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decision making

Dart Throwing Chimp

How to Smell Bullshit? 7 Rules that will Improve your Judgement

By All, Personal Behaviour

The great philosopher Bertrand Russell once said “The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt”. In work, life and politics there’s an overwhelming amount of bullshit being sold as knowhow. Here are 7 behavioural design rules to smell, attack and destroy bullshit

In the famous book “Superforecasting“, Philip Tetlock tells the story of how experts are on average not better than dart-throwing chimpanzees when it comes to predicting the future. Even worse, Tetlock discovered an inverse relationship between the fame of an expert and the accuracy of their prediction. In other words, TV-Pundits performed even worse than dart-throwing monkeys. The simple explanation for this remarkable feat is that pundits have this single big idea, mental model, or ideology in their head that they use as a template for everything.

If you believe passionately in free-market capitalism, then all of your predictions will be formed through this template. What Tetlock also discovered was that society greatly rewards lousy forecasters who have strong convictions than cautious forecasters, who express themselves in probabilities. People with strong opinions just make better TV. I guess this explains why total nitwits who deny the imminent threat posed by the climate crisis, always seem to outplay the more cautious scientists who are 100% sure about the size of the danger, but ever careful on how it will play out, and in which time frame. There simply is no way to predict the precise behaviours of the rapid changes in an incredibly complex ecosystem as our planet.

People with strong opinions just make better TV.

Bullshit is everywhere and on an epic scale. In this blog, I want to share some convenient rules of thumb from behavioural design to help you to smell and fight bullshit and form better judgement yourself.

Dart Throwing Chimp

Rule 1: Don’t mistake outcomes for good judgement

Never suspect a direct relationship between outcomes and the quality of the decision, unless an A/B test can prove it. 

The British government under Margeret Thatcher once launched a zero-tolerance policy to fight youth criminality. No matter how small the crime, kids would end up in jail. The problem, of course, is that there’s no way to prove it worked. If crime rates went down, it could have been attributed to dozens of other factors. It’s like the story of the man who sees a guy carefully throwing powder on the side of the street. When asked what he’s doing, the guy says “this will keep away elephants”. “But there are no elephants here”, the man answers in astonishment. To which the guy replies: “Great powder, isn’t it!”. 

The only condition in which you can safely say that you’re confident your action makes a difference is when you’ve done a randomised controlled test. This is an experiment in which you test one variable by assigning a random group of people to two groups. The only difference between both groups is the one variable you want to test. When Uber decided to temporarily shut down 100 million of the 150 million dollars of digital advertising spend for a week, they discovered it did absolutely nothing to their performance. They were pissing away the money, and they only found out about this after doing a proper A/B test. They eventually closed down 120 million of the 150 million dollars of their programmatic advertising budget. 

“We turned off two-thirds of our spend. We turned off $100 million of the annual spend out of $150 and basically saw no change in our number of rider app installs. What we saw is a lot of installs we thought came through paid channels suddenly came through organic. A big flip flop there, but the total number didn’t change.”

Rule 2: Never confuse reasonable with rational

Confidence and arguments that sound reasonable, are how experts get away with bullshit. 

As I wrote in an earlier blog, we tend to mistake confidence for competence. This mechanism is a classic ‘system 1’-shortcut. Our brain doesn’t want to waste too much energy on actively analysing a problem rationally, so it tries to answer a question by using shortcuts. The confidence of the bullshitter is a handy shortcut that allows you to make up your mind without having to think. Unconsciously, your brain thinks in a split second: “He looks like an expert” + “He seems confident about his stance” + “they allow him to say this on TV, so there must be some importance in what he says” + “He must have some information that I don’t have” = He must be right. 

This reminds me about one of my all-time favourite movies “Wag The Dog“, a secret service spin-doctor Conny (played by Robert The Niro), has a memorable conversation with movie director Stanley (played by Dustin Hoffman). They both successfully staged war between the US and Albania, just to divert the public attention from the fact that the president had sex with a cheerleader, just days before the election. 

Stanley: “There is no war”
Conny: : “Of course, there’s a war. I’m watching it on Television“.

The solution to this rule:
Always ask for second opinions on important decisions. It’s not because an expert sounds confident that you should take his word for granted. Even the emperor is naked underneath their clothes. Furthermore, never give the information you got from your first source to the second source, because this will unconsciously influence their judgement.

