Fighting insight with inference
We cannot infer our way to transformational insight. And yet we often set ourselves up to try exactly that — and are stuck with good arguments and minimum viable products, but without insight.
In my last post I argued that there is a subtle difference between solving problems and designing experiences. We looked at this through the lens of existential modes of having and being. What we pay attention to is different, depending on which existential mode we are in.
Today I want to offer an additional lens. You have heard of it before as the difference between Thinking, Fast and Slow.
Dual processing
There's a lot of convergence in psychology on the idea of a dual processing theory that we have multiple competencies. What this dual processing is, is itself very controversial. Initially, people talked about two systems, and then they talked about two styles. And because of critiques it was hard to maintain those terms. I'm not even convinced that they are distinct things, they might lie on a continuum.
To avoid all that controversy, they are simply called S1 and S2. I'm not claiming that they're discrete systems or even discrete styles, it's quite possible that they are polar positions on a continuum of processing. I'm going to put all of that aside, because it's not relevant for what we're talking about here. The main idea here is that these are different ways in which you process information.
S1
This process [S1] works largely intuitively. It works very much in a highly associational fashion. It makes use of a lot of implicit processing and it's very fast. It's very fast. This is the kind of processing that you're using all the time. Varella talked about your ability to cope. This is your coping.
When I'm moving around the environment, I'm relying a lot on my intuitive knowledge, my capacity for implicit learning, the way I can quickly associate things together. And so I would add to this, of course, as I argued before, that this is also how we are primarily caring for things, being involved with them, finding them salient, etc. But nevertheless, [S1] is the part of your cognition that is operating a lot of the time in the background.
In fact, I'm going to step aside from Stanovich for a moment and propose to you that instead of thinking that these are discrete systems, we can think of different states that you’re in, where one style or other is more foregrounded, and the other is more backgrounded.
S2
What's S2? S2 operates more deliberately. In both senses of the word, like deliberation, where I'm engaging in reflection, and deliberate in the sense that I am aware of it and intentionally directed in it. So it's deliberately. It tends to not work associationally. It tends to work inferentially, argumentatively (argumentation in the philosophical sense, not in the sense of having an emotional conflict with somebody). Of course, all processing has — and this is an important point — some aspects of it that are implicit. This is more of a contrast of emphasis. But this processing is much more explicit and it tends to be very slow.
Kahneman has a book out right now, Thinking, Fast and Slow, that is a very good discussion of this dual processing model. As I said, there's a lot of theoretical argumentation and evidence that is convergent on this. So this is a very highly plausible thing. And you see it showing up in many, many different domains within psychology.
A lot of research in psychology converges on the existence of two processing modes:
S1 — intuitive, associative, implicit, fast
S2 — deliberate, argumentative, reflective, slow
We make use of both, and we need both, but S2 is the one that we are more explicitly aware of, because it is basically our reflective, analytic, reasoning consciousness at work.
Meanwhile, S1 happens to operate so quickly and automatically that it is easy for us to overlook its contribution to our thinking process.
Jumping to conclusions
Let's take an example where you use the two systems: You're grocery shopping, and you come up to the cashier, and they're ringing you in. And you've got a normal basket full of normal groceries. And the cashier says to you, “That'll be $1,000 please." And you go, "What!?"
Where did that "What!?" come from?
You have associations between these objects, their prices, the amount. You've picked up implicit patterns. Notice how intuitively, associationally, implicit, and quickly you go, "What!? That's wrong! It can't be a thousand dollars. That makes no sense."
You call the cashier in question by using your S1 processing. Now what the cashier has to do, she or he can't just respond this way to you. The cashier can't go, "Nah… It's a thousand. I can sense it."
What do they have to do? They have to deliberately take out each thing. They have to get out the bill. They have to deliberately concentrate. They have to pay attention, step-by-step make the argument to you, explicitly and slowly, "No, no, look, look, look. Look at this matches this..." They're using S2 processing.
These, of course, are in a trade-off relationship, because the problem with — and Stanovich acknowledges this — but part of the problem with [S2] is how much demand it puts on your working memory, how slow it is. You cannot rely on it.
Yet another argument why you can't Descartes your way through the whole of your existence. You can't rely on [S2] for most of your behavior, because you will just head into the ocean of combinatorial explosion. You will get so slowed down and so overwhelmed that you won't be able to live your life. You'll commit cognitive suicide.
