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Habits: Eating the Entire Bag of Potato Chips

August 24, 2016 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

potato chips

A couple of years ago, I noticed that instead of following the same route (taking the same streets) to and from a particular grocery store, my habitual route was somewhat circular. After paying attention a few times, I realized that the route I’d ended up with involved more right turns than left turns, which meant it was ever so slightly faster. (If you know me, you know even the illusion of faster matters.)

A habit is a recurring, often unconscious pattern of behavior that is acquired through frequent repetition. Habits are acquired or learned over time. You can suddenly discover, as I did, that you have a habit you weren’t even aware of.

I may have consciously thought about making that initial right turn a few times at first, but I never think about it now. I’m satisfied with this habit, so I have no need to think about it unless I encounter an obstacle along the path. Goals, which I wrote about the value of last week, require ongoing System 2 intention from beginning to end. You’d be hard-pressed to complete a goal while your mind is otherwise occupied.

But habits only require System 2 attention until System 1 takes them over. That means that once a behavior or routine becomes a habit, it is initiated by your unconscious (System 1), usually as a result of something in the environment—a cue or a trigger. Your response is automatic rather than intentional or volitional.

Some other examples of habits are:

  • playing an instrument, if you’re trained
  • raiding the refrigerator in the evening
  • brushing your teeth before going to bed
  • biting your nails
  • eating the entire bag of potato chips every time
  • checking your email first thing in the morning

The word “habit” often elicits another word: “bad.” If you think of habits as bad—or as just something inconsequential that you do—you’ll have a harder time creating the habits you want to have.

Habits Are Immune to Your Opinion

Good habits, bad habits, they’re all the same to your brain. It doesn’t care what you think of your habits. All it cares about it is being efficient. Do anything often enough and it will become a habit. And habits, by their nature, are hard to change. Trying to exert willpower, using positive thinking, engaging in deep soul searching, or looking for the underlying cause of a habit are all fruitless endeavors. Unfortunately, you can’t have a heart-to-heart with your basal ganglia.

Your brain creates behavioral habits, with or without your conscious participation, in order to operate more efficiently. It chunks repetitive behaviors and turns the chunks over to the basal ganglia so you don’t have to waste your precious and limited System 2 attention on them. Habits are an energy-saving device.

The unconscious part of your brain (System 1) has one imperative, which is survival. However, it is only concerned with the short term: get out of the way of that bus right now! The fact that eating an entire bag of potato chips every time may have long-term negative consequences for your survival is of no concern to System 1. Up till now, eating the entire bag of potato chips has worked out fine. You’re still here. The status quo is status quo.

Maybe your cholesterol is becoming a growing concern. Well that’s conceptual; there’s no immediate crisis. Acknowledging and evaluating information about your cholesterol and deciding whether or not to change your diet requires System 2 attention. And then actually changing your diet requires more System 2 attention. In the meantime, System 1 continues running it’s program—in this case your habit of eating the entire bag of potato chips each time.

You think, What’s wrong with me? I know better. Or worse, and even less productive: I must be trying to sabotage myself. But the fact that you have information or that you know better has no direct or immediate bearing on your habit, which runs automatically whenever it is cued or triggered.

We experience this confounding situation over and over again because we tend to assume that behaviors are preceded by conscious intentions. You decide what you’re going to do and then do it. But only some behaviors are preceded by conscious intentions, far fewer than we’d like to believe. Estimates are that from 50% to 80% of what we do every day we do on autopilot, which means without conscious intention or volition.

You may be operating a 4,000 pound vehicle on a busy highway at a speed of 65 miles an hour or more while your mind is somewhere far, far away. This is especially likely to happen if you’re familiar with the route. You don’t need to pay conscious attention to your driving if nothing out of the ordinary occurs. You can zone out and your unconscious will generally get you to your destination just fine.

Your unconscious is doing exactly the same thing once you open the bag of potato chips. It’s getting you to your destination of eating everything in the bag. You don’t need to tell it to do that. But if you want it to not do that, you’re going to have to tell it over and over again until it rewrites the chip-eating program. You’re going to have to practice.

Repetition and Perseverance:
Practice, Practice, Practice

You would expect that the more a musician practices her instrument or the more dishes a chef prepares, the better they will become at doing those things. A musician is unlikely to attain excellence if she only practices when she’s in the mood for it. Skillful musicians develop the habit of practicing regularly whether they’re in the mood for it or not. And they don’t have to be in the mood for it precisely because they’ve developed the habit. They don’t have to waste conscious attention or drain self-control resources by thinking about or deciding each time whether or not to practice.

