The Hidden Drivers of Your Mind: Why We Think, Judge, and Decide the Way We Do

We like to believe our thoughts are rational and logical and that we are always in control. But are we? How exactly do we think, judge, and decide? Below, we’ll explore the answers to these questions. And what we learn here sets the stage for how we can influence or be influenced by others.

How We Think and Act: Two Processes at Work

In the simplest terms, we think and act to survive and thrive in our surroundings. Our brains and minds have evolved to ensure that.

Margolis’s “Seeing-That” and “Reasoning-Why”

In “Patterns, Thinking, and Cognition,” Howard Margolis proposed that making judgments and solving problems involves two processes at work. The processes are:

1. “Seeing-that”, and
2. “Reasoning-why”

“Seeing-that” is the pattern matching all brains have been doing for a long time.

Even the simplest animals are wired to respond to specific stimuli (such as light) with certain behaviors (such as turning away from the light). Animals quickly learn new patterns and connect them to their existing behaviors, which can also be turned into new patterns (as when an animal trainer teaches a dog a new trick).

Higher animals show more ability to think about choices (such as where to search for food today) and judgments (such as whether a junior chimpanzee showed proper, respectful behavior).

But in all cases, the basic thought process is pattern matching. It is rapid, automatic, and effortless processing that drives our perceptions.

Margolis also called this thinking “intuitive.”

“Reasoning-why,” in contrast, is the process “by which we describe how we think we reached a judgment, or how we think another person could reach that judgment.”

“Reasoning-why” can occur only for creatures with language and the need to explain themselves to other creatures.

“Reasoning-way” is not automatic; it’s conscious, sometimes feels like work, and is easily disrupted by cognitive load (the effort required).

This kind of thinking is simply called “reasoning.”

Haidt’s “Rider and the Elephant” and Kahneman’s “System 1” and “System 2”

In “The Happiness Hypotheses,” Jonathan Haidt called these two kinds of mental processes the:

1. rider (controlled processes, including “reasoning-why”) and the
2. elephant (automatic processes including emotion, intuition, and all forms of “seeing-that”)

He chose an elephant over a horse because elephants are much bigger and smarter.

Likewise, the two mental processes correspond to Daniel Kahneman’s System 1 and System 2 in “Thinking, Fast and Slow”.

Haidt’s “Intuition” and “Reasoning”

In “The Righteous Mind,” Jonathan Haidt referred to the two processes as:

1. Intuition, a.k.a. The “Elephant,” a.k.a.  System 1, a.k.a. “Seeing-That”– operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and without our control. A good example of intuition is driving to the airport for a good driver familiar with the route. Almost everything you do on your way will be automatic without much thought.
2. Reasoning, a.k.a. The “Rider,” a.k.a. System 2, a.k.a. “Reasoning-That” – focuses on complex mental tasks requiring attention and effort, like solving problems or calculating. Here, we’re in control and making conscious choices. An example of reasoning is planning a trip to the airport to catch an afternoon flight. What time do you leave your house? You must think about that consciously, considering possible traffic on the road and the check-in process at the airport.

Intuition

Intuition, or “the elephant,” as Haidt refers, includes the gut feelings, visceral reactions, and emotions that comprise much of the automatic system. It operates automatically, requires little or no effort, and is hard to control.

Natural selection has shaped our intuition to trigger quick and reliable action. Our intuition involves parts of our brain that make us feel pleasure and pain and that trigger survival–related motivations. Without fail, it has its finger on the dopamine release button. And so, we are drawn to novel, pleasurable, comfortable, or familiar things.

For example, if you are given several ways of achieving the same goal, which would you rather take, the least or the more demanding course of action? I presume you take the least demanding.

Intuitions run the human mind, just as they have been running animal minds over time, so they are very good at what they do, like software that has been improved through thousands of product cycles.

We are born prepared to perceive the world, recognize objects, direct attention, and avoid losses by constantly evaluating situations as good or bad, requiring escape or permitting approach.

Other mental activities become fast and automatic through prolonged practice. Remember the effortless driving to the airport earlier? Driving first must be learned and practiced before it becomes automatic.

Through pattern matching and the association between ideas, our intuition learns skills such as reading and understanding social situations. Some skills, such as finding strong chess moves, are acquired only by deliberate practice. Acquired knowledge is stored in memory and accessed without intention or effort.

Emotions

In “The Righteous Mind,” Jonathan Haidt notes that emotions, a significant part of intuition, were long thought to be dumb and visceral. However, in the 1980s, scientists increasingly recognized that emotions were filled with information processing.