But, of course, we have [S2] for a reason. We have this because it is supposed to override to a degree [S1]. Notice that these two systems are in an opponent relationship. They are both working towards the same goal of making you adaptive, but they tend to work in opposite fashions. And Stanovich sees S2 as largely having — and there's deep truth to this — having a corrective function for S1.
The reflective S2 exists to correct the intuitive S1. So far so good. That sounds a lot like we have evolved to have precise logical reasoning so it can override our hazy spontaneous intuition. There we have it, scientifically proven: Intellect over emotion. Thinking over feeling. The mind over the heart.
Is it really that straightforward?
Avoiding foolishness
Remember when I did the problem with you where you've got the pond? And on day 1 there's so many lily pads. And it doubles every day. And on day 20 it's done. On what day was the pond half-covered? And your S1 shouts at you, "10 days! 10 days in. Because it's half and half. And that's how it works." And that's wrong, because on day 19 half the pond was covered.
What you have to do is: S2 has to basically override how you're leaping to conclusions. How you leap to the conclusion that the people at the airport are in danger, because of the representative heuristic or the availability heuristic.
I need [S1] — that's what makes me fast. If I'm not leaping, I'm not fast. I'm not coping. Leaping and coping are deeply interdependent. But the thing is, sometimes — and again, it's unclear what the degree is; that's one of the ways in which I think Baron is a little bit more clear than Stanovich — but sometimes we need to override this leaping to conclusion.
He sees that what active open-mindedness is basically doing is teaching you to protect [S2] processing from being overwritten by the way S1 makes you leap to conclusions. You are foolish, you have dysrationalia, if you are highly intelligent and yet you have not trained S2 to be properly protected from the interference from S1.
Do you see what's going on here? This is how he's ultimately responding to Cohen. You have these two competencies [S1 and S2]. You need both of them. They are constitutive of your cognitive agency. They're both constitutive competences, but [S1] can interfere with [S2], and that can cause you to behave irrationally. What active open-mindedness does is to protect this kind of processing from that interference. That's Stanovich's central model. I think that's definitely a good account of active open-mindedness.
My central criticism of this is, I think it's an insufficient account of rationality. It's insufficient. I grant a lot of work has been done here. Rationality is not being equated to intelligence, is not being equated to logicality. It's centered on overcoming self-deception. There's an account of self-deception. It's so platonic, eh? It's so platonic. Here's the monster [S1], and it's interfering with the man [S2]. So platonic. And so we get that interference effect. That's what's causing us to be foolish. That makes us self-deceptive. If we cultivate active open-mindedness, then we can reduce the interference. And that makes us more comprehensively rational.
I think that's all, well, it's all elegant. It's beautiful. And the fact that this kind of work keeps getting replicated and massively convergent, it's so highly plausible and profound. That's all, I think, that's all worthy of being noted.
No wonder we appreciate objective, logical reasoning and analytic thinking. If one half of our cognitive processing is prone to leap to sometimes wrong conclusions, we should be thankful that we evolved to have a corrective mechanism that overrides our intuition with some proper analysis and reflective reasoning.
S2 powers much of modern science: Careful analysis and deductive reasoning. Looking at data, searching for evidence, inferring rules. Isn’t that a fundamentally good thing? Shouldn’t we strive for involving S2 wherever we can, to make sure we are not doing something stupid?
Why would we possibly choose to not be open-minded and reflective and instead just give in to our instinct?
Cognitive leaping
Is leaping always a bad thing? Well, I already implied you need to leap to cope, but let's take a look at the work of Baker-Sennett and Ceci from 1996: They investigated a thing they called inductive leaping. I think calling it inductive leaping is a mistake because I understand induction as an inferential procedure, and what they're explicitly doing is not inferential in nature. So I'm going to suggest that we don't use that term. I'm instead going to use the more neutral term of cognitive leaping.
What's cognitive leaping? Cognitive leaping — how did they test it? They tested it in the following ways: I give you various patterns that are unfolding across time. And at various times I stop and ask you, you can tell me what it's going to be. One version of it, there's a bunch of dots and what's it going to be? And more dots get filled in. Eventually you're able to leap and say, "Oh, it's going to turn out to be a sofa." Notice how you're going from features to gestalt. You're doing that leap. And you're going from looking at the dots to looking through them. You're doing an opacity-transparency shift, all that stuff we talked about. Mindfulness is involved.