Rule 3: Attack vagueness

Never let people get away with vague predictions because they can never be held accountable. 

If a pundit says: “This decision by the European Union will very likely push the economy into a recession”, and after a year this prediction hasn’t materialised, they can always get away with “oh, just wait. It hasn’t happened yet” or, “I said very likely. That didn’t imply I was sure”. Vague predictions are compelling: They sound reasonable, and they always allow you to get away with things. 

In the Ancient Greek City of Delphi, people went to see the high priest called Pythia, to ask for predictions. High as a kite, she murmured some incomprehensible sounds, that were interpreted by her nodding assistance, who seemed to indicate that they understood what she was saying. They translated the outcome in verses, so they could always be assured that there was still lot’s of room left for multiple interpretations.

The Solution to this rule:
Most pundits are really good at using the same techniques that the Pythia priestesses used in the 8th century BC. You can freak them out if you push them to be more precise about their prediction. If they can’t, then accuse them of bullshit.

Rule 4: Always suspect confirmation bias

When you hear someone defending their judgement with research: Always look for confirmation bias

The business model of firms like McKinsey or Boston Consulting Group is to provide arguments for a decision that was already made. This is called Franklin’s Gambit – the process of creating or finding a reason for what one already has a mind to do. 18th-century inventor Benjamin Franklin first stipulated this principle. Kahneman would call this principle the confirmation bias: the tendency to look only for evidence that supports one’s convictions. 

The irony of Franklin’s gambit is that it’s probably nowhere as persistent as in a discipline that always insists on projecting an image of ultimate rationality: the financial sector. In the years leading up to the 2008 crisis, report after report was commissioned and published that underscored how genius the so-called mathematical models were and how incredibly successful the financial sector was in creating value and wealth. 

Counterfactual evidence was being ignored with force: Whistelblowers were bullied; credit rating agencies blackmailed (or participated in the scam); the financial press had all kinds of perverse incentives not to spoil the party because that could hurt the stock market. Etcetera. 

The solution to this rule:
There are some fascinating experiments with blue teams vs red teams. Some investment firms assign a red team that will get a big incentive if they can bring up the arguments to kill the deal that the company is working on. This setup prevents the firm from being too blinded by the prospect of success. 

A more straightforward approach: always look for counterfactual data and learn a great deal by how the other party responds to this data. If they use it to improve their argument, you will get a better hunch about whether they know what they’re talking about. 

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Rule 4: Always look for Skin in the Game

Always check how much skin in the game the other has. 

I have written about this topic before in this blog so that I can be brief here: If someone is trying to persuade you to buy something from him or her, always try to get a feeling if he or she can both win and lose. The one simple intervention that could take away most of the excessive risk-taking in the financial sector is to introduce punishments next to bonuses. If I would offer you a chance to win big if you win, but lose nothing if you lose (because you’re playing with my money), wouldn’t you be tempted to play as much, and as risky as you can? That’s the financial crisis of 2008 in a nutshell in behavioural terms.

The one simple intervention that could take away most of the excessive risk-taking in the financial sector is to introduce punishments next to bonuses.

Like Warren Buffett once said: If you sit at a poker table and you don’t know who’s the patsy: you are the patsy. 

The Solution ot this rule:
Never buy or trust people who have nothing to lose and much to win, whether that’s money or a good reputation.

Rule 6: Expect Goodhart’s Law at work

Goodhart’s law: never trust metrics that are KPI’s

Have you ever heard about the Net Promotor Score? The magical, simple metric that predicts future success, based on how likely customers are to recommend the product or business to their friends. To measure NPS, you ask the one question: How likely are you to recommend this product/service and people have to rate their satisfaction from 1 to 10. 