When a musician shows up onstage to perform a violin solo, her habit of practicing ensures that her fingers know what to do with the violin. Without her habit of practicing, she might still be thinking about becoming a violinist or wishing it were so.

Changing or starting a new habit is no different. A musician or a chef wouldn’t expect to execute with complete skill the very first time. And the best musicians and chefs continue to hone their skills by practicing. So if you want to master not eating the entire bag of potato chips every time instead of just wishing it were so, all you have to do is keep practicing until it becomes automatic.

Filed Under: Choice, Habit, Living, Making Different Choices Tagged With: Autopilot Behavior, Goals, Habits, System 1, System 2

Should You Try
Living Without Goals?

August 17, 2016 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

winning

No. Just no.

Yes, there are some folks out there who are quite insistent that instead of setting goals, you should put all your attention on your habits. It’s like advising a writer that instead of using nouns, she should put all her attention on verbs. We need both nouns and verbs. And we need both goals and good habits.

I’ve also come across more than a couple of people in the behavior-change field who seem to confuse goals with habits.

A goal is the state of affairs that a plan is intended to achieve and that (when achieved) terminates behavior intended to achieve it.

A goal requires ongoing conscious (System 2) attention. You decide what your desired outcome is (the new state of affairs), and then you create a plan to achieve it. Once you’ve achieved your goal, you don’t keep working toward it. You’re done. A goal has an end point.

A habit, on the other hand, is a recurring, often unconscious pattern of behavior that is acquired through frequent repetition.

Habits are created with or without your participation. If you want to start a new habit or change an existing one, you need to use conscious (System 2) attention initially. But once something becomes a habit, the unconscious (System 1) takes care of it. Habits are ongoing.

I don’t know why or how this either/or, black/white approach to goals and habits came about, but I first heard of doing away with goals in the 1990s when someone gave me a copy of Living Without a Goal by James Ogilvy. I recall reading a bit of it, attempting to give it a fair shake, but even back then I rejected the premise. Subsequently I’ve come across numerous spokespersons for the Zen-like attractiveness of the goalless life, which is especially prominent in the blogosphere.

What’s Wrong with Goals?

One of knocks against goals is that (horrors!) they limit you. Of course they do, but living without goals also limits you. You face limits no matter what you do because when you’re doing one thing, you can’t be doing four other things at the same time. If you board a plane for London, that’s where you’re likely to land even if you change your mind mid-flight and decide you’d rather land in Adelaide, Australia. Trying to keep all your options open doesn’t enhance your life, it keeps you from living it.

In addition to limiting you, another knock against goals is that they eliminate the element of surprise from your life. The idea that if you set and pursue goals life is going to stop surprising you is absurd.

In fact, you’re much more likely to be surprised (both happily and unhappily) once you set your plan into motion because you’ll be actively engaged in accomplishing something challenging. You may be uncomfortable, you’ll get feedback, you’ll learn new things, you’ll have successes and failures, you’ll have to make course adjustments, and you may even decide to change direction. So you may end up exactly where you hoped you would or you may end up someplace quite different. In either case, you’ll have had a chance to appreciate some new scenery and you’ll know much more about yourself than you would if you’d arrived there randomly.

Furthermore, you’re less likely to be surprised by life if you don’t challenge yourself because the unconscious part of your brain doesn’t like surprises. It wants you to be safe and secure, so it will attempt to keep you in your comfort zone, blissfully unaware of what you’re missing.

What’s Wrong with Giving Up Goals?

After considering their case, I’ve concluded the anti-goals folks get it wrong in four ways.

(1) They are unwilling to make a commitment.

When you commit yourself to one thing—especially to following through on a long-term goal—you agree to forego other things and to sometimes do things you don’t particularly feel like doing in the moment. If you want to change your status quo, you can’t just snap your fingers. You need to take action, you need to be persistent, and you need to figure out how to overcome obstacles. You don’t know ahead of time what your experience will be or how things are going to turn out. Doing something you don’t feel like doing now in order to have something you want in the future may not make you happy, but it’s more likely to enhance the satisfaction and meaning in your life.

