According to the author Shanon M. Koening, people have 60,000 thoughts a day and most of them are negative . Such a shocking figure makes us wonder how little we know about thinking and how much influence it has on our behaviour and decision making.

Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist with a Nobel Prize

A renowned American psychologist realized the importance of thinking and his research led him to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001 . To explain the theory that led him to obtain the Nobel Prize, Kahneman begins by asking his students the following riddle:

Do not try to solve this exercise and try to use your intuition:

A bat and ball costs 1.10.The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much is the ball?

The 10-cent answer is presented as fast, powerful and attractive intuition, but it is wrong.

To arrive at the correct solution, 5 cents, many of us will have to resort to pencil and paper, transforming the riddle into a mathematical equation. We will have to resort to the slowest and most tiring way of thinking that our brain allows. Some psychologists consider that this type of test is a more valid predictor of intelligence than the current IQ tests . In this case, it serves to illustrate that intuitions can be wrong, no matter how powerful they seem.

Kahneman uses this example to describe the two different ways the mind creates thought.

First, there is the System 1 or implicit . This way of thinking is fast, automatic, frequent, emotional, stereotyped and subconscious. On the other hand, there is the System 2 or explicit . It is slow, lazy, infrequent, logical, calculating and is accompanied by the awareness of being solving a problem.

These two systems of antagonistic nature meet in the day-to-day of all the decisions of our life.

How do the two systems of thought work?

The quick 10 cent solution you gave quickly at the beginning of the exercise is due to the operation of System 1 offering you a reasonable response. However, when you used the pen and paper, you used System 2 which this time offered the correct 5 cent solution, a slower and more expensive solution but, after all, the correct answer.

This is because system 1, moved by intuition and heuristics, allows us to do simple tasks like walking or brushing our teeth without effort . In contrast, system 2 will be in play when we are doing the more complicated tasks, such as learning to drive.

Both system 1 and system 2 are continuously active and in communication. System 1 determines our thoughts with external perceptions, visual and associative memory, and then develops a framed conclusion, which we do not even question, thus avoiding any alternative story. The challenge is that it usually does a good job, so that we can trust it.

Intuitions guide our daily lives

Using heuristic theory, Kahneman states that system 1 associates new information with existing patterns, or thoughts, rather than creating new patterns for each new experience . This results in different types of biases. System 1, by generating a narrow, framed thought, tries to demonstrate that it leads right to a confirmation bias. Confirmation bias leads people to ignore some evidence that contradicts such thinking, and is one of the biggest individual problems when companies make decisions.

In short, people tend to look for information that validates their initial hypothesis. Kahneman details a series of experiments that aim to highlight the differences between these two thought processes and how they arrive at different results even when they receive the same information.

Now you know a little more about those products that your brain generates an average of 60,000 times a day, and how many of them are generated quickly and without taking into account all the present information leading to wrong conclusions.

So, next time you make a bad decision, don’t hold it against yourself . Now you know that it is the system 1 acting automatically and that the best decision you can make is to take paper and pen so that the thinking system 2 is activated and leads you to make the right decisions.