The World Is Succumbing To Reactive Thinking

As I say in the tagline to my podcast, bad leaders react, good leaders plan, and great leaders think. Right now, there is a whole lot of reacting going on in the world, and precious little thinking.

That is dangerous, because when we react, we are much more likely to make decisions relying on what cognitive psychologists refer to as System 1 Thinking.

The concepts of “System 1” and “System 2” thinking were popularized by the Noble Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman in his excellent 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow, which I consider required reading for everyone.

These two systems are ways to describe the dual-process theory of human cognition.

System 1, or Fast Thinking, is automatic and intuitive. It operates quickly, with little or no conscious effort. It is heuristic-based, meaning that it relies on mental shortcuts to make quick decisions. This can be efficient, but it often leads to biases and errors. It is also emotional, meaning decision makers who rely on System 1 thinking are more likely to be influenced by feelings and instinctual reactions.

Sound familiar?

System 2, or Slow Thinking, is deliberate and effortful. It allocates attention to more complex mental activities that require conscious effort. This allows us to analyze information more critically and reflect on past experiences more objectively. It is more logical and tends to break problems down step-by-step.

Unfortunately, we do not see a lot of that happening in the geopolitical arena right now, nor on the domestic political stage here in the United States.

System 1 has its place. It is what allows us to easily interpret facial expressions, determining the source of a sudden sound, or avoid placing our hand on a hot stove. As a species, it served us well when the most complex problem we had to tackle in a day was whether the lion trailing us across the savannah was hungry or wanted to be our friend.

But those are not the sort of problems confronting us today.

Achieving something resembling peace in the Middle East, ending the war in Ukraine, dealing with the lingering supply-chain disruption caused by the pandemic, or actually tackling with the climate crisis in a meaningful way require a lot more intellectual rigor and a much more thoughtful approach.

These are the sort of problems that demand System 2 thinking.

One of the main takeaways from Kahneman’s work is that we need to understand the limitations and strengths of each system. Recognizing when we are relying too heavily on automatic reactions and when we need to engage in more thoughtful analysis can help us make better decisions.