Read it fast, and then again slowly
One of the highlights of my intellectual life was discovering the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, in a book called Against the Gods, by Peter Bernstein. Since then, I’ve read some of his more scholarly work and have come across his name in dozens of books about thinking and decision-making. So, when I learned that he had written Thinking, Fast and Slow
As a fan of his work, it’s a sure bet that I am biased, but as a student of his work I have taken special pains in this review not to let that bias affect my thinking. Fortunately, this time both my intuition and reason agree that it is an important book for anyone who wants to learn more about the complexities and oddities that characterize our thinking, perceptions, and decision-making.
The key theme of the first section of the book is that we all have two currents of thought running simultaneously in our heads. Think of a hybrid engine, which runs quietly on electrical power in leisurely driving but requires gasoline power for surges of performance. System 1 thinking is equivalent to the electrical power. It’s fast and effortless and mainly runs below the level of our consciousness. System 2 is slower, more logical, and often difficult to use.
Clear thinking is hard to do and rarer than we think. Our brains use a disproportionate share of our energy resources, so we’ve evolved brains that conserve mental energy as much as possible. One of the ways we do this is by taking mental shortcuts (heuristics) to quickly arrive at “good enough” answers for most of life’s questions and challenges. System 1 generally serves us well.
Except when it doesn’t. In complex situations those shortcuts can take us in the wrong direction. When faced with a difficult question to answer, one of our most common shortcuts is to substitute an easier question. For example, the question: “Will this multimillion dollar investment deliver an ROI that exceeds our hurdle rate?” often becomes, “Do I trust this person who says it will?”
You can see the obvious implications for persuasion, regardless of which side of the persuasion attempt you’re on.
Another important idea is What You See Is All There Is, (WYSIATI). Even when we don’t have complete information to answer the difficult question, we often treat the information we have as all we need. One consequence of this is the halo effect, in which a salient judgment about a specific person carries over into other judgments. For example, people who are perceived as good-looking tend also to be seen as more intelligent, capable, etc.
We are remarkably good at some types of judgments, such as inferring the intentions of another person from a momentary glance. But we are also bad at other types of judgments, such as statistical thinking and some economic choices. In the second main section of the book, Kahneman shows us how our judgments deviate from the utility-maximizing “best choices” that economists tell us we should make.
I’ve written before about loss aversion and framing effects because of their close connection with persuasion. So often, it’s not the choice that makes the difference, but how the choice is described. For example, consider the following scenario.
A person with lung cancer can choose between radiation and surgery. Surgery has a better record for long term survival, but it is riskier in the short term. In studies, participants were given either of the following two descriptions:
- The one-month survival rate is 90%.
- There is 10% mortality in the first month.
Which would you choose?
Participants in the studies chose surgery 84% of the time when the first choice was posed, and only 50% chose it in the second frame. The choices are exactly the same, but the description makes a big difference. Disturbing, but maybe not surprising.
What was most surprising about the studies is that the framing effect applied equally to physicians as to the general population.
What makes so many of these errors especially sinister is that we are overconfident in our own certainties and abilities. In fact, often the people who are most wrong are in the worst position to know it.
As you can see, education is not enough of a guard against irrationality. It would be nice if Kahneman would have given us some practical advice on how to improve our judgments, but he tells us that “little can be achieved without a considerable investment of effort.” If you read this book, you will at least be in a better position to recognize situations where you should be on your guard and should make the extra mental effort to think through the choice.
There are many excellent books that have come out in recent years, but most of them are based on the original thinking and research done by Daniel Kahneman, so why not go directly to the source? Most people I talk to have never heard of Kahneman, and I didn’t want to tell you more about him until you had a chance to react first to some of his ideas. I guess I should mention that he is the only psychologist ever to have won the Nobel Prize for Economics.
In this brief review, I’ve only scratched the surface of the dozens of examples of the ways our thinking can go astray. Although most of the judgments and choices we make turn out alright, sometimes we need the extra horsepower that System 2 can provide. Any serious student or practitioner of persuasion—or of thinking clearly and resisting persuasion—should read and re-read this book.
Speaking PowerPoint by Bruce R. Gabrielle is one of the best books on slide presentations I have seen in a long time because it is full of practical suggestions, solidly supported by evidence, and clearly and compellingly written.
But it’s not for everyone. If you want to learn how to put together beautiful slides with stunning visuals to inspire or entertain, buy a book such as Nancy Duarte’s Resonate or Garr Reynolds’ Presentation Zen.
But if you want to sell ideas to critical thinkers, Speaking PowerPoint will help. To see where this book fits and why it is so important, let’s first look at the situations where PowerPoint decks can be deployed:
At the extreme right of the scale are the ballroom style presentations, which are presented to large audiences. Think of Steve Jobs doing a new product launch. In these types of presentations, the speaker does all the talking, supplies almost of all the words, and uses compelling visuals to add to the emotional impact.
Moving to the left, you have what Gabrielle calls briefing decks, which are used in boardroom settings; the audience is much smaller, but still may include up to about twenty people. The speaker is still doing most of the talking, but there is some interactivity.
