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Slow thinking is effortful thinking
What System One does
Hear 2+2 and something comes into your head. Hear "your mother" and an emotion comes with it. All of that is System One: automatic, involuntary, and out of your control.
What marks System Two
System Two is slower, though speed isn't what marks it. It is effortful and deliberate. Controlling yourself, controlling your thoughts, and performing complicated computations are all activities of System Two.
System One does most of the mental work. Nobody has to think about where to put the next foot or which word should come next. System Two handles the rest, important work that gets done when a person slows down.
Life in cognitive ease
With System One running the show in a free flow of cognitive ease, a person is more impulsive, more emotional, and more optimistic, and generally follows first impressions and first intuitions.
How does mental effort show up in the body?
In the 1960s, Daniel Kahneman and Jackson Beatty measured pupil size while people did mental tasks. In one task, participants heard a string of digits and had to say each digit plus one. Their pupils widened steadily as the string grew and reached their largest at the hardest moment. Pupils shrank back as soon as the task ended, and a given task produced the same pattern in most participants.
Where did the names System One and Two come from?
The labels System 1 and System 2 were proposed by psychologists Keith Stanovich and Richard West in a 2000 paper. Daniel Kahneman adopted them and made them famous in his 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow. The idea of two modes of thought is older, and researchers had described versions of it as dual-process theories for decades. Some psychologists argue that thinking runs along a continuum rather than splitting cleanly into two systems.
Why does easy thinking breed confidence?
Psychologist Robert Zajonc found in 1968 that repeated exposure to a word or a symbol makes people like it more, which he called the mere exposure effect. Familiar things are processed more smoothly, and smooth processing carries a positive feeling. In 1999, Rolf Reber and Norbert Schwarz showed people statements printed in high or low color contrast. Statements that were easier to read were judged more likely to be true.