Snitch 🤩
"I don’t like morning people, or mornings, or people."
—Shirt at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting
> godspeed | hostile voices
It happened all day long.
Customers at a coffee shop where I worked in Tulsa would at first say they didn’t want anything from the bakery case.
As their lips moved, however, their eyes criminally undressed the pasteries.
- "We buy with our eyes," a manager quipped one day during a rush. 🍩🧋
The area of the mind that directs our eyes to snitch on us was termed the unconscious mind by 19th century psychologist Sigmund Freud.
Today, it has many names including the intuitive, implicit, hot-processed, or automatic mind.
The late, groundbreaking psychologist Daniel Kahneman dubbed it "System 1." It's a major driver of our behaviors without us consciously "knowing" what's occurring.
Consider how many things you do throughout your day "without even thinking about it."
Examples of System 1 thinking processes include detecting a hostile voice, reading words on a billboard, or driving on an empty road. System 1 must sacrifice accuracy for speed to enable us to react rapidly to things happening around us.
In his bestselling book, "Thinking, Fast and Slow," Kahneman writes: "If System 1 is involved, the conclusion comes first and the arguments follow."
Then there's our System 2 (or analytical, cold-processed, explicit, conscious) mind. Examples of System 2 thinking include comparing consumer products, parking in a narrow space, and keeping our behavior appropriate in social situations.
Thanks to the paradox of our System 1 and System 2 minds, cognitive errors and lapses are staring at us all the time, and we don't consciously "see" them.
No one is immune. We all magnify events out of proportion. We overgeneralize from slim evidence. And we catastrophize with irrational what-if statements.
- next time "Perhaps we don't need to become truthseekers."
- listening Emma Ruth Rundle "Darkhorse"