This metric is highly problematic for several reasons: 

  • First of all: My 5/10 could mean the same thing as your 7/10. Attaching a number to a subjective feeling is very personal. 
  • Second: You have to measure the NPS by the percentage of promotors (the percentage of customers who gave you a 9/10 or 10/10) minus the percentage of detractors (the percentage of customers who scored you under 7/10 is). If you have 0 people rating you with a 9 or 10, and 10 people rate you with a 7/10, your NPS will be -100. If you have two people rating you with a 9/10, but 8 people gave you an angry 0/10, you will end up with an NPS of -60. In other words: You won’t see how dramatic you’re doing, because you’re NPS goes up. 
  • Third: Therefore, it’s quite apparent how much incentives there are to influence the NPS. When your bonus depends on improved NPS-ratings, there’s so much you can do to manipulate the numbers: Avoid asking the question to angry customers, give happy customers extra nudges to fill in the questionnaire. Present the question at a peak moment in the customer journey. Etc. 

This phenomenon is called Goodhart’s law, and it says: every metric that is used as a KPI, loses its value as a metric. If you give targets to police officers, they will get highly incentivised to harass people, just to meet their goals. If you connect funding of Universities to performance thinking, universities will become incentivised to attract as many students as possible, shut down departments with fewer students and skew investments only towards hard sciences. If you introduce individual bonuses, people will be very incentivised to meet their bonus at all costs, even if this would imply getting into a fierce competition for resources with other departments. 

When a KPI is introduced, it will start to direct the behaviour of the people affected by that KPI. 

The Solution to this rule:
Whenever you’re involved with planning and goal setting: Always look for perverse incentives. They’re everywhere. And they’re nearly always neglected or thought of as trivial. The problem with KPI-setting is that it’s the people who pretend to be rational, who do the thinking. They usually think of human behaviour as nothing more than a nuisance to their spreadsheets.

Rule 7: Status Anxiety affects Judgement

Never underestimate status anxiety as a driving force of bad decision making

In his magnificent book Alchemy, Rory Sutherland asks his reader to imagine the following story: Suppose you have to book a flight to New York for your boss. You know JFK is a nightmare: Long cues, lot’s of delays, endless transfer walks and when you finally leave the airport, you’re rewarded with a traffic hell till Manhattan. So you decide to do something slightly less obvious: You book a ticket to Newark, New Jersey: This is a much smaller airport, you can see the Manhattan skyline from the airport and traffic is pretty OK. The thing is: you have now taken a risk by trying something new, against the obvious popular choice. If it goes right, your boss will hardly notice. But if something goes wrong, like a flight delay, you will be blamed for stupid decision-making. “What were you thinking!” “There’s a reason why everyone flies JFK!”. 

Rory Sutherland has this brilliant quote:

“It is much easier to be fired for being illogical than it is for being unimaginative. The fatal issue is that logic always gets you to the same place as your competitors.”

The problem with being imaginative is that it usually defies ‘common practice’ or ‘common sense’. And doing something different can trigger all kinds of unwanted consequences: You can be held accountable for taking a decision that didn’t work out. If you would have followed standard practice, nobody will blame you. You can also be blamed for not respecting authority. I have written before about how the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl can be read as a story of layers upon layers of bosses that were highly incentivised not to hear bad news. So they didn’t get to hear bad news. The reactor was so unstable that it took nerve-racking skills from the operators to keep it afloat. One fatal mistake triggered a cascade of nuclear reactions that caused the nuclear meltdown. 

The Solution to this rule:
Always try to understand the forces that shape the behaviour of the other. Use the Influence Framework to map their pains, gains, habits and anxieties and Jobs-to-be-done: Try to understand how they define success? What keeps them awake? What are the things they are accountable for? Whom do they have to convince in their organisation? How is their relationship with those stakeholders? Only when you understand the social web around the other, you will get a better understanding of what prevents them from bold or confident decision-making. 

Also Read: The psychological prize of being rational is being unlikeable

More on Personal Development / Self-Improvement

A series on blogposts on how to apply behavioural design thinking to design a better life.

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If you want to learn more about how influence works, you might want to consider our Behavioural Design Academy masterclass. Or organize an in-company program or workshop for your team. In our masterclass we teach the Behavioural Design Method, and the Influence Framework. Two powerful frames for behavioural change.

You can also hire SUE to help you to bring an innovative perspective or your product, service or marketing in a Behavioural Design Sprint.  You can download the brochure here, or subscribe to Behavioural Design Digest at the bottom of this page. This is our weekly newsletter in which we deconstruct how influence works in work, life and society.