Something else that comes across from many in the anti-goal camp is an almost pathological fear of measuring results. I’m sure that measuring results can be carried to an extreme, and when coupled with poorly thought-out goals (or goals determined by someone else), not particularly rewarding or even healthy. But measuring results is how you know when you’re getting closer to or farther away from what really matters to you. Why wouldn’t you want to keep track of that?

(2) They have a poor understanding of what goals really are.

What are the things in life that really matter to you? Your goals should not be ends in themselves, but rather the means of having more of what you really want. If you know what you want, you can either hope that doing whatever you feel like doing in the moment will get you there. Or you can identify goals that can get you more of what you want and then take steps to achieve them.

Many of the arguments for giving up goals seem to imply that once you create one, you’re somehow imprisoned by it. It’s true that a goal without a plan is just wishful thinking, but plans are only rigid if you treat them that way. The best way to approach a goal is by paying attention to feedback and adjusting course as needed. There’s nothing in the definition of a goal that prevents you from being flexible or responding to new information or insights.

Yet another misunderstanding about how to make setting goals more effective is the focus on the outcome rather than on the process. You need to identify your desired outcome so you’ll know what you’re aiming for and will be able to tell when you’ve arrived. But then you need to focus your attention on the steps it will take to get there: on the process. Focusing on the outcome will actually decrease the likelihood of achieving your goal.

(3) They have an inability to identify juicy, enlivening, and expansive goals.

Maybe the real problem is a lack imagination. If the idea of setting goals seems dry and boring to the anti-goal folks, they’re probably not setting the right goals.  Maybe they haven’t yet determined what they really want and are still searching. They don’t understand that by undertaking challenges they can stretch their limits and expand their possibilities. They can learn just as much—if not more—than they can learn by meandering moment to moment.

If you do know what you want and have an idea about how to create more of that in your life, you’re likely to find working toward your goals exciting rather than tedious. Of course you won’t be excited about every single step and you won’t be excited every minute of every day. No one is. That’s where having a plan comes in handy. But if you’re not passionate about your desired outcome, let it go and find something else to work toward. Don’t throw out the entire concept of goals.

(4) They lack awareness about how the brain actually works.

Your brain is primed to create habits, but it is not primed to achieve goals. If you do the same thing, under the same circumstances, over and over again, it will become a habit. You will no longer need to focus conscious attention on it because your basal ganglia will have taken it over. Your brain loves repetition and routine. And the unconscious part of your brain actively resists change.

So if you want to change your status quo, which is what a goal is intended to do, you need to focus your conscious attention on completing the steps you’ve outlined until you’ve achieved it. Maintaining focus is not easy. It helps to have a plan that includes a means of measuring your results and rewarding yourself for your accomplishments. If you don’t get your brain to go along with your plan, your brain will get you to go along with its agenda. The unconscious part of your brain is much more interested in immediate gratification than it is in long-term satisfaction—which is why doing whatever you feel like doing in the moment is so appealing. Your brain is generally at the ready to divert your attention to any nearby bright, shiny objects. That means going with the flow is less a philosophical choice and more the path of least resistance of the unconscious part of your brain.

Don’t buy into the anti-goals rhetoric, even if you’ve had negative experiences with goals. Making effective use of goal-setting starts with knowing what you really want and making a commitment to go after it.

Filed Under: Attention, Brain, Creating, Habit, Unconscious Tagged With: Brain, Goals, Habits, System 1, System 2

Counterfactual Thinking: The World of What Might Have Been

June 15, 2016 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

counterfactual thinking

Counterfactual thinking is thinking that runs counter to the facts. It consists of imagining outcomes other than the ones that occurred: the way things could have been—or should have been—different from the way they turned out. Being able to imagine different outcomes is an enormous evolutionary and practical advantage. It’s critical in regard to being creative or inventive and in not continuing to make the same mistakes over and over again. But there are different ways of using counterfactual thinking, some of which are effective and some of which are not.

Nonfunctional or Functional?

Nonfunctional counterfactual thinking frequently leads to blame (of self or others), and if carried on long enough, to rumination, stress, anxiety, and depression, as well as to conspiracy theories and alternate versions of reality.

Functional counterfactual thinking is an honest attempt to examine a situation to determine what, if anything, could have been done differently to create a different outcome. It doesn’t involve blame, rumination, or the twisting of facts.

Upward or Downward?

