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Quick as you can, read the follow-ing sentences and answer thequestion. Observe your mind as

it fumbles to its conclusion. Kim buys one bat, and one ball. Kimspends $1.10. Kim’s one bat cost $1more than Kim’s one ball. How muchdid Kim spend on the bat?An apparently instinctive human re-

action drives many people to blurt outthe (wrong) answer, “One dollar!” Oth-ers pause before speaking, think for amoment, probably frown, break eyecontact, and eventually respond (cor-rectly), “One dollar . . . and five cents.”Professor Daniel Kahneman be longs toa third group of people who start think-ing just as the rest of us stop. They payattention to the mind at work and askthemselves, “Hello. What’s going onhere, then?” Kahneman’s book Thinking,Fast and Slow is instructive to rationalistsand skeptics because of what it tells usabout the nature of human error.

The little gedankenexperiment above isjust one of a great many that anchor theideas of Kahneman’s book to the empir-ical bedrock. Much modern psychol-ogy—or cognitive science if you prefer thefashionable term—relies on experimentto pick apart our mental machinery. Re -searchers assemble a group of people ina room to ask them a list of cunninglydesigned questions. They time their sub-jects’ responses and compare their an-swers with what is “reasonable” or “ratio-nal.” What we’ve learned from all thisscience is that while human beings don’tall respond in precisely the same way, asa species we exhibit quite a few counter-intuitive quirks and habitual, or instinc-tive, cognitive biases. In other words, our

answers are wrong in systematic and pre-dictable ways.

How does all of this work? Kahne -man offers the following explanation:Brains evolved to be pattern-seekingmachines. Biologically speaking, ourbrain’s primary function is to makesense of the overwhelming mess of sen-sory stimuli to which our environmentex poses us. In Kahneman’s telling of it,brains aren’t passive receptors. Rather,our grey matter is constantly trying toconstruct a coherent model of the world“out there” in order to guide our reac-tions to it.

But there’s a problem. A brain is aterribly expensive organ to run. Pri matebrains consume 20 to 25 percent of thebody’s energy budget. So what’s a poororgan to do? The answer appears to bethat our brains use mental shortcuts(heuristics) that allow for massive reduc-tions in brain-power at the cost of theoccasional error. If you think about it,even with these shortcuts our brains arepretty astounding. Stand up, walk to thebathroom, open the door, adjust theshower heat, apply soap—consider the

sea of unconsidered action upon whichour relatively tiny consciousness floats.Mental heuristics are many and mostlytrivial, but they can be tremendously po-tent. Mental shortcuts are what “tell” anexperienced surgeon when his patient isabout to hemorrhage, or a fire captainto pull his crew from a building just be-fore it collapses, or a cook when thesalmon is grilled to perfection. Sophis-ticated, learned responses often cannotbe rationally justified. They just “feelright.”

Kahneman refers to this large collec-tion of heuristics as “System 1.” System1 “operates automatically and quickly,with little or no effort and no sense ofvoluntary control.” In short, System 1 isa sense-making machine, and we rely onit almost exclusively to get through ourdays. Alas, System 1 isn’t perfect. Erroris built into its design. It is far, far betterthat our minds “detect” or “construct” anonexistent snake a hundred times thanoverlook a real snake just once.

Now, as we saw in the example ofKim’s bat and ball, there is also a secondmode of mental operation. Kahneman

[BOOK REVIEW

What’s Going On in Our Minds?PAUL BROWN

Thinking, Fast and Slow. By Daniel KahnemanFarrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2011.ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1499 pp. Hardcover, $30.

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Skeptical Inquirer | July/August 2012 59

refers to it as “System 2,” but you’ll also seeit elsewhere referred to as “executive func-tion” or “cognitive control.” It’s the part ofour brain that steps in from time to time,overriding System 1. “System 2 allocatesattention to the effortful mental activitiesthat demand it, including complex com-putations,” Kahneman writes. “The oper-ations of System 2 are often associatedwith the subjective ex perience of agency,choice, and concentration.” System 1thinks fast; System 2 thinks slowly.

System 1’s heuristics are fine as re -sponses to our everyday environment, butthey are poor guides for reasoning aboutsubjects expressed in terms of quantities,time periods, or probabilities—all moreproperly the province of System 2. Think-ing, Fast and Slow is in part a catalog ofthe ways we slouch into error: circum-stances where we opt for a quick, low-cost, and coherent worldview over mentalhard labor. Kahneman shared the 2002Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for theapplication of these psychological in sightsto the way human beings make economicdecisions and, while not strictly withinthe scope of a review with skeptical andrationalist readers in mind, this book’s cri-tique of the shambles and shenanigansthat characterize financial markets ispretty withering.

THE AIDS CONSPIRACY: Science Fights Back. Nicoli Nattrass. Theworld’s leading expert on AIDS conspiracies delivers a definitiveaccount of the origin and the dubious science behind theseclaims, as well as the political issues surrounding South Africanpresident Mbeki’s embrace of AIDS denialism. Columbia Uni -versity Press, 2012, 226 pp., $34.50. Also available as an e-book.