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sue behavioural design
02/03/2020
Pitcture depicting the Kock Brothers

The behavioural design of the economy. On incentives and rewards

By All, Citizen Behaviour

To get the rich and powerful to change their behaviour,
is the most wicked design problem of our time

Pitcture depicting the Kock Brothers

I have been thinking a lot lately about society’s inability to tackle the biggest challenges of our time. I don’t know about you but climate crisis, income inequality and radicalisation is scaring the hell out of me. We can’t seem to change the behaviour of those who are running the show. This is the most wicked problem of our time. I want to argue that the solution to change the course of history can be found in applying some Behavioural Design Thinking to this wicked problem.

The economy is a behavioural design

The best way to think about behavioural design is to think of it as the design of choices. The way you design a choice will largely determine the behaviour that follows from that choice. This simple and powerful first principle of Behavioral Designworks on all levels of human decision making, from small consumer decisions to big societal decisions. Let me illustrate this with a couple of examples:

  • If you want to sell an item, it matters a great deal if you give two or three options. You can change the value perception of a cake + coffee of € 5,- in comparison to a € 2,5 coffee instantly if you would introduce a decoy option of a € 4 cake in the middle. The introduction of the € 4 cake makes the € 5 coffee + cake suddenly look like a bargain.
  • You can change the value perpection of something if you don’t call it “cheap” but “great value for money”.
  • If you want to get a sales team to run like hamsters in a treadmill, introduce sales targets and continuously give them feedback on how they’re performing in comparison to their colleagues. With these simple interventions, you will have designed a choice system that triggers hyper-competitive game behaviour.

These applications of the lens of behavioural economics to human decision making is nothing new. What fascinates me is the idea that could also look at the economy through this lens. The economy is a behavioural design system that rewards particular behaviour with power and profits and punishes other behaviours with taxes and fines. If you want to transform the economy, you have to tweak the behavioural design in such a way that it rewards and incentives different behaviours.

(BTW: In this post we explore the concept of Behavioural Design in dept)

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It’s all about the incentives.

The problem with the current behavioural design of the economy is that it consistently rewards destructive behaviours, both with money, power and social status.

Society glorifies being rich and being powerful. To the extent that it rewards sociopaths like Donald Trump, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel and Charles and David Koch (see picture above. BTW: David died this week) with power, prestige, admiration, etc.… The summit of social status in western capitalist society is “being rich”.

Society also rewards them with unlimited power to do whatever they want. Think about how Bezos played out communities against each other to fight for hosting the next HQ of Amazon. Amazon was offered 2.2 billions in tax cuts by the city of New York.

The third reward is financial. If you’re rich, you have access to all the tools to get even richer. The (capitalist) behavioural design of the economy offers unlimited financial rewards to people with capital. Every valuable thing in the marketplace is being sucked dry by the owners of capital. There’s so much cheap capital in the hands of investors that they can buy everything to help them to grow their wealth even further: They buy up houses in cities, they buy kindergartens, elderly homes, entertainment franchises, etc. They own more than 90% of all fortune 500 companies through the stock market, and instead of using profits to reinvest them in the companies, they use it to pay themselves high dividends.

This process is called the financialisation of the economy and explains why everything of value is rapidly becoming more expensive.

 

The solution: Change the incentives


If you want to understand the economy, understand incentives. If we’re going to change the economy, we’ll have to change the incentives. It’s as simple as that. If we want to fight inequality and climate catastrophe, we will need to change the social, financial and power rewards.

Governments and economist only tend to focus on tax incentives today, but I think we could have a far more significant impact if we work on the psychological rewards of social status and power.

We will need to challenge the social status of those who are destructing the planet and extracting wealth out of the economy. We will need to reward those with bold and brave ideas about the future with power.

A great example of this behavioural design change is the work that the Sunrise Movement in the US is currently doing. They are the movement that came up with the New Green Deal. They did a fantastic job of reframing the climate crisis story. Instead of talking about “saving the planet” and scaring the hell out of people, they turned climate action into a narrative about investing in wealth creation, job creation and the investment in thriving communities where kids have access to good education, clean water clean air and health care. That’s a story for which they’re getting bi-partisan support.

As a consequence, this broad support incentives politicians to embrace the New Green Deal, because it increases their chances of being elected. Meanwhile, they do a great job in glorifying business and community leaders who step up and take action and vilify those who are bringing the world on the verge of climate catastrophe.

