Your quick, automatic thinking: System 1

System 1 is your quick, automatic thinking. By relying on intuition and experience, you make decisions effortlessly. This happens without your conscious control. The vast majority of the choices you make every day occur this way. Thankfully, because only making conscious choices would take far too much energy and time.

1. You hear someone speaking loudly through the phone, clearly angry → You can recognize an emotion from the tone of a voice.


2. A bus passes outside, although you cannot see it → You know immediately what the source of the sound is, even without seeing the bus.


3. You pick up a pen lying next to you instead of the one a little further away → You subconsciously estimate the distance between you and the objects around you.


4. You receive a new email with good news → You immediately grasp the content of a simple message.

System 1 has, like System 2 (see Chapter 2), no region in the brain that you can think of as its home. They are nicknames for processes that take place in your brain, but they aren't real entities. System 1 and 2 are fictional concepts, invented to better understand how the brain works.

Psychologists Keith Stanovich and Richard West first introduced the terms System 1 and System 2. Later, these terms gained greater prominence through the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. A simple name, rather than, say, "automatic system," was chosen because it takes less effort to remember.

Very good question. Find the answer to it below.