Your emotions occur in steps, the first of which is to assess something that just happened based on whether it advanced or hindered your goals. These assessments are information processing (thinking). After the assessment, you are set to respond appropriately.

For example, if you hear someone running up behind you on a dark street, your fear system detects a threat. It triggers your fight-or-flight response, helping you take in more information.

The building blocks humans use to construct moral systems and communities are primarily emotional, such as sympathy, fear, anger, and affection.

Summing up Intuition

Overall, your intuition:

• Provides the impressions that often turn into your beliefs.
• Is the source of impulses that often become your choices and actions.
• Interprets what happens to and around you, linking the present with the recent past and expectations about the near future.
• Contains the models of the world that instantly evaluate events as normal or surprising.
• Is the source of your rapid and often precise intuitive judgments.

And again, it does most of this without your conscious awareness of its activities.

Lastly, your intuition is the source of your many biases.

Reasoning

Reasoning, or “the rider,” as Haidt refers, is our conscious, controlled thoughts. It is rational and focuses on tasks that require a lot of mental effort, like solving complex problems. It is responsible for concentration, deliberate thinking, and making us feel in control of our choices.

An example of reasoning is making a marketing plan. It requires attention and effort, and you must construct your thoughts in orderly steps.

Attention and Effort

We decide what to do, but we have limited control over the effort of doing it. Our response to mental overload is selective and precise. Our brain protects the most critical activity so that it receives the attention it needs. Spare attention is allocated second by second to other tasks as needed.

Over time, our brains have evolved to allocate attention adequately. As suggested earlier, our ability to adapt and respond quickly to the most significant threats or promising opportunities improves our chances of survival.

In this regard, our intuition and reasoning are active whenever we are awake. While our intuition runs automatically, our reasoning is usually in a comfortable low-effort mode, in which only a fraction of its capacity is engaged.

By design, our intuition takes over in emergencies and prioritizes self-protective actions.

If you’re a good driver, imagine yourself at the wheel of a car that unexpectedly skids on a slippery road. You’ll find that you have responded to the threat before you became fully conscious of it.

Reasoning comes into play when it detects that you are about to make an error. Remember when you almost blurted out an offensive remark and how hard you worked to restore control? That’s your reasoning at play.

One of the tasks of reasoning is overcoming your intuition’s impulses. In other words, reasoning oversees self-control. But it requires resources (effort) that your brain tries to conserve.

So, laziness is built into our nature.

Lazy by Nature

In “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” Daniel Kahneman suggested that reasoning (system 2) has a natural speed.

Unless you are in a situation that makes you unusually wary or self-conscious, monitoring what happens in your environment or inside your head demands little effort. You make many small decisions as you drive your car, absorb some information as you read the newspaper, and conduct routine exchanges of pleasantries with people, all with little effort and no strength, just like a stroll.

It is normally easy and quite pleasant to walk and think simultaneously, but at the extreme, these activities compete for limited reasoning resources. That’s why navigating a problematic terrain while solving a complex problem will be challenging.

For most of us, staying focused and thinking deeply requires willpower. But not always, not when we are in a state of “flow.”

Flow

Fortunately, brain work does not always feel like hard work. Sometimes, people can focus intensely, putting much effort into something for hours without applying willpower.

The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced six-cent-Mihaly) has done more than anyone else to study this state and coined the term “flow” to describe it.

People who experience flow describe it as…

“a state of effortless concentration so deep that they lose their sense of time, of themselves, of their problems,” …

… and their description of the joy of that state is so compelling that Csikszentmihalyi has called it an “optimal experience.”

Think of the difference between forcing yourself to read a dull textbook versus getting lost in a great novel. Flow occurs when attention locks onto a meaningful task, making work feel engaging rather than draining.

Many activities, such as writing, reading, planning, gaming, or painting, can induce flow. In this state, reasoning works efficiently without feeling like a struggle.

So, what about when you are not in a state of flow?

Depletion of Willpower

It is now widely accepted that self-control (willpower) and focused thinking are forms of mental work. Controlling thoughts and behaviors requires attention and energy, making it a key function of reasoning.

Research arguably shows that using willpower is tiring. When you force yourself to do something difficult, you have less willpower for the next challenge. Scientists call this “ego depletion.”

Tasks that demand much reasoning seem to require self-control, and using self-control is draining and uncomfortable. This mental fatigue is partly about motivation. After one mentally demanding task, you may not feel like doing another, though you still could push through if you had to, especially with a strong incentive. Studies show people can resist ego depletion when given a strong enough reason.