Even the very rich are suckers for social status and recognition


In the end, no matter how rich we are, we all crave for recognition and social status. If we as a society succeed in taking those away from the current “heroes” of financial fame and instead reward the new heroes that bring society further through investing in a sustainable economy and a sustainable planet, we might succeed much faster in turning things around.  Saving the world is all about redesigning the incentives.

It’s as simple as that.

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25/08/2019
Nassim Taleb's great thinking on hedging against group-think

The psychological price of being rational is being unlikeable

By All, Customer Behaviour

Rational decision makers have to dare to
fight common sense and social norms.

Nassim Taleb's great thinking on hedging against group-think

This blogpost is about how being rational in organizations is actually pretty difficult. It comes at a high social cost. Because rational people need to defy groupthink, defy authority-based decision making and defy social pressure. That’s one of the reasons why innovation is so difficult to pursue.

When do you pull the Goalie?

Imagine you’re a coach of a hockey team. Your team is one goal behind and we’re approaching the end of the game. You know you need to take a gamble and change the goalie for a field player. Butthe question is when. When do you pull the goalie?

If you approach it rationally, the answer would be 5-10 minutes before the end of the game. That’s how you maximize the chance of making a difference. But no coach would dear to do this. Because if it goes wrong, everyone will blame the coach for the mad and unexpected move.

The example was told by Malcolm Gladwell in an episode of his podcast Revisionist History. It reminded me of another story, told by Nassim Taleb in the Black Swan. Before Taleb (see picture) turned philosopher, he used to work as a trader on Wall Street. His strategy was to bet against improbable events. He would take the money of his clients and he would put it all in insurance that would pay out in the case something unexpected happened, like a crisis. He knew the money would eventually pay out big time, he just never knew when the improbable “black swan” event would happen. But he just waited and did absolutely nothing.

It drove his managers and his clients mad. They expected him to work actively to make money for them. The idea that he would sit on his ass to wait for a crisis event to happen – which would pay out enormously – was just unbearable to them. It was a perfectly rational strategy, but Taleb had to develop a very thick skin in order to be able to stick to it.

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To be rational is to be unlikeable

The problem with acting rational is that it very often clashes with social norms. You will get much less problems for failing by following a strategy everyone else would follow, then you would if you followed an unexpected path, even though it makes sense from a rational point of view.

My partner Astrid decided to stop working at the office a couple of months ago. She realized that being at the office prevented her from doing the things she should be doing to create value for SUE. The constant distractions were killing for her productivity and her mood. So she started working at home. It took her three months to stop feeling guilty about it.

Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, the smartest investors in the world, spend most of their time in the office on reading. They figured that investing most of their valuable time in understanding more about the world, would eventually pay off in smarter decisions. Berkshire Hattaway made 242 Billion Dollars of profit in 2017.  Unlike most investors, they buy companies with the intention to hold on to them forever. They are in the business for the long run.

Corporate culture doesn’t like the crazy ones

The problem with acting hyper-rational is that you need to be able to deal with social pressure. Very often, people will not like you for breaking the social norm. And when your choice leads to failure, they will find it very easy to blame you for your stubbornness. I think that’s one of the reasons why it’s so difficult for corporations to innovate. Innovation needs stubborn people who don’t mind the social pressure to conform to corporate norms. “Think Different”, probably the best commercial ever made, actually pays tribute to those people with the following legendary quote:

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

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19/08/2019
mental models

Mental models: How to design for intelligent decision making?

By All, Behavioural Science Insights

We want to talk about mental models. They are key for intelligent decisions making. We want to introduce you to one of our intellectual heroes. A man who turned 95 on January 1st of 2019. There’s a fair chance that you’ve never heard about him. But you definitely have heard about his 88 years old associate, Warren Buffett. The man we’re talking about is Charlie Munger.

 

Mental Models: meet Charlie Munger

Charlie Munger became a hero to many people who are interested in better decision-making with a famous lecture he gave in 1994 at USC business school. The talk was called “A Lesson on Elementary, Worldly Wisdom As It Relates To Investment Management & Business”. You can’t find it on Youtube, but the transcript was published on the blog of startup Incubator Ycombinator and in the curious book “Poor Charlie’s Almanack, The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger“.