Why does that matter? Well, what they found was something very important. [Cognitive leaping] allowed them to operationalize at least an aspect of the ineffability of insight, because often you don't know what's going on in an insight. There's this leap.
And how they operationalized it was this: You're a good leaper, if you can use fewer cues and accurately say what the final pattern is going to be. If you use fewer cues, and you're making lots of mistakes, you're not very good. If you're largely accurate, but you have to get a whole bunch of cues, then you're not a very good leaper. But if you use few cues and get to the full gestalt reliably, then you're a very good cognitive leaper.
Ok, you're doing this. You have this skill, this facility with pattern detection, pattern completion. Why is that so important? Because [cognitive leaping] — and that's what the experiments show — is directly predictive of insight. The better you are at leaping, the better you are at insight.
Do you see the tension here? If I try to shut off too much leaping to conclusions, I'm also shutting off the machinery that makes me more insightful.
Look, we have to give up naive, simplistic notions of rationality. I'm not accusing Stanovich of this, not at all. But what I'm saying is: Being rational is a very complex process in which there are trade-off relationships, and a very complicated kind of optimization needs to be trained.
We want active open-mindedness. […] Sometimes I leap to conclusions, and that causes a lot of mistake in inference. What I need is active open-mindedness to moderate that and ameliorate it to a significant degree. But I want to leap to insight. And I need that for good construal, and good construal is central to being a problem solver, central to being rational.
Insight is leaping. If we try to avoid leaping, we avoid insight.
And we set ourselves up for successful insight when we shut down our intellect and listen to what our experience feels like in the moment, when we are mindful of the here and now, when we are deeply in touch with the world, when we judge not with our intellect based on arguments, but with our intuition based on feeling.
Does your environment support cognitive leaping, or are you constantly asked to prove everything with data, facts, and good arguments? When was the last time you made a decision because it felt right?
Alexander’s feeling
Christopher Alexander in The Nature of Order, book 2, The process of creating life, Conclusion [highlights mine]:
If living processes, guided by feeling for the whole, and guided by feeling, were to shape all acts of construction in society, then everything, nearly, that we know about modern society would be changed.
Above all — and what I wish to say now is not a small thing — it means that people would have a self-awareness, a knowledge of reality and wholeness as it is, quite different from the ignorance of inner feeling we came to accept as normal in the 20th-century.
The idea that feeling — above all feeling — should become the main anchor of the huge, hundred-million-variable process which creates life on Earth, seems hard to take seriously. Above all, it seems hard to implement. We live in a world of computer processes, banking, strictly controlled procedures. How is it possible to contemplate a world in which the freedom exists, that could allow natural unfolding — the unfolding governed by deep feeling — to control processes of such magnitude?
(1) By feeling, the reader must remember that I mean adherence to the whole. It is not an idiosyncratic touchy-feely kind of thing, but serious, holistic connection with the whole, which provides a wholesome feeling in the actor.
(2) Next — a feeling-guided process was typical in most human societies, during much of the Earth’s history. That alone should give one pause in dismissing it too quickly. Why should it not also be possible for us?
(3) What I have called a feeling-based process — the fundamental process as I have described it — is demonstrably necessary for the production of living structure.
At the beginning of the 21st century, even the biologically oriented views of complexity theory, are chiefly guided by interaction of complex variables, mathematical attractors in phase space, and so on. The power of the techniques that have been elaborated is startling. But it remains true that human beings, and human nature, are intuitively more in tune with feeling than with mathematics. Our humanity — humanity itself, our sympathy for one another, and for ourselves — all has its origin in issues concerned with archetypal feeling.
From this point of view, the importance — in my view — of the techniques I have described, is their capacity to create a living world which is rooted in human feeling, because that will create a world in touch with us, with our true nature, with our humanity.
The idea that feeling itself can become both criterion and instrument — that what is done, no matter how large or how small, can become personal, connected to the personal self of all human beings — and that this process then opens the door to a new form of society. That is truly revolutionary. That can shake the world.
We are in touch with the world through experience.
Alexander practically suggest that we need to design for experience.
Inference vs. and insight
We have to pay attention to the context, even in which we are theorizing about rationality. And if we are in a largely academic context, we are going to think of rationality as primarily about theorizing. And so [S1 interference] is a great danger to theorizing. I would argue, if the project you're engaging in rationality is the project of theorizing — and I mean that broadly in the sense of generating scientific or historical theory — then active open-mindedness is crucial.
