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Book Review: "Thinking Fast and Slow"
 Reviewed by lotp Suppose I told you a little about Linda. Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations. Which would you say is more probable? (1) Linda is a bank teller. If you chose the latter, you would be in good company. Despite the fact that having two properties is by definition less probable than having only one of those same properties, most people choose the option that includes feminism. Why? Because the description above doesn't suggest 'bank teller', but does suggest 'feminist'. Stephen Jay Gould, certainly familiar with the fallacy involved in this choice, nonetheless noted that "a little homunculus in my head continues to jump up and down, shouting at me -- 'but she can't just be a bank teller; read the description!" Welcome to fast thinking, the part of our brains that quickly seeks similarities to patterns we already know. The fast brain works quickly. It operates on the What You See Is All There Is principle. And it often comes to wrong judgments that our slower, reasoning brain systems either acknowledge as wrong (but there's that little person in our heads jumping up and down) or -- worse -- rationalize. Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow is an account of the insights into decision making that won him a (respected) Nobel prize in Economics. The book is a useful guide not only to our day-to-day decision making but also to understanding how political campaigns succeed in the face of incoherent policies, lousy character on the part of candidates and repeated failures and broken promises. Decision theory has long spoken of the 'utility' provided by various options under consideration. Different decision makers have different 'utility curves' which plot the increase in value a person perceives as some factor varies. For instance, the utility of earning $1000 more a year is expected to be much higher for an intern than for a corporate CEO -- the intern's utility curve for additional income is probably very steep, with each additional increment of income bringing significant additional utility. The CEO, on the other hand, might not even notice a difference. Utility theory lies behind most schools of economics -- and behind the political stance of Ron Paul, among others. It assumes we can identify key factors of value, assess the likely outcomes of various alternatives and calculate factor*likelihood = expected utility. Rational people will, it is asserted, choose the option that they assess will have the most utility for them in any given situation. But what if we don't in fact have a single utility curve for various factors -- or even have a single deciding self? What if, instead, we have at least two 'selves' that participate in every decision: one that is experiencing life right now and another that remembers a (reconstructed and often distorted) past? Kahneman carefully describes a series of research results showing evidence for two evaluating / deciding selves in a wide variety of situations: assessing the pain of a colonoscopy during vs. after the procedure, responses to imagined loss or gain of money depending on the situation surrounding the loss/gain, anticipated vs. actually experienced regret and so on. For example: you buy 2 theater tickets for $80 each, but when you arrive at the theater you discover they are missing. Do you a) use your credit card to buy 2 new tickets or b) go home? Would your answer be different if instead of having already purchased the tickets you went to the box office with $160 in cash to buy them there, only to discover that your cash was missing? A lot of people are more likely to go home if the already-purchased tickets were lost or stolen than if it was cash that was gone. Cash, it seems, comes from a mental/emotional "general fund" category for most people, whereas if the tickets were already purchased, that money was perceived as already used up, as it were. And yet the financial impact of the decision should be the same in either scenario. We are wired to fit details and new situations into patterns of salience (relevance to our current situation) and to overall order and meaning. Our fast thinking systems often get it wrong. We're in an election year. The Occupy movement protests the 1% - but inevitably most will vote for Obama, who is more tightly aligned and more heavily funded by Wall Street than by any other candidate for many years. Newt Gingrich is at best a social and financial moderate -- but Tea Party voters see him telling it like it is and, well, What You See Is All There Is to the fast thinking part of our brains. Kahneman's book is not a quick read, but it's worth the time and effort to understand how we and the other voters around us will actually make decisions not only in elections but for all aspects of our lives. Posted by: 2011-12-25 |
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