I want to urge you to read the transcript of the lecture. It’s one of the most exciting texts you will ever read. I re-read it at least three times per year. In this lecture on Worldly Wisdom, Charlie Munger argues that the reason why Munger and Buffett beat the market with their investments, for more than 60 years is that they have a different approach to decision making. Munger argues that if you want to make better decisions, you need to use more than one mental models to look a the problem. One of his famous quotes to make his point is the following:

To a man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

He argues that most people in business, everyday life and investing approach problems from a single mental model. If you work in branding, everything looks like a branding problem, if you work in business consulting, everything sounds like a transformation problem. If you are an economist, everything looks like a market-problem.

Mentals models: Worldly Wisdom

Munger and Buffett pride themselves with locking themselves up most of the day, reading books. What they are looking for is elementary worldly wisdom.They are obsessed with learning interesting “mental models”. Mental models are concepts from all kinds of sciences that offer elegant explanations to the world. To quote Munger:

What is elementary, worldly wisdom? Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.

You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience—both vicarious and direct—on this latticework of models. You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life. You’ve got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head”.

A list of mental models.

There’s a lot of renewed excitement for Munger’s idea of Mental Models. Shane Parish, host of the amazing podcast “The Knowledge Project” and author of Farnamstreet, the ultimate blog on better decision-making by learning from the smartest people in the world. Shane Parish is writing a book on the subject. He recently published a post called “Mental Models, the best way to make intelligent decisions (109 models explained)“. It’s a list of all the mental models that he is using in his daily life. A lot of these models are concepts from cognitive psychology and the science of influence.  BTW, Munger is also fascinated with how human decision-making works. If you understand how people think and why they do what they do, you can do a much better job at predicting and changing their behaviour.

Mentals models: learn more

  1. Here’s another great blogposts on Mental models (Thanks for sharing: Ed Borsboom)
  2. Start making a list of your favorite mental models in your todo-list. I use Evernote. I created a folder “Mental Models” and started the habit to post concepts I use a lot in my thinking. My most recent one is this: “You are the sum of the five people you hang around with”.
  3. Re-read your mental model list regularly. Once you use them to look at challenges or problems, they will always provide you with new ways of looking at the problem and its solutions.

Enjoy Munger while he’s still alive. 🙂

PS: We had Munger’s mental models in mind when we designed the program of our Behavioural Design Acacademy  Fundamentals Course. Our program is designed to teach you some very powerful and easy to remember mental models for finding human insights and for coming up with smart interventions for behavioural change. #funfact.

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In our Fundamentals Course you will master the Behavioural Design Method©. A powerful mental model (and hands-on tool) to decode human decision-making and translate this into interventions that shape desired behaviours. Join over 2.000 forward-thinkers from over 45 countries who have already joined.

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Do you want to learn more?

Suppose you want to learn more about how influence works. In that case, you might want to consider joining our Behavioural Design Academy, our officially accredited educational institution that already trained 2500+ people from 45+ countries in applied Behavioural Design. Or book an in-company training or one-day workshop for your team. In our top-notch training, we teach the Behavioural Design Method© and the Influence Framework©. Two powerful tools to make behavioural change happen in practice.

You can also hire SUE to help you to bring an innovative perspective on your product, service, policy or marketing. In a Behavioural Design Sprint, we help you shape choice and desired behaviours using a mix of behavioural psychology and creativity.

You can download the Behavioural Design Fundamentals Course brochure, contact us here or subscribe to our Behavioural Design Digest. This is our weekly newsletter in which we deconstruct how influence works in work, life and society.

Or maybe, you’re just curious about SUE | Behavioural Design. Here’s where you can read our backstory.

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04/01/2019

Kahneman fast and slow thinking explained

By Behavioural Science Insights

Excerpt: this is a reference page. Here you can find the fundamentals of Kahneman’s breakthrough work on human decision making. Firstly, it will address his discovery of fast and slow thinking. Secondly, the importance of our unconscious mind in making decisions and influencing behaviour will be discussed.

1. Kahneman Fast and Slow Thinking

On this page, we want to give you a quick guide to Daniel Kahneman’s groundbreaking work about decision making. Maybe you’ve already heard of system 1 and system 2. Or you’ve heard Kahneman was the first psychologist to win the Nobel prize for economics in 2002. Could be you’ve heard about cognitive biases and heuristics. Enough to be intrigued. He is one of our heroes and the godfather of behavioural economics. We’ll give you the highlights of Kahneman’s thinking which he published in his best-selling book ‘Thinking Fast and Slow.’

