Slow and fast thinking: when you think you think
It is an insult for every humanist and politician. But the results are the same again and again. Psychologist show more and more that what we think about ourselves is just an illusion.
Irrationality is not something that happens when we are too busy to act “normal”, irrationality is the norm. You don’t know as much as you know and you certainly don’t think as much as you think.
In fact nearly every decision we made is based on “fast thinking”, according to Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman.
(Fast and slow thinking may look like conscious and unconscious, but there are differences.)
Fast thinking is what helps us through the day. Distances and speed of cars, interpretation of faces, reactions to prices in the supermarket.
Slow thinking only happens when something unusual disturbs this process. For example a pink car with yellow stripes.
Slow thinking uses a lot of energy, so it is used sparingly.
And since “we” define us by our slow thinking, which makes only a tiny amount of the work, “we” get shown a fantasy movie.
A fantasy movie where “we” are in power, where “we” decide, when in fact “we” are steered by our fast thinking in almost all cases.
And the fast thinking only knows what it knows right now, has no sense of statistics or time. This is why three out of four people say that more people get killed in car accidents than 20 years ago, when in fact the number of car deaths has more than halved in that time (may be a bit different in your country).
The same fact-ignorance is true for politics. From pictures alone psychologist were able to say who would win an election with 70% correctness. Being square-jawed and smiling is more important than anything else.
And this insult to every human ego goes on: Judges that roll a manipulated dice before judging on a case double the time in jail if they rolled a high number. And estate agents laugh loud about the incredible high price a seller wants to have, but bid one third more than their colleges that got a market-price wish.
If professionals get influenced so much by things that have no connection to what they have to decide on, how badly are “you” influenced by your fast-thinking self?
If you have ever see people scrambling to buy “two for the price of three”, you know the answer.
Tries to understand this:
Reads the rest of the post and think "he" understood more than he understood.
judging by the ways the thing are in our society i can guess that the majority influenced badly! Also a simple example is that when we talk to someone either a friend, or a girl we like or just a random argument and we say our things. A couple of minutes or hours later that we are alone or that we are just thinking by ourselves without anyone "pressures" us a tons of possible better answers come in our heads!
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