Upward counterfactual thinking focuses on how things could have turned out better, while downward counterfactual thinking focuses on how things could have turned out worse. Focusing on how things could have gone worse tends to make people feel better. You might think this is a good strategy, but it’s a short-term solution that can contribute to long-term difficulties because it decreases the impetus to change.

That’s because focusing on how things could have gone worse prevents people from identifying actual problems that need to be solved or behaviors that need to be modified. Sometimes it’s only a matter of dumb luck that things didn’t turn out worse than they did.

Evidence vs. Information

Perhaps the biggest difference between nonfunctional and functional counterfactual thinking is that in the former case, the events or actions leading to an outcome are perceived as evidence to support a particular agenda, while in the latter case, the events or actions leading to an outcome are perceived as information to be examined without regard to an agenda. (You can read about feedback loops for a more in-depth treatment of evidence vs. information.)

If you are dissatisfied with a particular outcome, the most useful thing you can do is use counterfactual thinking functionally by attempting to determine what led to the outcome and what, if any, changes you could make to be more effective in similar situations in the future.

Analyzing a situation and identifying what you want to change and why you want to change it uses System 2 (conscious) attention, which is why it isn’t always the go-to response. But if you want to use your brain instead of letting your brain use you, and if you want to be a creative rather than a reactive force in your own life, you will sometimes need to do what doesn’t come naturally.

Filed Under: Attention, Brain, Clarity, Living, Mind Tagged With: counterfactual thinking, System 1, System 2

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Brain and Social Change

October 16, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

resistance

We have a difficult time making behavior changes in our own lives, yet we’re often surprised that enacting social change is so frustrating, difficult, and time consuming. But the situation isn’t remotely surprising. Change is difficult and slow because our brain is wired to maintain the status quo, and it is we—people with brains wired to maintain the status quo—who put into place and are then affected by laws and social policies.

One part of our brain (System 2) can see the benefit of change and wants to make changes. The other part of the brain (System 1) actively resists change. The part of the brain that can see the benefit of change is slow, lazy, and easily depleted. The part of the brain that resists change is fast, vast, and always on. When System 2 is depleted–which is often–we revert to operating not logically and rationally, but on autopilot.

Furthermore, laws and social policies are based on the idea that people are rational actors, who respond to incentives in straightforward ways. We believe that education, awareness, and clearly defined negative consequences are effective strategies. This is a very logical position to take. It’s also one of the reason why our laws and policies don’t work the way we expect them to work.

Many of our social institutions—and laws in particular—implicitly assume that human actions are largely the product of conscious knowledge and intention. We believe that all we need for a law-abiding society is to let people know what is right and what is wrong, and everything will follow from there. Sure, we make exceptions for people with grave mental disorders, but we assume most human behavior is conscious and intentional. Even when we acknowledge the power of unconscious influence, we believe it can be overcome by willpower or education.—Shankar Vedantam, The Hidden Brain

The hidden brain, as Shankar Vedantam refers to System 1, doesn’t operate logically or rationally. It isn’t necessarily up to the same thing the conscious part of our brain, System 2, is up to. For example:

  1. System 1 focuses on survival and detecting threats to our survival.
  2. System 1 can’t handle complexity, so it generalizes instead.
  3. System 1 is biased because biases make it easier to decide what we think.
Threat Detection

The brain is, first and foremost, a survival tool, and the way that it has found to be most effective at guaranteeing survival is through the threat and reward response. Put simply, your brain will cause you to move away from threats and move toward rewards. —Dr. David Rock, author of Your Brain at Work

This sounds reasonable and not particularly problematic until you realize that, in additional to actual survival needs (food, water, shelter, etc.) and actual physical threats, each of us has personalized our threat-detection system to include situations we have defined as threatening. And once the brain gets the idea that something is a threat, it responds as if it is facing a threat to our physical survival.

How logical do you tend to be when you’re facing a threat to your survival?

When the brain is under severe threat, it immediately changes the way it processes information, and starts to prioritize rapid responses. “The normal long pathways through the orbitofrontal cortex, where people evaluate situations in a logical and conscious fashion and [consider] the risks and benefits of different behaviors— that gets short circuited,” says Dr. Eric Hollander, professor of psychiatry at Montefiore/Albert Einstein School of Medicine in New York.  Instead, he says, “You have sensory input right through the sensory [regions] and into the amygdala or limbic system.”