Therefore, this isn’t so much an article as a reference page that you can consult whenever you want to know more. Or reread about Kahneman. To make your life a bit easier, we have created page sections so you can easily jump to the subject that is of particular interest to you. We also have included shortcuts links for this page as well as links to more detailed information if you want to dive a bit deeper. The page sections:

System 1 and 2
The power of your subconscious mind
Heuristic: definition and meaning
Cognitive bias

System 1 and system 2

Most importantly, the groundbreaking research of Daniel Kahneman showed that our brain has two operating systems. Which he called system 1 and system 2. These are the differences between the two systems of our brain:

System 1

  • FAST
  • DEFINING CHARACTERISTICS: unconscious, automatic, effortless
  • WITHOUT self-awareness or control “What you see is all there is.”
  • ROLE: Assesses the situation, delivers updates
  • Does 98% of all our thinking

System 2

  • SLOW
  • DEFINING CHARACTERISTICS: deliberate and conscious, effortful, controlled mental process, rational thinking
  • WITH self-awareness or control, logical and skeptical
  • ROLE: seeks new/missing information, makes decisions
  • Does 2% of all our thinking
How do you influence minds and shape behaviours? How do you change other people’s, as well as your behaviours? How do you help people to make better decisions? Isn’t it strange that the majority of all of our behaviours and communication aims at influencing other people? Yet, at the same time, we have no clue about the principles and laws that govern influence?

System 2 is a slave to our system 1

To summarize, you could say that our system 2 is a slave to our system 1. Our system 1 sends suggestions to our system 2 which then turns them into beliefs. Do you want to know more about the differences between system 1 and 2? We’ve created a more elaborate overview of the main characteristics of system 1 and 2. Or maybe you’d like to hear Daniel Kahneman himself explain the concept of system 1 and 2? This is a good video to watch and is only 6.35 minutes long.

 

 

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The power of your subconscious mind

Kahneman’s additional discovery of the bandwidth of each system was what made this research so significant. It was a breakthrough into the lack of reasoning in human decision-making. He showed how the two thought systems arrive at different results, even though they are given the same inputs. Foremost, however, he revealed the power of the subconscious mind; where we all tend to think we’re rational human beings who think about our decisions and about the things we do. Kahneman demonstrated that we’re (almost) completely irrational. But that’s a good thing. It’s our survival mechanism.

35,000 decisions a day

On average we all have about 35,000 decisions to make each day. These differ in difficulty and importance. It could be taking a step to your left or right when talking. Or deciding to take the stairs or elevator. But they all hit you on a daily basis. If you had to consciously process all these decisions your brain would crash. Your automatic system’s primary task is to protect your system 2 in order to prevent cognitive overload.

There are a few ways our automatic system lightens the load on our deliberate system. First, it takes care of our more familiar tasks by turning them into autopilot routines, also known as habits. But what system 1 primarily does is rapidly sift through information and ideas without you even noticing it by prioritising whatever seems relevant and filtering out the rest by taking shortcuts. These shortcuts are also called heuristics. We’ll explain them in the next section.

We are all irrational human-beings

Above all, we all have to accept that we are irrational human beings almost all the time. Even if you think you’re not. Somehow we can accept our irrationality, or at least understand it when it’s explained to us, but we keep making the same mistake with others. When trying to influence someone, we tend to forget they are irrational too. We often try to convince somebody with rational arguments or facts. We love to tell someone about the benefits of our products or services or ideas.

Decisions are based on short-cuts

However, the decision of the person you’re trying to convince isn’t based on this rational information. It’s based on system 1 shortcuts. Kahneman’s work demonstrates that people struggle with statistics and cannot reason the probable outcomes of their decisions. A second very important insight from his work is that our decisions are driven by heuristics and biases. We’ll dive deeper into those in the next two sections.

