 Danny Kahneman makes the distinction between system one and system two and I think it's worth spelling out a little bit exactly kind of the character of those two systems so system one is as I said it was it's fast it's automatic and It's completely effortless. You don't even know you're doing it and so a few of those examples include For example, you might see a face an angry face And so if you look at a photo and you see the angry face then you don't have to kind of Build it up. You don't have to recognize. I will snarling face kind of frowny wrinkles on the forehead Showing teeth right none of these things have to happen in order for you to recognize that it's an angry face It just happens another example is Two plus two equals you don't need four just pops into your head or bread and Butter hopefully pops into your head And again, I mean it's kind of the nature of this Processing means that it's it just happens to you another example that we revisited in in episode two is This idea of illusions and again, you can't help but to see these illusions We gave the example of the faces appearing on the side of the screen You can't help but to see the faces appear alien like This is a really nice example. It's by Edward Adelson and it's called the checker shadow illusion and you see two squares marked A and B and When you're looking at the squares, you can't help but to see one square being darker than the other, right? They look like they're completely different, but in fact, they're exactly the same shade of gray So if you were to actually measure and we encourage people to kind of do some arts and crafts here And you can see in fact that the two squares are in fact identical But you can't help but to see them is completely different, right? So this is system one so You can't help these things actually happen to you You're not doing anything to see these illusions, and I think that's really worth pointing out and as we talked about in episode two People have this conception when it comes to higher order Properties like learning and memory that we have some sort of introspective access that we're that we have some Control over these sorts of things, but in fact as Nisbet said that we actually don't So that's that's kind of system one. These are the things that happen to you. It's effortless. It's automatic But system two is the opposite and so instead of two plus two We have something like I don't know 17 times 24 Yeah, doesn't exactly come roll off the tongue right like it like two plus two does so you actually you could compute it You could sit down you can probably even do it in your head if you had a bit of time but it doesn't immediately jump out at you and Another one might be so a system one property might be recognizing a familiar face So you can recognize your friend immediately and you can recognize Someone that you your mother for example in a crowd even you could she would just kind of pop out But when you're searching for a friend for example in a crowded auditorium right and you're trying to find out who it is It's the serial process. You have to do one thing. No, not them not them and you kind of go through This type of long effortful process in order to spot that person So that's kind of the distinction between system one and two Another one which I find quite interesting is driving and so I've been living in Australia for the last 10 years or so I have absolutely no problem driving on the left side of the road It's completely effortless. It's largely system one particularly and on an open road You just there's no processing whatsoever. You can almost forget how much you've actually traveled But when I go back to Canada Where I grew up and drive on the other side of the road. It is really effortful. I have to sit and remember Okay, driving the right driving the right driving indicators on this side Not the the window wipers go off every once in a while and it's not easy. This freaks me out actually So we recently we recently went to New York to have a chat with Danny Kahneman and of course you're driving on the right side of the road and I'm in the passenger seat and We're driving through the streets of New York, which is hard at the best of times, but then You're talking to me about quite complicated, you know, scientific Processes and principles and I can I can tell that that your mind is not necessarily on the road But it but it's thinking about these things. That's another facet of of system two kind of thinking actually so the System two is is slow and deliberate deliberate, but it the resources are limited So when you're trying to do two complex tasks, which is driving on the other side of the road that you're used to and Explain a complex phenomenon to me those two interfere with each other. So I think Next time we're in the US You should you should keep focused on the road But maybe we're in Australia when you know system one is you know taking control of the wheel Then we could have a chat about more more more complicated things and you'd like to think that we'd be immune to these sorts of effects and we talked about this previously, I think in episode two where We aren't any better than anyone else at making these sorts of errors, right? So hopefully I had somebody you know in the back in the side in the seat next to me work that would say either shut up or pull over and we can carry on the discussion, but Hopefully, I mean this distinction between system one and two I think is quite important. Now everybody should have completed the Three questions that we had earlier in the episode Now these are part of something called the cognitive reflection task. Do you want to tell us a bit about the test? Sure It was developed by a researcher at Yale called Shane Frederick and it's kind of like a three question IQ test But it's a little bit different it it assesses your ability to suppress the kind of quick system one response and Your ability to to rely on the slower deliberate system to response So here's an example a bat and a ball cost a dollar and ten cents The bat cost one dollar more than the ball. How much does a ball cost? Now when I first heard this example my my internal monologue was just screaming ten cents ten cents ten cents But hold on a minute if the ball costs ten cents and the bat costs one dollar more than the ball That means the bat costs a dollar ten and the ball costs ten cents which adds up to a dollar twenty Which doesn't make sense right? It has to add to a dollar ten So if you spend a little bit of time thinking about this you realize that The bat has to cost a dollar and five cents and the ball five cents That's the only way that these two things can add up to a dollar ten So as I said you've got a in order to get this question, right? You've got to really suppress that that initial response and think a little bit more about it And so it's the same thing with the other two questions on the on the on the cognitive reflection test So I think the second one is if it takes five machines five minutes to make five widgets how much how long does it take for a hundred machines to create a hundred widgets and Immediately the intuitive sort of responses a hundred hundred minutes, right? But in fact, that's not correct. The third question is about question Is a question about lily pads on a lake that keep doubling in size each day And if it covers the entire lake after 48 days, how many days does it or how long does it take to cover half of the lake? The first thing that comes to your mind is half of 48, which is 24, which also isn't correct so it would be great if people can kind of go back to those questions and Figure out use their system to and figure out exactly what the correct response is to to these questions But yeah, it's it's not easy And it's it takes a little bit of cognitive effort to stop and kind of move on but I hope people don't feel bad by If they didn't get each of the three questions correct in fact, that's extremely rare as Shane Frederick showed In fact, they compared people across a whole bunch of institutions from Harvard and MIT and other institutions That aren't in part of the Ivy League and so on And a lot of people didn't get it correct So they shouldn't feel bad if they didn't get all three correct, but it does seem to measure people's Degree of rationality if you call it. I think Keith Stanovic from Toronto talks about this difference between intelligence and rationality and Rationality is kind of what we mean by system to processing the extent to which people put in the effort to process the information a bit more carefully but I Think it's worth keeping in mind again the point of this exercise is to recognize the distinction between system one and system two and obviously the the grandfather of of heuristics and biases and the originator of this distinction between system one and two is is Danny Kahneman now We had a conversation with Danny in New York, and he really made that distinction between the two systems