GREY WOLF: The Escape of Adolph Hitler. Simon Dunstan andGerrard Williams. A military historian and a journalist claim tohave uncovered evidence that Hitler did not die in 1945 but in-stead escaped to South America where he died in 1962; thoughthe book offers perhaps the best case for this conspiracy theory,it’s not clear how convincing historians will find it. Sterling Pub-lishing, 2011, 384 pp., $24.95.

THE MARTIANS HAVE LANDED! A History of Media-Driven Panicsand Hoaxes. Robert E. Bartholomew and Benjamin Radford. Ahighly readable litany of hoaxes, scares, and sensational exag-gerations promulgated variously on radio, on television, in news-papers, on the Internet, and, for some, seemingly “every-where”—many of them quite recent—that have had an impacton people’s lives. McFar land, 2012, 248 pp., $40.

PROPAGANDA IN THE HELPING PROFESSIONS. Eileen Gambrill. Acomprehensive and fascinating review of centuries of fads, fal-lacies, and misinformation in the healing professions, this bookcontains countless examples of fallacious appeals to science(an advertisement for “radium suppositories” on page 201 isparticularly unnerving) as well as useful discussions of spot-ting fallacies in health-related fields. Oxford University Press,2012, 567 pp., $65.

THE SCIENCE OF GHOSTS: Searching for Spirits of the Dead. JoeNickell. Nickell begins with the cultural and psychological forcesthat shape beliefs in ghosts, then he presents case studies thattake him to numerous supposedly haunted places. His book ex-amines spiritualism and mediums who claim the ability to con-tact the dead and analyzes the evidence of those who visit al-legedly haunted places. Prometheus Books, 2012, 290 pp., $18.

SCIENCE AND PSYCHIC PHENOMENA: The Fall of the House ofSkeptics. Chris Carter. In this book reprinted from 2007, the au-thor tries mightily to defend psi research against (mostly CSI-affiliated) critics by appealing to quantum physics(!) and sug-gesting that science needs to be reinterpreted to allow for theacceptance of psychic powers; a mildly interesting look at anti-CSI polemics, peppered with logical fallacies and misquotedskeptics. Inner Traditions, 2012, 300 pp., $18.95.

—Kendrick Frazier and Benjamin Radford

[NEW AND NOTABLE Listing does not preclude future review.

Think ing, Fast and Slow is in part a catalog of the wayswe slouch into error: circumstances where we opt for a quick, low-cost,and coherent worldview over mental hard labor.

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Skeptics will find that the ideas inKahneman’s book arm them with bothsword and shield. If you’re ever exasper-ated at the way some human beingsmanage to remain sublimely indifferentto evidence, Kahneman offers an expla-nation that plea-bargains any charge ofmalevolence down to mere laziness.Mental work is hard, and monkeysdon’t like it. Thinking about abstrac-tions such as numbers or general lawsof nature reduces the amount of energyand attention we can invest in morepractical and immediate problems likegathering fruit, not standing in fire,avoiding bad meat, or figuring outwhen another monkey is up for a cud-

dle. If your worldview includes super-stitious or irrational beliefs, your Sys-tem 1 will go to extraordinary lengthsto weave your experiences to gether totell you a coherent story that is consis-tent with those beliefs—and since on aday-to-day basis there’s little penalty forbelieving in things that don’t exist, whychange?

But the book also reinforces the ideathat skeptics are human beings too, andhuman beings are never more prone toerror than when we are overconfident.Hubris yields error, and Kahneman andhis colleagues have famously shownhow few human specimens displaymore hubris than “experts.” It’s apparentthat even when we know we’re in error,even when we’ve been alerted to the na-ture of the mistake, even after we’ve

made the mistake and it’s been pointedout to us and explained to us, it takestremendous effort on our part to rewireour brains.

Kahneman makes that point withanother of his experiments. Based onthe following thumbnail biography,which of the two subsequent state-ments is most probably true?

“Wendy is young, of average ap -pearance, and socially awkward. From ayoung age she excelled at school andwent to an elite university, completingher doctorate. She is married with adaughter.”

1. Wendy works as a librarian. 2. Wendy works as a librarian and is

an active feminist. Confronted with a version of this

puzzle, no less a rationalist and skepticthan Stephen J. Gould wrote, “A littlehomunculus in my head continues tojump up and down, shouting at me.” Forthose of you puzzled by the problem, ithelps to retell the story in stark, mathe-matical terms. Given any two probabilis-tic propositions, A and B, which is morelikely? A? Or A and B? If the mathe-matics of probability means anything, itmeans that “Wendy works as a librarian”must be more “probably true” than“Wendy works as a librarian and is anactive feminist.” Every librarian who isan active feminist is still a librarian, andthere are surely librarians who are notfeminists! But our lazy brains prefer themore detailed, coherent, and more plau-sible story to the energy-intensive workneeded to arrive at the truth. Kahnemanprovides several examples of large-scalemistakes that required entire communi-ties of highly trained professionals—himself included.