A good place to start motivating people to complete a task is by making it as easy as possible. In other words, make the task high in cognitive ease.

Cognitive Ease

Kahneman suggested that whenever you are conscious, and perhaps even when you are not, your brain is constantly processing information to keep track of some key questions:

• Is anything new going on?
• Is there a threat?
• Are things going well?
• Should my attention be redirected?
• Is more effort needed for this task?

You can imagine your mind as a control panel with dials that monitor these essential factors. The assessments are carried out automatically by intuition, while reasoning comes into play when extra effort is required.

One of the dials measures cognitive ease, which ranges from “easy” to “strained.”

• Easy is a sign that things are going well – no threats, no major news, no need to redirect attention or mobilize effort.
• Strained indicates that a problem exists, requiring more reasoning. As a result, you experience cognitive strain.

Cognitive strain is influenced by how much effort you’re currently using and any unmet demands on your attention. Strain causes depletion of willpower unless motivation is strong enough.

So, to motivate people to complete required tasks, make such tasks as easy as possible to ensure a state of ease rather than strain.

For example, a website designed for selling a product should make it easy to find the:

• Product on the site
• Information that promotes and helps complete the purchase
• Checkout process

Summing up Reasoning

Overall, reasoning:

• Focuses on complex mental tasks requiring attention and effort
• Makes you feel in control of your choices
• Is responsible for overcoming your intuition’s impulses, but it’s lazy
• Requires willpower or self-control, which seems to get depleted with use but can be boosted by motivation
• Sometimes gets into flow, allowing you to have an “optimal experience.”
• Leans toward cognitive ease and avoids strain

Lastly, when we think of ourselves, we identify with the conscious, reasoning self with rational beliefs that choose what to think about and do. But are we right?

Let’s explore that below.

Our Judgment and Decision-Making Process

As suggested earlier, intuition runs our minds, just as it has been running animal minds for a long time. It’s very good at what it does, as it has been refined over time.

When humans evolved the capacity for language and reasoning, the brain (mind) did not develop itself to hand over control to a new and inexperienced driver. Instead, reasoning evolved because it did something useful for intuition.

It can:

• See further into the future (because we can examine alternative scenarios in our head), and therefore, it can help intuition make better decisions in the present. 
• Learn new skills and master new technologies, which can be deployed to help intuition reach its goal and sidestep disaster.

And most important, reasoning acts as the lawyer or spokesman for intuition, even though it doesn’t necessarily know what intuition is thinking.

Reasoning is skilled at fabricating post hoc (after the event) explanations for whatever intuition has just done, and it is good at finding reasons to justify whatever intuition wants to do next.

Also, because we gossiped about each other since we developed languages, it became extremely valuable for intuitions to carry along a full-time public relations firm (reasoning).

So, intuition often drives our judgments and decisions, and reasoning then typically justifies such judgments and decisions.

Note that there are times when reasoning does drive our judgments and decisions regardless of what intuition thinks. Such times include when:

• Our reputation is on the line, as we will learn further below, and when
• We genuinely seek to promote the greater good.

But most times…

Intuition First, Reasoning Second

Here are examples to illustrate that intuition comes first (drives our judgments and decisions), and then reasoning follows (to justify such judgments and decisions).

The first is the famous Muller-Lyer illusion. Take a look at the figure below.

Lines 1 and 2 are of the same length (identical). But you’ll always see line 1 as longer than line 2 even after you know the two lines are the same length. 

Based on what it sees, our intuition tells us one is longer even though our reasoning says it’s not. Another example is the Wason 4-card task. You are shown four (4) cards on a table. All cards have a letter on one side and a number on the other.

Which card(s) must you turn over to test if it is true that if a card shows a vowel on one side, there is an even number on the other?

Everyone immediately sees that you must turn over the A, but many people also say you need to turn over the 2.

Led by intuition, they seem to be doing a simple-minded pattern matching: There was a vowel and an even number in the question, so let’s turn over the vowel and the even number.

Many people resist the explanation of the simple reasoning behind the task: turning over the 2 and finding a C on the other side would not invalidate the rule, whereas turning over the 5 and finding an E would do it. So you need to turn over the A and the 5.

When people are told upfront what the answer is and asked to explain why that answer is correct, they can do it.

But amazingly, they are just as able to explain and just as confident in their reasoning, whether they are told the correct answer (A and 5) or the popular but wrong answer (A and 2).

