"Keeping It Simple" May Be Harmful
Your brain wants to apply familiar, simple solutions to complex problems and may cause new problems in the process
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Did you know that your brain’s natural tendency is to automatically solve a current, complicated problem using a prior, simpler solution without doing too much analysis? It’s called substitution. It’s fast and simple, which is cool, but the prior solution may have little to do with your current problem, which isn’t so cool. Even worse, it may ignore much of the current problem’s complexity which can create its own problems. Definitely not cool!
This week’s topic may scare you a little! Read on if you dare!!!
Isn’t it fun to be right? Isn’t it cool that you can quickly know what someone else should do next? Even more amazing is that you often know what someone should do even when you know nothing at all about what is happening? Be honest. We all do it. We live much of our life making judgments based on intuitive hunches and their related opinions. Think intuition without guardrails. To quote a good friend, “I may often be wrong, but I’m never in doubt!”
In our defense, there are many areas where we are in over our heads and yet need to make choices, so we do the best we can using our intuition as a guide. It could be buying insurance. Or deciding how to invest your 401(k). Or getting financing to purchase a rental building. Or choosing a doctor for an important surgery. Or deciding whether to change careers. Most of this is done courtesy of the automatic part of our thinking (System 1)1 with occasional help from the analytic part of our thinking (System 2)2.
Image created by Ed Paulson using Dall-E.
Prompt: a photo of a business person choosing between two options
Nobel Prize recipient Daniel Kahneman puts it this way.
“The normal state of your minds is that you have intuitive feelings and opinions about almost everything that comes your way. … Whether you state them or not, you often have answers to questions that you do not completely understand, relying on evidence that you can neither explain nor defend.”3
System 1’s automatic processing gives us intuition4 which is amazing and helpful, but there are times when it can cause problems if not monitored. This is especially true for business decision makers who often deal with complex problems and whose decisions may have a lasting effect on employees, customers, and vendors.
When managers are faced with a current problem that doesn’t have a clear solution they often suggest doing what was done before. Why? Because the automatic thinking part of your brain (System 1) doesn’t like uncertainty and likes consistency, so it will look to use an earlier solution it understands. The solution replacement process is called substitution5, and it often happens without our knowing it. The problem is that the current problem may not match the prior one which means the repurposed solution may not work. To make things worse, the mismatched solution will be compounded by the affects of confirmation bias.
To quickly review a prior post, confirmation bias6 is our brain’s tendency to seek out that which supports what we already believe and ignore the rest. Confirmation bias lives in the automatic realm of System 1. System 1 will seek out information that supports an existing viewpoint (i.e., the adopted earlier solution) then pass this biased information to System 2 which performs its analysis using skewed information. Contrary options are not considered by System 1 and consequently may not be considered by System 2 either unless System 2 decides they should be, but to do that it must have a reason.
What does this mean when making decisions? When System 1 assesses a situation as being a certain way it applies a solution and moves forward, unless the analytic part of our thinking processes (System 2) becomes engaged to analyze its validity. But, according to Kahneman, System 2 is lazy and does not want to expend a lot of effort and often accepts what System 1 gives it. This means that there is a solid chance that System 2 will simply adopt the solution that was handed to it from System 1 without looking too closely at whether it is the best fit. The two systems are happy: They produced a solution and didn’t have to work hard to get it.
Unfortunately, we may not have looked deeply enough to realize that the adopted solution has little to do with the current problem even though it was a great solution to an earlier one. In other words, when analytically reviewing a proposed solution, we may ignore contrary information and only see what verifies that the prior solutions is the right one.
Ironically, because the solution came easily, we may not realize that the current problem is a lot more complicated than the earlier one. This sets us up for an unexpected failure when the adopted, simpler solution doesn’t do the trick.
You see … I promised scary!
FOR NEXT TIME:
Now that we understand the issues related to substitution and confirmation bias, let’s talk solutions. Next time we will look at how you can interrupt this automatic substitution/adoption cycle and use System 1 and System 2 as a team to find your best available option.
WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ABOUT ALL OF THIS?
What are your thoughts about all of this? Does it feel right to you? Did you not buy it? Have you ever had a time when you unconsciously performed a substitution? Is your intuition ever wrong?
Sharing your thoughts will get others to share theirs as well and allows us to learn from each other. Help me understand where you would like the topics to go next, and I will do what I can to go there. You are collectively my System 2, telling me where to focus for future posts.
#DanielKahneman, #DecisionMaking, #Substitution, #ConfirmationBias
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System 1 is the automatic part of our thinking which operates in the background, always monitoring what is happening us around and keeping us safe. It is the source of our intuition. If it has a question, it will ask System 2.
System 2, as defined by Kahneman, is the deliberative, analytic part of our thinking. It receives input from System 1, directs System 1’s activities, and has the ability to overrule System 1.
Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow” p. 97.
See the January 15, 2024 newsletter for more on intuition.
Kahneman defines substitution as “the operation of answering one question in place of another.”
See the October 9,2023 for more on confirmation bias.