A Pretty Dangerous "Sport"

Take a look at the following picture for a few seconds.

What did you read and what images popped into your head? If you're like most people you read the left part as "ABC", the right part as "121314" and you pictured Ann heading to the building of a financial institution. Now look at it again.

You may just as well have read the first part as "A13C" and thought of Ann floating around in a canoe on a river. How come you didn't?

"In the absence of an explicit context, System 1 generated a likely context on its own. We know that it is System 1 because you were not aware of the choice or possibility of another interpretation. Unless you have been canoeing recently, you probably spend more time going to banks than floating on rivers, and you resolved the ambiguity accordingly. When uncertain, System 1 bets on an answer, and the bets are guided by experience. The rules of the betting are intelligent: recent events and the current context have the most weight in determining an interpretation. When no recent event comes to mind, more distant memories govern. Among your earliest and most memorable experiences was singing your ABCs; you did not sing your A13Cs." (p. 80)

That's Daniel Kahneman, writing about the "sport" of jumping to conclusions in his bestseller book Thinking, Fast and Slow. System 1, of course, being our intuitive thoughts: what comes to our mind immediately. Once we sit down and take some time to think about it (System 2), we realize that the "B" in the first picture is exactly the same figure as the "13" in the last one and that the word "bank" has more than one meaning in English.

Usually that's not a problem, but what if System 2 is busy with other things? In order to find out, the psychologist David Gilbert confronted the participants of his experiment with nonsensical assertions, like "whitefish eat candy", followed by either "true" or "false". Some of them were required to hold digits in memory while looking at these sentences. The consequence was that they later thought many of the false sentences to be true (in a test of memory).

"The moral is significant: when System 2 is otherwise engaged, we will believe almost anything. System 1 is gullible and biased to believe, System 2 is in charge of doubting and unbelieving, but System 2 is sometimes busy, and often lazy. Indeed, there is evidence that people are more likely to be influenced by empty persuasive messages, such as commercials, when they are tired and depleted." (p. 81)

Good to know, right? Sounds to me like multi-tasking might not always be such a great idea... But it actually gets worse. Here's what can happen when you jump to conclusions after meeting someone for the first time:

"You meet a woman named Joan at a party and find her personable and easy to talk to. Now her name comes up as someone who could be asked to contribute to a charity. What do you know about Joan's generosity? The correct answer is that you know virtually nothing, because there is little reason to believe that people who are agreeable in social situations are also generous contributors to charities. But you like Joan and you will retrieve the feeling of liking her when you think of her. You also like generosity and generous people. By association, you are now predisposed to believe that Joan is generous. And now that you believe she is generous, you probably like Joan even better than you did earlier, because you have added generosity to her pleasant attributes." (p. 82)

And the moral of the story? Don't go to parties and talk to women you don't know ;-)