System One is an almost instantaneous story generator. An event occurs and we automatically have a story about it – a cause or a reason. These stories are tentative, and require validation or confirmation from System Two.
Because laziness is as much a characteristic of System Two as immediacy is a characteristic of System One, it tends to endorse System One’s stories more than it questions them. Nuance, ambiguity, contradiction, deep truth – these things require a tremendous amount of effort to work through. It’s much more efficient to go with what “feels” right.
The result is we end up seeing a version of the world that is much simpler than what is actually the case – a world based on beliefs and decisions we have made and worked back from to justify.
This is why people we have profound political, social or religious disagreements with can look so ridiculous to us in their reasoning. They are. The thing is – we look as ridiculous in our reasoning to them. Because all of us are using reason and logic far less than we think.
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