It all makes sense with hindsight

Daniel Kahneman: Thinking, Fast and Slow 

Penguin Books, 2012  £8.99

ISBN: 978 0 141 03357 0

 

 

 

Daniel Kahneman is a behavioural economist.  He’s spent decades studying the effects of social, cognitive and emotional factors on the decisions we make – economic and otherwise.  In Thinking, Fast and Slow, he shares some of the insights of his work in decision science: to stimulate, as he says, “watercooler conversations” so that we can better understand the systemic errors of judgement and choice that humans are prone to.

What has all this to do with rhetoric?  Aristotle tells us that rhetoric concerns “things about which we deliberate but for which we have no systematic rules”.  Decision science deals in the same matters.  It offers evidence-based theories about how we choose in the face of uncertain outcomes: when we face risk, when a situation is incomprehensibly complicated, or when information is scarce. 

 

Kahneman explains his findings by invoking the fiction of two ‘systems’.  System 1 is intuitive, associative and fast; System 2 is rational, logical, slow and lazy.  System 1 prefers plausibility to probability; it craves coherent meaning and will do everything it takes to construct it from any scrap of information.  It cannot deal with statistics; it prefers causal explanations every time.  It hates doubt.  System 2 does its best to understand the truth in all its fullness; but it can only work with what System 1 gives it, and it’s lazy:  without conscious attention and effort, System 2 will simply ratify the decisions of System 1.

 

Rhetoric exploits the relationship between these two systems – for good or ill.  Almost every one of Kahneman’s examples has rhetorical implications.  Here’s an obvious one:  your audience will accept a message more easily if it’s repeated or primed  (if you’ve just seen the word EAT, you’re more likely to interpret SO_P as ‘soup’ than ‘soap’).  They will also accept it more easily if they feel good.  Physical actions prime their emotional correlates: for example, if the audience all grasp pencils in their mouths while listening to you, they’re forced to smile – which will make them feel happier and make them more receptive to your message.  (Go on: try it.)

 

 

 

 

 

As so often with discussions based on experimental social science, I found myself mildly irritated that experiments seemed merely to confirm what most of us know by experience already.  But that, of course, is precisely Kahneman’s point: experience is not an infallible guide to truth. “Everything,” he says, “makes sense in hindsight.”  The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.

The penny, for me, dropped with a resounding crash in Chapter 20.  At one point, Kahneman and his colleague, Amos Tversky, worked with a group of investment advisers, looking for evidence of skill in their ability to predict movements in stock prices. 

They found none.  The results of every single adviser, over time, were no better than blind betting. 

As someone who coaches analysts who write advisory reports for investors, this confirmed what I’d always suspected: the only real power of persuasion available to these professionals is rhetorical.  In efficient markets, stocks can never be definitively judged to be wrongly priced.  The highly sophisticated skills of evaluating a business aren't sufficient; an analyst needs to know whether information about a firm is already incorporated into the stock price.  Kahneman's research proved conclusively that the advisors he examined lacked that skill.  The conclusion is inescapable: the livelihoods and self-esteem of thousands of financial professionals depend entirely on their rhetorical skills.

Kahneman delivers over 400 pages of material showing how incapable we are of understanding statistics, how brilliant we are at ignoring our ignorance, how we regularly substitute easy questions for hard ones in decision-making, and other cognitive biases.  Getting through the book can be hard work, not least because Kahneman is broadly pessimistic about our ability to manage our illusions.  True, he claims that ‘our thoughts and actions are routinely guided by System 1and are generally on the mark’; but his book is overwhelmingly more concerned with the flaws of intuition than its marvels.  Above all, he seems to ignore one aspect of System 1 that provides some of the most powerful illusions driving progress.  Look in the index, and you will find no entry for imagination.

Nonetheless, Thinking, Fast and Slow contributes hugely to the conversation about intuition and reason.  It’s in the borderland between the two that rhetoric lives and feeds; this book, and others in its field, offers vast potential for reinvigorating rhetoric, both as knowledge and practice.