Two common (& recent) mistakes about dual process reasoning & cognitive bias - Cultural Cognition of Health

“Dual process” theories of reasoning — which have been around for a long time in social psychology — posit (for the sake of forming and testing hypotheses; positing for any other purpose is obnoxious) that there is an important distinction between two types of mental operations.

Very generally, one of these involves largely unconscious, intuitive reasoning and the other conscious, reflective reasoning.

Kahneman calls these “System 1” and “System 2,” respectively, but as I said the distinction is of long standing, and earlier dual process theories used different labels (I myself like “heuristic” and “systematic,” the terms used by Shelley Chaiken and her collaborators; the “elaboration likelihood model” of Petty & Cacioppo uses different labels but is very similar to Chaiken’s “heuristic-systematic Model”).

Kahneman’s work (including most recently his insightful and fun synthesis “Thinking Fast, Slow”) has done a lot to focus attention on dual process theory, both in scholarly research (particularly in economics, law, public policy & other fields not traditionally frequented by social psychologists) and in public discussion generally.

Still, there are recurring themes in works that use Kahneman’s framework that reflect misapprehensions that familiarity with the earlier work in dual process theorizing would have steered people away from.

I’m not saying that Kahneman — a true intellectual giant — makes these mistakes himself or that it is his fault others are making them. I’m just saying that it is the case that these mistakes get made, with depressing frequency, by those who have come to dual process theory solely through the Kahneman System 1-2 framework.

Here are two of those mistakes (there are more but these are the ones bugging me right now).

1. The association of motivated cognition with “system 1” reasoning .

“Motivated cognition,” which is enjoying a surge in interest recently (particularly in connection with disputes over climate change), refers to the conforming of various types of reasoning (and even perception) to some goal or interest extrinsic to that of reaching an accurate conclusion.  Motivated cognition is an unconscious process; people don’t deliberately fit their interpretation of arguments or their search for information to their political allegiances, etc. — this happens to them without their knowing, and often contrary to aims they consciously embrace and want to guide their thinking and acting.

The mistake is to think that because motivated cognition is unconscious, it affects only intuitive, affective, heuristic or “fast” “System 1” reasoning. That’s just false. Conscious, deliberative, systematic, “slow” “System 2” can be affected be affected as well. That is, commitment to some extrinsic end or goal — like one’s connection to a cultural or political or other affinity group — can unconsciously bias the way in which people consciously interpret and reason about arguments, empirical evidence and the like.

This was one of the things that Chaiken and her collaborators established a long time ago. Motivated systematic reasoning continues to be featured in social psychology work (including studies associated with cultural cognition) today.

One way to understand this earlier and ongoing work is that where motivated reasoning is in play, people will predictably condition the degree of effortful mental processing on its contribution to some extrinsic goal. So if relatively effortless heuristic reasoning generates the result that is congenial to the extrinsic goal or interest, one will go no further. But if it doesn’t — if the answer one arrives at from a quick, impressionistic engagement with information frustrates that goal — then one will step up one’s mental effort, employing systematic (Kahneman’s “System 2”) reasoning.

But employing it for the sake of getting the answer that satisfies the extrinsic goal or interest (like affirmation of one’s cultural identity defining group). As a result, the use of systematic or “System 2” reasoning will thus be biased, inaccurate.

But whatever: Motivated cognition is not a form of or a consequence of “system 1” reasoning. If you had been thinking & saying that, stop.

2. Equation of unconscious reasoning with “irrational” or biased reasoning, and equation of conscious with rational, unbiased.

The last error is included in this one, but this one is more general.

Expositors of Kahneman tend to describe “System 1” as “error prone” and “System 2” as “reliable” etc.

This leads lots of people to think that that heuristic or unconscious reasoning processes are irrational or at least “pre-rational” substitutes for conscious “rational” reasoning. System 1 might not always be biased or always result in error but it is where biases, which, on this view, are essentially otherwise benign or even useful heuristics that take a malignant turn, occur. System 2 doesn’t use heuristics — it thinks things through deductively, algorithmically  — and so “corrects” any bias associated with heuristic, System 1 reasoning.

Indeed, this view is not only wrong, but just plain incoherent.

There is nothing that makes it onto the screen of “conscious” thought that wasn’t (moments earlier!) unconsciously yanked out of the stream of unconscious mental phenomena.