In this post I will list various examples which indicate S1 or S2 at work.
- In the first ten minutes of the movie Sully, we are shown how the captain of a passenger aircraft, with 150+ people on board, whose engines cease to function because of bird hit - how he makes a swift decision within a couple of minutes to not go to back to the airport just 7 miles away - rather to land on Hudson river. Subsequent analysis proved his decision to be extraordinary and right. Did he do a detailed analysis through S2 or a quick S1 decision? I believe it's the latter.
- Having seen Sully's S1 we now go to the movie "National Treasure" where the hero Nicholas Cage tries to guess the heroine's (Diane Kruger) password. He lifts her fingerprints from the keyword and gets the keys / letters AEFGLORVY which he communicates to his friend who is elsewhere on a computer. The friend tries various combinations to crack the anagram on the computer (use of S2). The hero rejects all the suggestions. The hero cracks it finally on his own - "Valley Forge" which actually has an extra E and an extra L. His S1 makes the right associations, includes an extra E and L which were not part of the original anagram which he himself had lifted from the keyboard. The causal story (specific instances of the story, in this case the heroine's love for American history), often deprecated by Kahnemann, was instrumental in the hero cracking the anagram. I am not saying Kahnemann was wrong. But this post is about our use of S1 and S2 in various circumstances.
- Next, I am reminded of 2 friends who were surprised that I did not think through different ways of packaging a message and that I happened to just say things without understanding who I was talking to. Each of the two friends independently told me that they would mentally run through different options before actually communicating a (verbal) message. They were using S2. Like many others, I do not use S2 much while communicating.
- Going on to a different example, many people think carefully about what to wear for an occasion. Most people, especially women will appreciate this and I will not go into how people think through various options before finally deciding. Now many people I know just pick up something from the wardrobe and get it done with. The former are using S2, the latter do not.
- Next example: Couple of friends of mine got annoyed with my tendency to work out difficult Sudokus or play Dumb Charades with brute force (meaning with s2 without the elegance of S1). Both were independently disgusted with my way. One of them would do Sudoku only when she was stressed and automatically assumed I was stressed when I did Sudoku. I do Sudoku for pleasure. The other friend would only solve (mime) dumb charades through S1 association of ideas - not laboriously by breaking down long words into smaller bits and then solving the smaller bits one by one. It had to have elegance. Both friends felt that the use of S2 for frivolous puzzle solving was weird. They (P people) would use S2 for more social things where the return is tangible. The different ways that T and P people use S2 is fascinating.
I will now mention a quote attributed to Eibstein - "The intuitive mind is a sacred gift while the rational mind is a faithful servant. "
Additional reading:
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