The Social Intuitionist Model

As partly described above and as proposed by Jonathan Haidt in “The Righteous Mind,” the social intuitionist model outlines our judgment and decision-making process.

We often make our first judgments rapidly and are dreadful at seeking evidence that might disconfirm those initial judgments. Yet Friends can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. They can challenge us, giving us reasons and arguments (link 3) that sometimes trigger new intuitions, making it possible for us to change our minds.

We occasionally do this when we think about a problem by ourselves, suddenly seeing things in a new light or from a new perspective. Link 6 in the model represents this process of private reflection. This line is dotted because this process doesn’t happen often. For most of us, it is not every day or every month that we change our minds about an issue without any prompting from anyone else.

Far more common than such private mind-changing is social influence. Other people influence us constantly by revealing that they like or dislike somebody. That form of influence is link 4, the social persuasion link.

Many of us believe that we have an inner moral compass that we follow. Still, history demonstrates that other people exert a powerful force on us. They can make cruelty seem acceptable, and kindness seem embarrassing without giving us any reason or arguments. Ever wonder how genocides happen?

Why This Process

Why do we have this weird judgment and decision-making process?

As our brains developed over time, why did we evolve an inner lawyer or spokesman rather than an inner judge or scientist? Wouldn’t it have been most adaptive for our ancestors to figure out the truth about who did what and why rather than using all that brain power just to find evidence supporting what they wanted to believe?

That depends on which you think was more important for our ancestor’s survival: truth or reputation?

The Selfish Self

In “The Selfish Gene,” Richard Dawkins proposes that genes are selfish because their primary motivation is survival and replication, even if it means sacrificing the organism’s well-being. Genetically related people cooperate with and can be selfless towards each other to maximize their chances of survival and passing on those genes.

So, selfish genes shape people to be helpful to others only when they benefit and not all the time or to everyone.

Our weird judgment and decision-making process evolved to:

• Help family members survive
• Help others who help us back
• Maintain a good reputation in our community since others talk about our behavior

Looking Good Rather Than Being Good

In “The Republic,” Glaucon (Plato’s brother) argues that…

People care a great deal more about appearance and reputation than about reality.

Is he right?

For a long time, our ancestors’ survival depended upon their ability to get small groups to include them and trust them, so if there is any inborn drive here, it should be a drive to get others to think well of us.

Phil Tetlock, a leading researcher in the study of accountability, asks subjects to solve problems and make decisions.

For example, they’re given information about a legal case and then asked to infer guilt or innocence.

Some subjects are told that they’ll have to explain their decisions to someone else. Other subjects know they won’t be held accountable by anyone.

Tetlock found that when left to their own devices, people relied on their intuition to make judgments quickly and used reasoning to defend such judgments, as explained earlier. They were lazy, made errors, and relied on gut feelings. He called this type of reasoning confirmatory thought.

But when people know they must explain themselves in advance, they engage in thoughtful reasoning. They:

• Think more systematically and self-critically
• They are less likely to jump to conclusions and more likely to revise their beliefs in response to evidence.

He called this second type of reasoning exploratory thought.

Tedlock concludes that conscious reasoning is carried out mainly for persuasion rather than discovery. But Tedlock adds that we are also trying to persuade ourselves. We want to believe the things we are about to say to others.

Our moral thinking is much more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth.

Glaucon was right. We care a great deal more about appearance and reputation than about reality.

We would rather look good than be actually good.

Not Only Selfish

Yes, indeed, people are often selfish. Many moral, political, and religious behaviors are thinly veiled ways of pursuing self-interest. Just look at the awful hypocrisy of so many politicians and religious leaders.

But it’s also true that people are groupish. We love to join teams, clubs, leagues, and fraternities. We take on group identities and work shoulder to shoulder with strangers towards common goals so enthusiastically that it seems our minds were designed for teamwork.

Note that when it’s said that human nature is selfish, it means that our minds contain several mental workings that make us great at promoting our interest in competition with our peers.

When it’s said that human nature is also groupish, it means that our minds contain various mental works that make us great at promoting our group’s interest in competition with other groups.

We are not saints, but we are sometimes good team players.

The Team Player

So far, based on the works of Jonathan Haidt, Daniel Kahneman, and others referenced earlier, we have a portrait of human nature that is somewhat cynical.

We have seen that:

• We care more about looking good than about truly being good.
• Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.
• We lie, cheat, and cut ethical corners quite often when we think we can get away with it, and then we use our reasoning to manage our reputations and justify ourselves to others.
• We believe our post hoc reasoning so thoroughly that we end up self-righteously convinced of our virtue.