Discussion decks are used in boardrooms as well, but the audience might be in the single digits. The presenter still does most of the talking, at least at first, but the primary purpose is a full-participation discussion with a lot of interaction.
Finally, a reading deck can be used as a document, meant to be read individually either on paper or on a screen. In this situation, the deck has to stand alone and convey all the important information by itself.
It’s your job to reduce complexity
Any persuader who has to sell an idea faces a dilemma: simplicity sells, but the truth is usually more complex. Given the increasing connectedness and rate of change, the world is definitely getting more complex, so simple explanations are bound to get something wrong. How do you find the right balance between pure truth and getting your point across effectively?
At one end, are those who lack a grey scale in their persuasive efforts and simplify everything to black and white. Their motto seems to be: “You’re either with me or against me.”
At the other extreme are those who see everything in shifting shades of gray, depending on which perspective they’ve thought about most recently. Their motto seems to be, “on the other hand…”
The best approach for an ethical persuader is somewhere in between those extremes, but closer to the simple side.
Who owns YOUR attention?
Last week we looked at the benefits of being in control of your own attention. This article tells you how to do it.
The good news is that attention is a skill that can be improved with practice. You can make adjustments in how you work on a regular basis, and if you’re really ambitious you can even try some ideas on ways to train your brain to improve its capacity for sustained focus.
Personal adjustments in how you work
Pay attention to your attention. The first step in any skill improvement is to gauge how well you’re doing. Be aware of times that your mind wanders, or the number of times you interrupt an important task. It’s probably far higher than you imagined. One study measured the number of “unimportant interruptions” in a typical knowledge worker’s day totaled 28% of their time. (This figure includes the time it takes to recover mentally from the interruption.)
Invest your attention like Warren Buffett. Attention is an investment in the quality of your work and relationships, but most of us invest it like a day trader, jumping in and out of our “positions” to chase after higher returns. Buffett has been successful by choosing his investments very carefully and then holding them for a long time.
Worthwhile tasks require quality time, and the best way to get it is to carve out time to force yourself into a specified time period or task. Peter Drucker, in his book The Effective Executive, suggests finding ways to consolidate your discretionary time. It’s not so hard to find ten minutes here and fifteen minutes there throughout the day, but it’s also not very effective.
For starters, I recommend a web site devoted to the Pomodoro Technique which involves setting a timer for 25 minutes at a time, which seems to be long enough to get something done and short enough to handle. It works well, but larger chunks of uninterrupted time are much more conducive to quality and depth of thought. The appropriate length will vary, and you will need to find what works best for you, but it’s probably longer than you typically spend now.
In order to set aside the time period, it helps to arrange your calendar and/or your space so that you’re not distracted by others and so you don’t have to interrupt your flow to get something you forgot. Set specific times to check emails and surf the web.
If time is too arbitrary for you, set a target, for example two chapters read in the book before you put it down, or 500 words written.
Besides carving out time, you can also make space for yourself. Disconnect. Ironically, the more “connected” we are electronically, the more disconnected we become personally. Here’s one simple change you can make that will have a huge impact: position your computer screen so that you can’t see it when you’re on the phone.
Get away from the distractions. It seems unthinkable today to leave the house without taking your phone, but most of us alive today used to do that all the time. Go on, give it a shot. Even within your own house, is there a room that does not contain a screen of some sort? If not, make one.
Write things down. I carry some form of Moleskine notebook everywhere I go, and I’ve found that helps me deal with distractions in two ways. First, taking the time to write down a thought, observation or idea usually helps me think it through a little better. Second, as David Allen says in Getting Things Done, if you get it out of your head and down on paper, it won’t be a nagging distraction.
There are tons of other ways to arrange your day for better focus—if you can take the time to think about them!
Improvements in your brain’s capacity to focus
For most people, adjusting personal habits as discussed above will be enough, and should make a significant impact on your capacity to control your own attention productively. If you want to take it a step further, there are some approaches that may make a difference.
I say may because, as the Boomer generation ages, an entire industry has sprung up to sell us “solutions” to train our brains and keep them young, so it’s hard to separate fact from marketing. I’ll limit this to two suggestions, one of which I’ve worked with extensively and one which I still hope to give a good effort to in the future.
The Dual n-back task is a fiendishly difficult and laborious yet addictive application that supposedly helps you improve the capacity of your working memory. I forced myself to do it almost daily for over two months and kept a record of my results. I saw huge improvements in my score on the game. I also noticed what I thought were clear improvements in my ability to focus and remember. (Which proves absolutely nothing, of course; it may have been confirmation bias, wishful thinking, or the placebo effect. However, I still go back to the game occasionally for a tuneup.)
Meditation is touted as the best long term approach to improving your attention, and there is much more evidence and literature about its benefits. I have no reason to doubt it; it’s just that I have tried to do it and have so far failed miserably every time. I try to concentrate on my breathing, or a spot on the wall. When distractions intrude, I “gently push them away”, but they come back stronger than ever. If you have the time and willpower to devote to meditation, go for it. If you’ve mastered it, let me know how you did it.