This dramatically alters how we think, since the limbic system is deeply engaged with modulating our emotions.  “The neural networks in the brain that are involved in rational, abstract cognition— essentially, the systems that mediate our most humane and creative thoughts— are very sensitive to emotional states, especially fear.” So when people are terrorized, “Problem solving becomes more categorical, concrete and emotional [and] we become more vulnerable to reactive and short-sighted solutions.” —Maia Szalavitz , neuroscience journalist

When we feel threatened, logic and rationality go offline.

Generalization

Statistical facts don’t come to people naturally. Quite the opposite. Most people understand the world by generalizing personal experiences which are very biased. In the media the “news-worthy” events exaggerate the unusual and put the focus on swift changes. Slow and steady changes in major trends don’t get much attention. Unintentionally, people end-up carrying around a sack of outdated facts that we got in school (including knowledge that often was outdated when acquired in school). —gapminder.org/ignorance

System 1 processes data and information through association. It sees patterns and makes connections, whether or not the patterns and connections actually exist. It is, as Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow) writes, “radically insensitive to both the quality and quantity of the information that gives rise to impressions and intuitions.” As a result, System 1 accepts anecdotal evidence as being as valid as verified evidence.

Seeing patterns and finding connections makes it easy to come up with sometimes sweeping generalizations.

One example: Person A is similar to Person B in some particular way; therefore, Person B is probably similar to Person A in other ways. Since I know Person A, I now believe I also know and understand Person B. And I see all of the people who share some of these same characteristics as being alike. This leads me to believe I understand more than I do and know more than I know about Person B and other people who bear some similarity to Person B.

Another example: Extrapolating from my own personal experience to assume that everyone thinks the way I think, feels the way I feel, or would respond the way I respond.

Generalizing can be useful when we need to make quick assessments. But it’s a lazy way of thinking that can be dangerous when used in important or critical situations.

It’s easy to find examples of generalizing in the opinions we have and the alliances we form around hot-button social topics such as climate change, GMOs, vaccines, immigration, and Planned Parenthood. It can also be seen in how people line up in the pro- or anti-science camps.

When we generalize, we make assumptions and draw conclusions from limited data or evidence.

Implicit Biases

Critical thinking doesn’t come naturally. Since we need to make all kinds of assessments and decisions in the course of our lives—and since the part of the brain that can think critically is often offline—we use mental shortcuts instead of thinking most things through.

[Implicit] biases, which encompass both favorable and unfavorable assessments, are activated involuntarily and without an individual’s awareness or intentional control. Residing deep in the subconscious, these biases are different from known biases that individuals may choose to conceal for the purposes of social and/or political correctness. Rather, implicit biases are not accessible through introspection.

The implicit associations we harbor in our subconscious cause us to have feelings and attitudes about other people based on characteristics such as race, ethnicity, age, and appearance.  These associations develop over the course of a lifetime beginning at a very early age through exposure to direct and indirect messages. In addition to early life experiences, the media and news programming are often-cited origins of implicit associations.

A Few Key Characteristics of Implicit Biases

  • Implicit biases are pervasive. Everyone possesses them, even people with avowed commitments to impartiality such as judges.
  • Implicit and explicit biases are related but distinct mental constructs. They are not mutually exclusive and may even reinforce each other.
  • The implicit associations we hold do not necessarily align with our declared beliefs or even reflect stances we would explicitly endorse.
  • We generally tend to hold implicit biases that favor our own ingroup, though research has shown that we can still hold implicit biases against our ingroup.
  • Implicit biases are malleable. Our brains are incredibly complex, and the implicit associations that we have formed can be gradually unlearned through a variety of debiasing techniques.

Source: kirwaninstitute.osu.edu. Note: Harvard University has developed an implicit association test that is available online (https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/) so you can test yourself for your own hidden biases.

Now What?

Change is hard because of the way we’re wired. If we can come to terms with the fact that we operate less rationally than we think we do, we might be able to create or modify laws and public policies to be more effective for more people.

