Part I - Two Systems

Question 1

Describe System 1.

Answer 1

System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.

Question 2

Describe System 2.

Answer 2

System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.

Question 3

How is System 1 truly the hero of the book when System 2 believes itself to be where the action is?

Answer 3

System 1 effortlessly originates the impressions and feelings that are the main source of the explicit beliefs and deliberate choices of System 2.

Question 4

What do the highly diverse operations of system 2 have in common?

Answer 4

They require attention and are disrupted when attention is drawn away.

Question 5

Why is the term “pay attention” apt?

Answer 5

You dispose of a limited budget of attention that you can allocate to activities, and if you try to go beyond your budget, you will fail. It is the mark of effortful activities that they interfere with each other. which is why it is difficult or impossible to conduct several at once.

Question 6

When can you do several things at once?

Answer 6

Only when they are easy and undemanding.

Question 7

What is a curious feature of focusing on a task?

Answer 7

Intense focusing on a task can make people effectively blind, even to stimuli that normally attract attention.

Question 8

Which two important facts does the Gorilla Study illustrate?

Answer 8

We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.

Question 9

Describe how Systems 1 & 2 operate together.

Answer 9

Both Systems 1 and 2 are active whenever we are awake. System 1 runs automatically and System 2 is normally in a comfortable low-effort mode. System 1 continuously generates suggestions for System 2: impressions, intuitions, feelings,and impulses which, if endorsed by system 2, turn into beliefs and voluntary actions. Most of the time, System 2 adopts the suggestions of System 1 with little or no modification.

Question 10

System 2 is usually in low-effort mode. When is it mobilized to high focus?

Answer 10

• When System 1 doesn’t have an answer to a question or problem.
• Whenever you are surprised.
• When self-monitoring.
• When it detects an error about to be made.

Question 11

Describe the surge of consciousness you experience when you are surprised.

Answer 11

System 2 is activated when an event is detected that violates the model of the world that system 1 maintains. Surprise then activates and orients your attention: you will stare, and you will search your memory for a story that makes sense of the surprising event.

Question 12

Describe how the arrangement between Systems 1 & 2 is highly efficient.

Answer 12

It minimizes effort and optimizes performance. The arrangement works well because most of the time System 1’s models of familiar situations are accurate, its short-term predictions are usually accurate as well, and its initial reactions to challenges are swift and generally appropriate.

Question 13

Can biases always be avoided?

Answer 13

The best we can do is a compromise: learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high.

Question 14

What is the point of introducing fictitious characters with ugly names (System 1 and System 2) into a serious book?

Answer 14

Because a sentence is understood more easily if it describes what an agent does than if it describes what something is, what properties it has. The mind - especially system 1 - appears to have a special aptitude for the construction and interpretation of stories about active agents, who have personalities, habits, and abilities.

Question 15

What are pupils sensitive indicators of?

Answer 15

Mental effort; and they dilate more if the problems are hard than if they are easy.

Question 16

How do pupils normally dilate during mental multiplication?

Answer 16

The pupils normally dilate to a large size within a few seconds and stay large as long as the individual kept keeps on the problem; it contracts immediately when they find an answer or give up.

Question 17

Explain the walking metaphor for the paces of mental life.

Answer 17

Mental life is normally conducted at the pace of a comfortable walk, sometimes interrupted by episodes of jogging and on rare occasions by frantic sprints.

Question 18

What can happen when people are engaged in mental sprints?

Answer 18

They can become effectively blind.

Question 19

How are pupils like the electricity meter outside your house?

Answer 19

They offer an index of the current rate at which mental energy is used.

Question 20

Although both electrical circuits and System 2 have limited capacity, How do they respond differently to threatened overload?

Answer 20

A breaker trips when the demand for current is excessive, causing all devices on that circuit to lose power at once. In contrast. the response to mental overload is selective and precise: System 2 protects the most important activity, so it receives the attention it needs; “spare electricity” is allocated second by second to other tasks.

Question 21

What relationship do studies of the brain shown between mental activity and skill?

Answer 21

As you become skilled in a task, its demand for energy diminishes. The pattern of activity associated with an action changes as skill increases, with fewer brain regions involved.

Question 22

What relationship do studies of the brain shown between mental activity and talent?

Answer 22

Highly intelligent individuals need less effort to solve the same problems, as s indicated by both pupils size and brain activity.

Question 23

Name and describe the general rule which applies to both cognitive and physical exertion.

Answer 23

“The law of least effort”. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. in the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature.

Question 24

Why does System 2 require effort?

Answer 24

Effort is required to maintain simultaneously in memory several ideas that require separate actions, or that need to be combined according to a rule.

Question 25

Why can’t System 1 deal with demanding tasks?

Answer 25

Because only System 2 can follow rules, compare objects on several attributes, and make deliberate choices between options.
System 1 detects simple relations and excels at integrating information about one thing, but it does not deal with multiple distinct topics at once, nor is it adept at using purely statistical information.

Question 26

Explain System 2’s advantage when it comes to its crucial ability to adopt “task sets”.

Answer 26

System 2 can program memory to obey an instruction and overrides habitual responses. For a task you have not performed before, it will not come naturally to your System 1, but your System 2 can take it on. It will be effortul to set yourself up for the exercise and effortful to carry it out, though you will surely improve with practice.

Question 27

What is a significant discovery made by cognitive psychologists in recent decades regarding effort?

Answer 27

That switching from one task to another is effortful.
Operating under time pressure is also effortful.
The rate at which material decays from memory forces the pace, driving you to refresh and rehearse information before it is lost. Any task that requires you to keep several ideas in mind at the same tie ha the same hurried character. The most effortful forms of slow thinking are those that require you to think fast.

Question 28

How do we normally avoid mental overloads?

Answer 28

By dividing our tasks into multiple easy steps, committing intermediate results to long-term memory or to paper rather than to an easily overloaded working memory.