But this isn’t the complete story.

Yes, human nature is primarily selfish, but with a groupish overlay resulting from natural selection simultaneously working at multiple levels. This is as suggested by Jonathan Haidt in “The Righteous Mind.”

Individuals compete with individuals, and that competition rewards selfishness, including some forms of strategic cooperation (even criminals can work together to further their interests).

But at the same time, groups compete with groups. That competition favors groups of true team players. Those willing to cooperate and work for the group’s best interest, even when they could do better by slacking, cheating, or leaving the group.

These two processes pushed human nature in different directions and gave us the strange mix of selfishness and selflessness we know today.

Indeed, we may not understand morality, politics, or religion until we understand human groupishness and its origins.

So how did we get so groupish as to truly work for the good of the group and not just for our advancement within the group?

Winning Tribes

A long time ago, when two human tribes living in the same area came into competition, all things being equal, if one tribe included a great number of courageous, sympathetic, and faithful members who were always ready to warn each other of danger, to aid and defend each other, then, this tribe could succeed better and conquer the other.

The advantage that disciplined soldiers have over undisciplined rivals follows chiefly from each man’s confidence in his comrades. Selfish and contentious people will not be united, and nothing can be achieved without unity.

Cohesive tribes began to function like individual organisms, competing with other organisms.

The more cohesive tribes generally won. Natural selection, therefore, worked on tribes the same way it works on every other organism.

Note that groups competing doesn’t necessarily mean groups being at war or fighting with one another.

They were competing to be the most efficient at turning resources into offspring. Don’t forget that women and children were also important members of these groups.

Group selection does not require war or violence. Whatever traits make a group more efficient at acquiring food and turning it into children makes it more fit than its neighbors.

Group selection pulls for cooperation, for the ability to suppress selfish behaviors and spur individuals to act in ways that benefit their groups.

Yes, group-serving behaviors sometimes impose a terrible cost on outsiders (as in warfare). However, in general, groupishness is focused on improving the welfare of the in-group, not on harming an out-group.

City States and Empires

In time, tribes conquered/cooperated with other tribes to form even larger groups and eventually city-states, empires, and countries as we know today.

How and why did it happen?

While many animals are social, that is, they live in groups, flocks, or herds, only a few have crossed the threshold and become ultra-social, which means they live in large groups. Such large groups have some internal structure, enabling them to reap the benefits of the division of labor.

Beehives and ant nests, with their separate caste of soldiers, scouts, and nursery attendants, are examples of ultra-sociality, and so are human societies.

Becoming Ultra-Social

Three key features that have helped all nonhuman ultra-socials to cross over appear to be the need to:

1. Defend a shared nest plus dependable food within the searching range of the nest inhabitants,
2. Feed offspring over an extended period (which helps and gives an advantage to species that can recruit siblings or males to help mothers), and
3. Avoid intergroup conflicts.

That’s according to the findings from biologists Bert Holldobler and E.O. Wilson, noted in their book, “The Ants.”

Those same three factors apply to human beings. Like bees, our ancestors were:

1. territorial creatures with a fondness for defensible nests (such as caves) who
2. give birth to needy offspring that required an immense amount of care, which had to be given while
3. the group was under threat from neighboring groups.

For hundreds of years, conditions were in place that ensured we evolved to be ultra-social.

When some groups embraced agriculture and built permanent homes, they had a steady food supply that had to be defended even more vigorously.

Like bees, humans began building even more elaborate nests, and in just a few thousand years, a new kind of vehicle appeared on earth – the city-state, able to raise walls and armies. City-states and, later, empires spread rapidly, changing many of the earth’s ecosystems and allowing human beings to dominate the world today. Today’s nests are countries or nation-states.

But how did humans get each other to work for the group’s interest rather than their selfish interests within the group?

Especially given that within each tribe (group), selfish individuals (free riders) come out ahead. They share in the group’s gain while contributing little to its efforts. The bravest army wins, but within the bravest army, the few cowards who hang back are likely to survive the fight, go home alive, and become fathers.

Suppressing Selfishness

How did the early humans deal with the free rider problem?

Scientists proposed a series of “probable steps.”

The first step was the “social instinct.” In ancient times, loners were more likely to get picked off by predators than their more social, company-loving siblings, who felt a strong need to stay close to the group.

The second step was reciprocity. People who help others are more likely to get help when needed.

However, the most important step, which we explored earlier, is that people are passionately concerned about the praise and blame of others.

