cast our ballot is not something most of us would consider to be a big influencing factor in our preference for school funding, but it is. We are not the autonomous actors that we like to believe we are.

 

Priming factors influence a lot of our behaviors, often without our awareness. In the past I wrote about priming and creativity and the power of our environment from research that Richard Wiseman presented in his book 59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot. Small factors in our environment can change our emotional valance and can influence how creative we are, even if we don’t notice those factors directly. What our brains are doing is sometimes under our control, like when we focus on writing, doing math problems, or skiing downhill, but even then, our performance and ability can be influenced by things external to our brain that seemingly have no significance to our lives or the task at hand.

 

This raises the question about how autonomous we are, how much self-control and self-determination can we exercise, and whether there any potential for free will. The debates around free will are complex, and most people who study consciousness seem to be telling us that free will, at least as popularly conceptualized, cannot exist. Brain scans and studies show that an action potential builds up in the brain before we make a conscious decision to do something. Add to that the fact that priming studies show that the decisions we make are often influenced by factors beyond our immediate discretion, and we have to conclude that we do not have the kind of will, control, and autonomy that we typically perceive ourselves as having.

 

Kahneman writes, “Studies of priming effects have yielded discoveries that threaten our self-image as conscious and autonomous authors of our judgments and our choices.” Our environments and the priming factors around us shape who we are and how we behave. Social norms and cues dictate our responses to many events. We don’t behave rationally and autonomously, we respond to stimuli and the world, and don’t have the control that we associate with the autonomous actors we believe ourselves to be.
The Ideomotor Effect

Ideomotor Effect

Posted on by jabittan
I grew up playing basketball and one thing coaches always tell players is that they have to have confidence when they shoot the ball. If you shoot while thinking I hope I don’t miss, then you are going to miss. If you are worried about being yelled at for missing a shot and if you are afraid to miss, then your chances of actually making a shot are slim. At the same time, shooting with confidence, believing you are going to make the shot before you have even caught the ball, is going to make it more likely that you will score. Visualizing a perfect swish before you shoot, the wisdom of all my coaches said, and your swish will come true, but think about what might happen if you miss, and you are out of luck.

 

I don’t know how much I believed this during my playing days, but the idea was everywhere. There were certainly times I can still remember where I was afraid of missing a shot, only to miss the shot. I can remember a moment from my senior year, where I was wide open for a three on the left hand side. I knew I was going to shoot the ball before my teammate even passed it to me, and I knew I was going to make the shot. “Shoot it,” he said as he passed it to me – not that I needed any extra incentive – and of course, I swished the shot and nodded my head like I was LeBron James as I ran back down the court.

 

Research from Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking Fast and Slow suggests that there really might be something to this shooting mindset. Kahneman writes about a study of college students who were asked to complete a word scramble and then walk down the hall to another room. When students were presented with words associated with the elderly, the average time it took them to get up from their chair and walk down the hallway to the next room was longer than it was for a control group who didn’t have word scrambles related to old people.

 

Kahneman writes, “The idea of old age had not come to their conscious awareness, but their actions had changed nevertheless. This remarkable priming phenomenon – the influencing of an action by the idea – is known as the ideomotor effect.”

 

Simply thinking about old people made people move slower. Thoughts, even thoughts and ideas that people were not directly focused on, changed the way people behaved in the physical world. It is like listening to some pump-up music while pumping iron, but without deliberately setting up the environment to get you in the zone for the physical task. The ideomotor effect represents the connection between our mental state and our physical performance, and it appears that it can be conscious and intentional as well as subconscious and unknown.

 

So while it might seem like a bunch of superstition to believe that visualizing a swish versus fearing a missed basket will influence whether or not you make a shot, the ideomotor effect might actually make it a reality. My coaches probably hadn’t heard of the ideomotor effect or of a study of slow walking college students thinking about old people. Nevertheless, their intuition seems to have been correct, and my thoughts while shooting basketballs in high school may have played a big role in whether I made a shot or missed.
Conscious and Unconscious Priming Effects

Conscious and Unconscious Priming Effects

Posted on by jabittan
“Another major advance in our understanding of memory was the discovery that priming is not restricted to concepts and words,” writes Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, “You cannot know this from conscious experience, of course, but you must accept the alien idea that your actions and your emotions can be primed by events of which you are not even aware.”