For readers interested in personalerror—both understanding and avoidingit—the book isn’t especially comforting.Kahneman explains that hu man beingsare terrible at perceiving their own errorsand worse at learning from them. Con-sciously changing our own beliefs byconsidering the evidence is ap parentlyterribly hard—never mind the beliefs of

others. So what’s a rationalist to do? Well it turns out that for all our fail-

ings at self-regulation, we’re actuallypretty decent at spotting mistakes madeby other people. Anyone who has spentany time in a collaborative work envi-ronment will instantly recognize thephenomenon. It might never occur tome to examine each step along the pathfrom insight to conclusion, but fortu-nately other people can typically be re-lied upon to tell me I’m wrong and why.Rationalists can take some comfort inthe thought that the institutions of sci-entific practice and peer review exploitthis aspect of human nature.

What about changing the minds ofothers? Here, Kahneman’s view is at firstglance rather bleak, but it offers a curi-ous kind of hope. If you ask people, “Doyou believe X?” they will answer either“Yes” or “No.” If you ask them, “Haveyou always believed X?” they will typi-cally respond that they’ve never changedtheir minds. Enquire of their opinionson a scientific or political controversyand they’ll explain them to you. Thensupply new information (pro or con), re-peat the questions, and what you find isthat Lo! their minds have changed . . .hardly at all.

However, if you ask people at differ-ent times what they think, you will findthat their minds have in fact changed.Psychologists have noticed that evidencenot only changes our current beliefs butalso our memory of what our beliefswere before we acquired the new infor-mation. Gradual evolution of public sen-timent is apparent in survey re sponses toquestions about religious be liefs, the ex-istence of satanic cults in daycare centers,or the wisdom of the Raiders’ secondround draft choices. Minds, it seems,aren’t changed abruptly through reasonbut gradually as the heuristics by whichour minds construct their coherentworldviews adjust. And we typically failto perceive how much change we’ve un-dergone.

Kahneman uses this System 1/System 2 framework to examine ques-tions about how people arrive at deci-

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Skeptics will find that the ideas in Kahneman’sbook arm them with both sword and shield.

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Skeptical Inquirer | July/August 2 0 1 2 6 1

BOOK REVIEW]

sions with uncertain information, howwe think about risk, and how we con-struct our lives through a combinationof experience and memory. Through outthe book readers will find memorable,pithy pronouncements such as, “Lan-guage implies that the world is moreknowable than it is” or “Nothing in lifeis as important as you think it is whenyou are thinking about it” or (quotinganother psychologist) “Sub ject’s unwill-ingness to deduce the particular fromthe general was matched only by theirwillingness to infer the general fromthe particular.”

Anyone who has followed recentpublic policy debates about behavioral fi-nance or prospect theory will find littlein the book that goes beyond recapitu-lating the greatest hits of one man’s veryproductive career as a working re searchpsychologist. Kahneman also stays muteon the kinds of big questions skepticswould like answered, such as why peoplepersist in irrational and even self-destruc-tive beliefs. He prefers to report the evi-dence and provide softer, more personaladvice on how best to grapple with ourown biases and guard against errors whenpricing bats and balls.

For readers interested in deepeningtheir understanding of what is going intheir own minds (and how to guardagainst their own errors), it’s hard topass up a book with such a combinationof persuasive power and pedigree. n

Paul Brown is a computer scientist who special-izes in building data management applicationsfor very large scale science projects. Althoughhe has published extensively in perhaps theworld’s most obscure professional research jour-nals, this review is his first foray into popularwriting.

Sunday, August 5 – Saturday, August 11, 2012 | Camp Seven Hills, Holland, New YorkYoung minds don’t just ask big questions, they search forbig answers. Increased availability of information in-creases the need for critical thinking and the rational fil-tering of a barrage of opinions from a world of “experts.”

These same skills of skeptical questioning are applicablenot only to the latest social media posts but to living ameaningful and enriching life in both the virtual and thereal worlds. Skeptics of any age don’t just want to amassinformation. They want real understanding. They wantto know the how and the why. At Camp Inquiry, there’san app for that.

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Camp Inquiry, now in its seventh year, is one of the manyeducational initiatives offered by the Center for Inquiry(CFI), a nonprofit educational and research institutiondevoted to the appreciation of science and reason andtheir applications to human conduct. Camp Inquiry 2012 is cosponsored by the James RandiEducational Foundation.

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ebeck@centerforinquiry.net or by phone at (716) 636-4869 ext. 408. Have any questions for our Camp Director? Feel free to e-mail Karen Strachan at kstrachan@centerforinquiry.net.

James “ The Amazing”Randi

David Willey Michael Cardus Sharon Hill“The Mad Scientist” for The Tonight Showwith Jay Leno

Founder of Create-Learning

Author of Doubtful News blog

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