Positive Psychology | HR Matters
Half a mind By Sulynn Choong
Checking in. Ever caught yourself saying “I have half a mind to ... (do something) but ... (did not follow through with some excuse not to do it)”? Or perhaps driven home by default although you were on your way to somewhere else? Jumped to some embarrassing conclusion about something or someone, only to realise later that you missed some material contradictory information? As for me, I often call my daughter by my younger sister’s name, much to the former’s chagrin. Often our excuse is ‘oops, not thinking’ or ‘sorry, I was not all there’. On the other hand, when I get exasperated, I tend to lament that ‘people just don’t use their brains’; or are ‘lazy to think’. Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Laureate in Economics, leads a band of psychologists whose research findings show that there are two teams of little people who run the business of thinking inside our heads a.k.a. System 1 (Team S1) and System 2 (Team S2). (Aside: I love this guy for making my notion of ‘little people in the head’ legitimate). Team S1 is quick as a flash, intuitive, automatic and spontaneous, constantly monitoring the world inside and outside the mind and checking for coherence. It continuously generates assessments of the situation e.g. risk evaluation (to go ahead or retreat), pleasure or pain, normal or novel, and is self-preserving but without specific intention and with little effort (intuitive judgment). So Team S1 helps us recognise a friendly face, and realise that the shoe on the left is the right shoe and should be worn on the right 18
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October 2013
HR Matters
foot. Its responses may be innate like recognising anger from facial expression/tone, or learned through prolonged practice like typing on the keyboard without looking or multiplying 2 x 2. So what does Team S2 do? Team S2 acts slowly; it allocates attention to effortful mental tasks of directing attention and searching through our memories to find answers to all new, unfamiliar or perplexing impressions generated by Team S1. Team S2 does calculations, makes choices, exercises self-control, and ponders the big stuff. Most of what it thinks and does come originally from Team S1, and Team S2 only takes over when things get tough, and has the deciding vote. Note that intense focusing on a task can make people effectively blind to stimuli that normally attract attention – selective attention. For example, consider when reversing our car into a narrow parking space in a congested area. We turn the radio volume down and stop listening to the conversation in the car to focus intensely on distance, turning angle, speed and space. All attention and thinking