Here’s a quote from Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow:
The experimenters recruited 40 Princeton students to take the CRT (Cognitive Reflection Test).
Half of them saw the puzzles in a small font in washed-out gray print. The
puzzles were legible, but the font induced cognitive strain. The results tell a
clear story: 90% of the students who saw the CRT in normal font made at
least one mistake in the test, but the proportion dropped to 35% when the
font was barely legible. You read this correctly: performance was better
with the bad font. Cognitive strain, whatever its source, mobilizes System
2, which is more likely to reject the intuitive answer suggested by System 1.
Is there really a ‘system 1’ and ‘system 2’ anyway? Brain is a real-time system, and has to provide gradual de-rating when the time is shorter. When facing a really complicated problem that would take a lot of time to solve, there’s “system 2” type reasoning being not even wrong if not given enough time.
“System 1” and “System 2″ aren’t meant to represent separate sub-minds; they’re just a helpful categorization of mental processes. If you want a fuller disclaimer on this useful oversimplification, Kahneman has an excellent one in Thinking, Fast and Slow.
Anything that activates System 2 (for instance, writing questions in a difficult-to-read font) has the same effect.
Sounds interesting; got a citation?
Here’s a quote from Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow:
Is there really a ‘system 1’ and ‘system 2’ anyway? Brain is a real-time system, and has to provide gradual de-rating when the time is shorter. When facing a really complicated problem that would take a lot of time to solve, there’s “system 2” type reasoning being not even wrong if not given enough time.
“System 1” and “System 2″ aren’t meant to represent separate sub-minds; they’re just a helpful categorization of mental processes. If you want a fuller disclaimer on this useful oversimplification, Kahneman has an excellent one in Thinking, Fast and Slow.