Heuristic: definition and meaning

The shortcuts our system 1 makes are heuristics. The definition of a heuristic, as can be found on Wikipedia, is:

Any approach to problem-solving, learning, or discovery that employs a practical method, not guaranteed to be optimal, perfect, logical, or rational. But instead sufficient for reaching an immediate goal. Where finding an optimal solution is impossible or impractical. Heuristic methods can be used to speed up the process of finding a satisfactory solution. Heuristics can be mental shortcuts that ease the cognitive load of making a decision.

A heuristic is our automatic brain at work

If we bring it back to Kahneman’s thinking, a heuristic is simply a shortcut our automatic (system 1) brain makes to save the mental energy of our deliberate (system 2) brain. This is our survival mechanism at play. You’re probably already familiar with the experience of heuristics. We sometimes refer to them as a gut feeling, guestimate, common sense, or intuition. We use heuristics for problem-solving that isn’t a routine or habit. The way we ‘build’ heuristics is by reviewing the information at hand and connecting that information to our experience. Heuristics are strategies derived from previous experiences with similar problems. The most common heuristic is trial and error, trying to solve a problem based on experience instead of theory.

The availability heuristic

Another example is the so-called availability heuristic. When making a decision, this heuristic provides us with a mental short-cut that relies on immediate cases that come to our mind. Or easier put: we value information that springs to mind quickly as being more significant. So, when we have to make a decision, we automatically think about related events or situations. As a result, we might judge those events as being more frequent or more probable than others. Therefore, we have a greater belief in this information and tend to overestimate the probability and likelihood of similar things happening in the future.

Heuristics can be wrong: biased

The problem with heuristics is that sometimes they’re wrong. They are nothing more than mental shortcuts that usually involve focusing on one aspect of a complex problem and ignoring others. Therefore, heuristics affect our decision-making and, subsequently, our customer’s behaviour.

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Cognitive bias

With all this in mind, you could say that Kahneman discovered something very interesting about our cognitive abilities as human beings. To be clear about the meaning of cognition, let’s take a look at how the dictionary defines it.

“The mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses.”

What Kahneman discovered is truly paradigm shifting. It is breakthrough thinking that can even hurt egos. We are far less rational and far less correct in our thinking than we’d like to give ourselves credit for. The side-effect of heuristics is that we all suffer from cognitive bias. A cognitive bias refers to a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment, whereby inferences about other people and situations may be drawn in an illogical fashion. Individuals create their own ‘subjective social reality’ from their perception of the input.

List of cognitive biases

There are a lot of cognitive biases. You can take a look on Wikipedia, at their extensive list of cognitive biases or check out an overview we made of the most common ones. The most important thing to remember is that we all base our decisions on a heuristic, and we all are influenced by our cognitive biases. By being aware of the most common biases, you can anticipate them.

Cognitive bias in recruitment

To round things up, here is an example that ties up all the concepts of Kahneman discussed in this post. Think about recruitment. If you have to interview a person for a position for your team or organisation, the chance of this person is getting hired is proven to be established in the first 10 minutes. What happens? A person steps into the room and your system 1 makes a fast, mostly unconscious judgment based on heuristics. This leads to certain biases in your judgment. If the person is similar to you, your system 1 instantly likes him or her (liking bias). If the person wears glasses, your system 1 thinks he or she is smart (stereotyping bias). It all happens fast.

Lowering mental stress

In conclusion, your system 1 has sent these suggestions to your system 2 without you even noticing it. And your system 2 turns those into beliefs. The rest of the interview your system 2 looks for affirmation of the system 1 suggestions. To recap, our brain simply loves consistency. It lowers our mental stress or cognitive overload. And there you go. You base your final judgment on the two operating systems of your brain. Helped by heuristics and skewed by cognitive bias. We do this all day, in all kinds of situations.

BONUS: How to become a better recruiter by understanding your biases'

Especially for you we've created a free cheat card to make sure you avoid these biases in HR situations. For you to keep at hand, so you can start using the insights from Kahneman whenever you want—it is a little gift from us to you.

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To sum it up

To sum it up, by understanding Kahneman you can understand human decision-making. Because if you understand human-decision making, you can understand human or customer behaviour. You can see how we are predictably irrational. Dan Ariely wrote a beautiful book with this title, which we highly recommend. However, we just have to accept our own irrationality and understand that if we want to convince someone or try to nudge them into a certain behaviour, they are just irrational too.

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17/10/2018