But there are domains where it goes the other way. There's domains in which what you need is you need to be able to come up with a transformative insight, where you need a radical re-construal of the problem or the issue where that's crucial because you are somehow locked in.
Where is the domain in where that's crucial? Well, we've talked about it.[Active open-mindedness] is good for theorizing. But Jacobs in his book (and you can see some related work by Teasdale) points out there's an opposite context. There's the context, not a theory, but there's the context of therapy. (I think it's broader than this, but I'm using this because it's a good contrast, and there's an alliterative relation to help for mnemonic purposes.)
In therapy very often what's needed is: You're existentially trapped and you need this fundamental kind of transformative insight. And you cannot infer your way through it. […] And the problem in therapy is people try to think their way through it. That's Jacob's main point in a book called The Ancestral Mind. And the same point is being made I think by Teasdale, when he talks about metacognitive insight being central to therapy.
Often, what you need is to try and shut [S2] down, try to trigger [S1]. I mean, think of Freud and free association. You have to try and shut down [S2], prevent it from interfering. Bring [S1] into the foreground. Keep [S2] in the background.
When we're theorizing, we need [S2] in the foreground and we need it protected. We need it to seriously background and constrain [S1]. Active open-mindedness is doing this.
But in the therapeutic situation, [S1] needs to be much more foregrounded. [S2] needs to be backgrounded. And [S2] needs where it needs to be constrained so it doesn't unduly interfere with [S1].
Now, what we can ask ourselves is: What's a cognitive style that makes [S1] much more focal, tries to constrain [S2] and really improves insight? Well, we know what that is. And Teasdale in fact argues for it explicitly as what triggers meta-cognitive insight. That's mindfulness.
I've tried to argue that we need an ecology of psycho-technologies to cultivate the cognitive style of mindfulness. Think of one, think of meditation. Think of how much in meditation you are trying to really constrain [S2], shut this down, reduce all that inner speech, all that inferential processing, that deliberate direction. And you're trying to open [S1] up in a very powerful way.
Notice that I now have a cognitive style that is in a very important sense opponent, not adversarial, but opponent to active open-mindedness. Notice that they are both sharing the training of attention, what you are paying attention to, and how you are paying attention.
[S2] is great for planning. […] And especially when the planning is epistemic, when we're trying to theorize, when we're planning for truth. [S1] is very good for coping, especially when we're doing a kind of coping that's therapeutic in a broad sense, in which we are needing to transform and undergo important qualitative development.
I think what's missing from Stanovich is a broader account of our competences and how they are played off against each other, how there's a trade-off relationship with them. And part of what, I would argue, goes into wisdom is a cultivation of both active open-mindedness for inference and mindfulness for insight. And then what we're going to need is — well, what coordinates them together? How are they coordinated together? How do I optimize the opponent — not adversarial — processing between them?
I’ve written so many posts now that seem to always end with the same conclusion. When the question is, “Which is better, A or B?” more often than not the answer seems to be, “Doesn’t matter, you’ll need both.”
Once you are sensitive to this pattern, you can recognize in an instant, if you are talking to someone who still believes that there are only two possible answers to the question — it’s got to be either A or B. And the world — especially the Internet — is full of heated debates between advocates of both sides, going hard at each other, trying to convince the other side that they clearly got it wrong.
Polarization is powerful. And simplistic. Many just want to be right. Few are willing to unravel the complexity of reality, because we will eventually get to the point where we have to realize that we can no longer keep track of the complexity with our analytic mind.
We got to where we are today, not because we suppressed our intuition and developed our reasoning. We got here because, whether we want to or not, our cognitive processes have always been taking advantage of both facilities.
It is time to acknowledge what S1 has to contribute and explore what happens if we develop this mode of our cognitive processing, just as we have optimized culture for S2 processing over the last 300+ years.
Mirror of the Self is a fortnightly newsletter series investigating the connection between creators and their creations, trying to understand the process of crafting beautiful objects, products, and art.
Using recent works of cognitive scientist John Vervaeke and design theorist Christopher Alexander, we embark on a journey to find out what enables us to create meaningful things that inspire awe and wonder in the people that know, use, and love them.
If you are new to this series, start here: 01 • A secular definition of sacredness.
Overview and synopsis of articles 01-13: Previously… — A Recap.
Overview and synopsis of articles 14-26: Previously… — recap #2.
Another great way to start is my recent presentation Finding Meaning in The Nature of Order.