Things to remember:

  1. System 1’s agenda is to maintain the status quo, so most of the time that’s our agenda and everyone else’s, too. If it’s difficult for us to make personal changes, imagine how difficult it is to make changes that involve large groups of people—or to change other peoples’ minds.
  2. System 1 is primarily a threat-detector. When we feel threatened, we are not going to be thinking or behaving logically, and we should expect the same to be true of others. People who feel threatened are easier to manipulate, and they may take actions that are not in their own best interest.
  3. We generalize because System 1 doesn’t handle complexity well. Generalizing leads to a feeling of cognitive ease because we think we know more than we do and understand more than we do. That may not be a problem in trivial matters, but it has huge implications when it comes to laws and public policies.
  4. We are all at the effect of implicit biases. Because we aren’t directly aware of them, it’s easy for us to deny we have them. That doesn’t make them go away, however. The best thing to do is to pay attention to how we act and react to other people so we can begin to recognize, acknowledge, and eventually neutralize some of these biases.

Filed Under: Beliefs, Brain, Cognitive Biases, Living, Unconscious Tagged With: Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational, Shankar Vedantam, Social Change, System 1, System 2, the Hidden Brain

Brain Dead: Is Your Mind Temporarily Offline?

September 4, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

brain fog3

Your brain has two systems for processing the stimuli and experiences of your life and determining how you act upon them.

Conscious: The processing system you’re aware of is called System 2. It is logical and intentional and sometimes referred to as “true reasoning.” (A formal outline is a good example.) It is also slow, limited, and easily depleted. It processes about 40 bits of information at a time.

Unconscious: The processing system you’re not aware of is called System 1. It is associative, which means it sees patterns and connects dots. (A mindmap is a good example.) It is fast, vast, and always on. It processes about 11,000,000 bits of information at a time.

If System 1 were to go offline, you would, too. Game over! But you can still function when System 2 is temporarily offline, even for long periods of time, such as when you’re asleep. So when you think or talk about being temporarily brain dead, you’re talking about exhausting System 2 attention.

If you’re in good health, there’s not much you can do to tax or exhaust the capacity of System 1—and there are things you can do to enhance its functioning. However, your supply of System 2 attention is always limited, and anything that occupies your working memory reduces it. Some examples of things that tax System 2 attention are:

  • Physical illness (even minor), injury, or lack of sleep
  • Making numerous trivial decisions throughout the day
  • Stress, anxiety, and worry
  • Exercising will power (forcing yourself to do something you don’t want to do or to not do something you do want to do)
  • Monitoring your behavior
  • Monitoring your environment if it is new or you consider it unsafe
  • Learning something new, traveling an unfamiliar route, etc.
  • Completing a complex computation
  • Trying to tune out distractions
  • A long period of concentrated or focused attention
  • Trying to remember dates, numbers, or unrelated facts
  • Listening to me talk

Since System 1 is fast, vast, always on, and has an answer for almost everything—and since you don’t need System 2 attention for most of what you do when you’re awake—what’s the big deal if you run out of System 2 attention from time to time?

Three Categories of Errors

Optimally, the two systems work together, and neither type of processing is superior. However, System 1 is more useful in some situations, while System 2 is not only more useful but also required in other situations.

System 1 is pretty good at what it does because its models of familiar situations are accurate so its short-term predictions tend to be accurate. But that’s not always the case. System 1 sacrifices accuracy for speed, meaning it jumps to conclusions. It also has biases and is prone to making logical errors.

One of System 2’s jobs is to detect System 1’s errors and adjust course by overriding System 1’s impulses. As Daniel Kahneman says in Thinking, Fast and Slow:

There are vital tasks that only System 2 can perform because they require effort and acts of self-control in which the intuitions and impulses of System 1 are overcome.

Bear in mind that System 1 is not rational. If System 2 is depleted and can’t veto or modify the non-rational impulses of System 1, those impulses then turn into actions (or speech).

There are three categories of errors you tend to make when System 2 is depleted.

Logical Errors

System 1 thinking uses shortcuts. System 2 thinking takes the long (logical/linear) way home. So when you’re out of System 2 attention, you’re more prone to making mistakes in anything that requires logical, linear thinking. Errors of intuitive thought can be difficult for System 2 to catch on a good day. When System 2 is offline, you automatically assume them to be correct. As a result:

  • You will have trouble making, following, or checking the validity of a complex logical argument. You’ll be more likely to be led by the cognitive biases and distortions System 1 uses because they don’t require any effort and give you a comforting sense of cognitive ease.
  • You will have difficulty comparing the features of two items for overall value. If you have to make a choice, you’ll be more likely to go with what intuitively feels right or the item that has some emotionally compelling attribute (it reminds you of the one your mother had, for example, or reminds you of your mother).
  • You will be more gullible. You’ll be more likely to believe things you wouldn’t otherwise believe or be persuaded by empty messages, such as in commercials. System 2 is the skeptic, so the best time for someone to take advantage of you is when it is offline.
Intention or Response Errors

System 1 continuously picks up on cues and triggers in your environment to determine what situation you’re in and to predict what’s next. Any deviation from the norm requires System 2 attention. If it isn’t available, you’re likely to do not what you intended to do but whatever is normal for you in that situation. And without System 2 attention, you’re much more likely to respond automatically (habitually) to the stimulus (cue or trigger).

  • System 2 is in charge of self-control, continuously monitoring your behavior, keeping you polite, for example, when you’re angry. In the heat of the moment, when you’re out of System 2 attention, you’re much less likely to be able to suppress your immediate emotional reactions to people and situations.
  • System 1 has an answer for almost everything. But when it encounters a surprising situation (something it hasn’t previously encountered or that is unusual in that situation), it notifies System 2. You don’t need System 2 attention to drive a familiar route, but if you encounter an obstacle along that route, you need System 2 to figure out what it is and to respond appropriately to it.
  • System 2 is also in charge of will power. If you are in the process of trying to stop doing something you habitually do (such as raiding the refrigerator in the evening), you need System 2 to belay the impulse from System 1 to see if there’s more pie. Without System 2, you’re more likely to give in, look for the pie…and eat it.
  • You need System 2 if you want to take a different route from your usual one or make an extra stop you don’t normally make. Without adequate System 2 attention, you’re likely to find yourself taking the usual route and forgetting to make that stop.
Gatekeeping Errors

We all have biases, whether or not we’re aware of them and whether or not we want to admit it. While it’s easy to spot overt biases and prejudices in other people, most of your own biases are hidden even from you. In the case of biases toward specific groups of people, you’ve likely come to a reasoned conclusion they’re wrong and have chosen not to think about and treat other people based on stereotypes. But that doesn’t mean the biases have disappeared. They’re still part of System 1’s associative processing operations. It’s just that when System 1 suggests a biased response to System 2, System 2 normally overrides it. Per Daniel Kahneman:

Conflict between an automatic reaction (System 1) and an intention to control it (System 2) is common in our lives.

When System 2 is depleted, there is no one at the gate to keep the biased or prejudiced responses from getting through. You may simply have a biased thought. You may say something in the presence of others that you wouldn’t normally say. Or you may respond to another person based on a group stereotype. The thought, comment, or behavior may be something you later regret. If you were to claim it doesn’t represent what you believe or the way you really feel or think, you’d most likely be right.

But when you see a blatant expression of bias or prejudice in someone else—especially a celebrity—you might have a different reaction. You might assume their true colors are showing.  We think that what we see in other people when their guard is down and they’re pushed or stressed reveals the truth about them. But the actual truth is that to the extent we have any civility at all, it’s because System 2 maintains it.  Without System 2 you and I would have no ability to question our biases or prejudices, no ability to come to reasoned conclusions about them, and no ability to monitor and veto System 1’s automatic reactions.

Conclusion

It isn’t always necessary, advisable, or even possible to override System 1. But when you deplete System 2, you can’t override it even when you want or need to. Without System 2, you can’t think straight (logically and linearly). So:

  • Don’t try to make important decisions of any kind when you feel brain dead.
  • Don’t assume you’ll feel or think the same way about something the next day as you do when you’re stressed, sick, just completed your annual tax return, or have recently fallen in love.
  • Don’t stay up late to watch the QVC channel unless you have a lot of money you’re trying to unload.
  • Don’t keep pie around if you’re trying not to eat it.
  • Don’t get into debates about complex issues after you’ve had a few beers.
  • Don’t tax your working memory with details you can keep track of some other way.
  • Don’t take System 2’s censoring of your biases and prejudices for granted. And don’t assume other people’s mental lapses reveal deep-seated truths about them.

Filed Under: Attention, Brain, Cognitive Biases, Consciousness, Living, Memory, Mind, Unconscious Tagged With: Brain, Brain Dead, Cognitive Biases, Daniel Kahneman, Fast and Slow, Mind, Predictably Irrational, System 1, System 2, Thinking

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