People are obsessed with their reputation. The emotions that drive this obsession were acquired by natural selection at the individual level. Those who lacked a sense of shame or a love of glory were less likely to attract friends and mates.

The final step was shared intentionality. It refers to sharing the same intention (goal) and working towards achieving it together by sharing tasks to meet the goal best.

For example, while foraging, one person could pull down a branch while the other plucks the fruit, and both share the meal.

Shared Intentions

When early humans began to share intentions, their ability to hunt, gather, raise children, and raid their neighbors increased exponentially.

Everyone on the team now understands the task, knows that his or her partners shared the same intention and the tasks to be done, and knows when a partner acted in a way that impeded success or hogged the spoils and reacted negatively to such violations.

Shared intentionality led to our capacity to treat duties and principles as sacred. We learn and conform to social norms, feel and share group-related emotions, and ultimately, create and obey social institutions. 

When you put these steps together, you get evolved humans for whom free riding is no longer so attractive. Selfish genes begin to craft relatively selfless group members who constitute a supremely selfish group.

Today, the most effective groups have many ways of suppressing selfishness.

For example, in a real army that greatly values honor, loyalty, and country, the coward is not the most likely to make it home and father children. He is most likely to get beaten up, left behind, or shot in the back for committing sacrilege. And if he does make it home alive, his reputation will repel women and potential employers.

Team Before Self – Sometimes

Note that we are often “groupish” rather than selfish in moral and political matters. We can believe almost anything that supports our team and deploy our reasoning skills to demonstrate commitment to our team.

We ask, “Can I believe it? when we want to believe something, but “Must I believe it?” when we don’t want to believe. We then search for supporting evidence, and if we find even a single piece of pseudo-evidence, such as misleading statistics, we can stop thinking. We now have permission to believe or not. We have a justification, in case anyone asks.

In the past, many political scientists used to assume that people vote selfishly, choosing the candidate or policy that will benefit them the most. However, decades of research on public opinion have concluded that self-interest is a weak predictor of policy preferences.

Rather, people care about their groups, whether those are racial, regional, religious, or political.

The political scientist Don Kinder summaries the findings like this:

“In matters of public opinion, citizens seem to be asking themselves not “What’s in it for me?” but rather “What’s in it for my group?”

Our politics is groupish, not selfish.

This still sounds somehow cynical, doesn’t it?

How do we create effective teams and ethical societies if people within groups pull in different directions?

Creating Effective Teams and Ethical Societies

To create effective teams and ethical societies, we need to do the following:

1. Have shared intentions for the team or society. Everyone needs to understand the intentions, why and how they benefit them, and what part they need to play to meet the intentions.
2. Ensure everyone’s reputation is always on the line, so bad behavior will always bring bad consequences. No exceptions.

We are champions of cooperation beyond kinship, and we do it mainly by creating formal and informal accountability systems. We are good at holding others accountable for their actions and skilled at navigating through a world in which others hold us accountable for our own.

Remember Phil Tetlock? He defines accountability as the following:

“Explicit expectation that one will be called upon to justify one’s beliefs, feelings, or action to others”

We expect people to reward or punish us based on how well we justify ourselves.

When nobody’s answerable to anybody, when slackers and cheaters go unpunished, everything falls apart.

Talking about creating great teams and societies is splendid, but let’s return and conclude the article topic.

Our Process as Mental Shortcuts

As you can substantiate, most of our judgments, decisions, and actions are often appropriate.  

Our world is incredibly complex and fast-paced. We face countless decisions and situations every day. To cope with this, we evolved to be guided by our intuitions instead of reasoning everything we encounter. And our confidence in our intuitive beliefs and preferences is usually justified. But not always.

In “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion,” Robert Cialdini suggested that we consider our judgment and decision-making process mental shortcuts. It isn’t perfect – sometimes, our quick reactions aren’t the best response to a situation. We are often confident even when we are wrong. And an objective observer is more likely to detect our errors than we are.

But we need these shortcuts because we don’t have the time, energy, or capacity to think through everything we encounter carefully.

And because intuition operates automatically and cannot be turned off at will, errors of intuitive thoughts are often difficult to prevent. Biases cannot always be avoided because reasoning may not know the error.

Even when clues to likely errors are available, errors can be prevented only by enhanced monitoring and effortful reasoning activity, which is impractical.

The best we can do is compromise, recognize situations where mistakes are likely, and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high.

On a final note, why we think, judge, and decide the way we do sets the stage for our next article, which explores how we can influence or be influenced by others. Make no mistakes: we can influence and be influenced by others.

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