Playing the Systems - Cathy Butler

Allow me to set you a small puzzle:

A bat and ball cost $1.10
The bat costs one dollar more than the ball.
How much does the ball cost?

The correct answer is at the bottom of this post. I’m sure many of you got it right (the problem isn’t difficult, after all), but others will have leapt to the wrong conclusion and answered that the ball costs 10c. What’s more, even those who found the right answer will almost certainly have had the answer “10c” spring unbidden to their minds before putting it firmly to one side. Why?

This puzzle is not my own, as you may have guessed from the choice of currency. I quote it from the book I’m reading at the moment, Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (2011). Kahneman is a psychologist, but he won the Nobel Prize for Economics – largely by demonstrating that (contrary to the assumptions built into most economic models) human beings are not rational in their decisions when it comes to money, or much else. This is not news to novelists, but Kahneman provides fascinating details about the ways in which our irrationality manifests itself.

I’m not here to review Kahneman’s book, though I highly recommend it, but I want to mention the fundamental model he uses for human judgement and decision making, which I think has some interesting applications to writing. Kahneman talks of two systems, which share the work of thinking. System 1 is intuitive, instinctive, semi-conscious: we use it to do routine tasks such as walking, as well as for our initial judgements of situations. It was your System 1 that came up with the answer 10c. System 2 is conscious, effortful, and sometimes lazy: we bring it to bear in unfamiliar situations, or if we have reason to believe that System 1 isn’t to be trusted. If I ask you to multiply 2x2, System 2 probably won’t need to get involved, but for a sum such as 24x93, it will. Not only that, but the two systems compete for resources. As Kahneman points out, if you ask someone to multiply 24x93 in their head when they happen to be walking, they will typically stop to work it out – to free up extra mental capacity.

When you become expert at something, it becomes less conscious – moving from System 2 to System 1, in Kahneman’s terms. If you’ve learned to drive, or touch-type, you’ll have experienced this: actions that were at first conscious and effortful become “automatic”. In fact, although I touch-type quite well I would be unable to tell you the layout of a QWERTY keyboard: that knowledge has migrated from my conscious mind, where it could be retrieved by System 2, to my fingers. Similarly, I would be hard put to say whether the clutch is to the left of the brake pedal or vice versa. Happily, my feet know.

This has got me to wondering about the roles of Kahneman’s two systems in writing. Writers sometimes find themselves in that luxurious place known as “the zone”, in which consciousness appears to take a step back, and words flow onto the page like honey (but without the mess). On such occasions writing appears effortless, intuitive – the product, one might imagine, of System 1 – and specifically of an expertise that has become automatic.  Most of the time, however, it’s not like that, and both systems are involved. System 2 is there, judging whether what we’ve written says quite what we wanted it to; whether it’s in the right place; whether we need it at all. System 1 is taking in the overall shape of the text, and finding it satisfying or otherwise; it’s suggesting dialogue and plot for System 2’s approval. Both systems are unfortunately unreliable: System 1 (as we saw in the puzzle at the top) likes to go for the obvious answer, or (in writing terms) the cliché; System 2 is liable to swing between a lazy dereliction of duty and hypercriticism that can choke writing off entirely. A good and productive writer will be able to find a balance between the two, and judge at any moment which ought to be taking the lead – which rather implies a System 3 for making this kind of decision! In fact, as so often, Plato got there first, with his allegory of the chariot – but Daniel Kahneman has taken my understanding of my own thought processes a lot further.

What's your experience? Do you recognize these descriptions from your own writing life?

Answer: The ball costs 5c.