 

Yesterday I wrote about linguistic priming. How words can trigger thoughts in our mind, and set us up to think certain thoughts. I wrote about how ideas spread, like in the movie Inception from one thought or idea to another based on similarities and categories of things. I wrote about how important implicit associations can be, and how we have used them to measure racial bias and the harm that these biases could have in society. Today’s post continues on that trend, exploring the areas in our lives where priming may be taking place without our knowledge.

 

In his book, before the quote I shared at the start of this post, Kahneman describes our thoughts as behaving like ripples on a pond. A train of thought can be primed in one direction, and ripples from that priming can spread out across our mind. So when I used Inception earlier, I may have primed our minds to think about trains, since they feature so prominently in the movie, and if that is the case, it is no surprise that I used train of thought just a few sentences later. From this point forward, there are likely other metaphors and examples that I might use that are potentially primed by the movie Inception or by associations with trains. It is clear that I’m following priming effects if I directly reference my thinking staying on track or going off the rails, but it might be less obvious and clear how my thinking might relate to trains in the sentences to come, but as Kahneman’s quote suggested, my mind might be unconsciously primed for certain directions all from the casual mention of Inception from earlier.

 

Across my writing I have always been fascinated by the idea that we are not in as much control over our minds as we believe. Thoughts think themselves, we don’t necessarily think our own thoughts. Our minds can be influenced by time, by caffeine levels, by whether someone smiled at us on our commute to work, or whether our sock is rubbing on our foot in a strange way. We don’t have to think of anything for it to directly register with our brain and influence where our mind goes. What thoughts pop into our head, and what ripples of ideas are primed across our mind are beyond our control and influenced by things we sometimes barely notice. Priming, according to Kahneman, can be direct, deliberate, and conscious, or it can be unconscious and oblique. The mind and how we think is more random and unpredictable than it feels, and sometimes more random than we would like to believe. This should change how we think of ourselves, how we think of others, and what information and knowledge we privilege and encourage. It should make us less certain that we are always behaving as we should, and less certain that we are as smart and savvy in all situations as we like to believe we are.
Associative Thinking

Associative Thinking

Posted on by jabittan
I had a few linguistics classes in college and I remember really enjoying studies about associative thinking, or priming, where one word would trigger thoughts about another related thing. If you read stop sign, and someone then asked you to name a color, you are likely to say red. Our minds hover around a set of words associated with a topic, and words further away from the topic probably won’t register as quickly. If you read jellyfish then your mind is going to be set up for more ocean words like water, seaweed, or Nemo. Words like cactus, x-ray, or eviction, would take an extra second for your brain to register because they don’t seem to belong with jellyfish. If you watch Family Feud, then you will get to see great examples of linguistic priming and associative thinking in process. The first person in a family will say their answer, and it will be hard for the rest of the family to jump into a different category to get the final item on the list.

 

Associative thinking is even more interesting and complicated than just linguistic priming. Daniel Kahneman writes about it in his book Thinking Fast and Slow:

 

“An idea that has been activated does not merely evoke one other idea. It activates many ideas, which in turn activate others. Furthermore, only a few of the activated ideas will register in consciousness; most of the work of associative thinking is silent, hidden from our conscious selves. The notion that we have limited access to the workings of our minds is difficult to accept because, naturally, it is alien to our experience, but it is true: you know far less about yourself than you feel you do.”

 

Associative thinking reveals a lot about our minds that we don’t have access to. This is why implicit association tests (IAT) have been used to measure things like racial bias in individuals and societies. Your conscious mind might know it is wrong to think of people of color as criminals, but your unconscious mind might implicitly connect words like crime, drugs, or violence to certain racial groups. Even though you can consciously overcome these biases, your immediate reaction to other people might be enough to show them that you don’t trust them and might reveal implicit fears or negative biases. A clenching fist, a narrowing gaze, or an almost imperceptible backing away from someone might not be conscious, but might be enough for someone to register a sense of unease.

 

I don’t know enough about the benefits of racial bias training to say if it is effective in counteracting these implicit associations or immediate and unconscious reactions. I don’t know just how truly bad it is that we harbor such implicit associations, but I think it is important that we recognize they are there. It is important to know how the brain works, and important that we think about how much thinking takes place behind the scenes, without us recognizing it. Self-awareness and knowledge about associative thinking can help us understand just how we behave and interact with others, so that hopefully we can bring our best selves to the conversations and interactions we have with people who are different from us.