How my mind works

I'm reading the book titled Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman and finding it quite fascinating to better understand how my mind works.  And it's really quite relevant as I try and make sense of why I made the decisions I made, how I chose what to ignore, and what I was willing to tolerate for so long.  It's applicable not only as I heal from my divorce but also as I make sense of the ways I interact with friends, family, colleagues, etc.  So although my understanding is still in its infancy, I'm going to try to put together some of my thoughts here.

Most of our day is governed by the intuition of our System 1.  System 1 is constantly taking information in, making associations, and recommending decisions to our System 2 which accepts a lot of those recommendations without too much thought.  System 2 is our more conscious thought process that kicks in when there is something that we feel needs more analysis.

One really interesting point Kahneman made was that if our cognitive load is high it can overload our System 2 such that our System 1 has to step in and make decisions without the benefit of the analysis available to System 2.  This can result in making less than ideal decisions that take into account a very limited portion of the information we have.

So in the case of my ex-husband, I now realize he and the relationship really drained me and based on my physical pain, there likely was underlying stress.  These are things that would have increased my cognitive load and made my thought process more inefficient, depending more on System 1 for things that System 2 probably should have handled.

Now let's talk about biases.  Confirmation bias is a bias I was previously aware of although hadn’t really considered the extent of the role it plays.  It is the idea that based on our prior experience and beliefs, we have a preconceived idea of how something should be and so we focus more on the facts that confirm those beliefs and ideas.  Our brain much prefers when things fit neatly into the world view we already hold.

The halo effect exaggerates emotional consistency.  It puts more weight on the information we learn first, our first impressions.  Subsequent information is mostly wasted.  

The author gave an example from his teaching days.  Each of his students had written two essays that he needed to grade.  At first he read both essays for each student one after another.  What he found is that a student who had written a strong essay for the first one and a weak one for the second one would ultimately receive higher scores overall than a student who had done the same but in reverse order (a weak one first followed by a strong one).  His impressions and assumptions about the student he gained from the first essay were strongly influencing how he graded the second one.

So if I put myself back at the beginning of the relationship with my now ex-husband, I was coming in with a world view of what I thought marriage was.  My parents have a stable marriage with reasonably good communication that they modeled for us.  Throughout my life I had watched them consider each other in small and big ways.  This was honestly all I really knew in any depth about marriage.  So I went into this marriage looking to confirm that my marriage would be the same.

In addition, we had quite the amazing first year.  He was showing me all kinds of ways he was considering me and pouring into me and our relationship.  He was kind.  He was attentive.  He was fun.  He was supportive.  And he was sharing the same values I held.  His parents were even doing the same in the way they were welcoming and loving me.  They were all on their best behavior giving off a pretty great first impression.  That first year of positive impressions held so much weight in my mind that when things shifted, it was easy to ignore the new information.  That new information was wasted.

Kahneman repeats often what he has abbreviated WYSIATI, "What you see is all there is" to describe the mental shortcut we use when we don't account for missing information.  I suppose that applies to both information we have not yet come across and information we have chosen to ignore.  

I held on so firmly to the image of him that showed up in that first year probably because it was my first impression of him and also probably because the new information was so incongruent with that earlier version of him and with my world view.  For cognitive ease, my brain focused on the earlier impressions that fit more easily into my world view. 

And then as life got stressful in those early years of marriage and I then developed chronic pain, my cognitive load increased to the point I imagine I was depending too much on System 1 to get me through each day.

I'm not going to spend the time to elaborate here but I can see ways this is relevant to friendships I've had over the years as well.

So knowledge is power, right?  Theoretically, if I know my mind will try to take these mental shortcuts and follow my biases, I should be able to use that information to pause and give my System 2 time to better reflect on relationships in my life.  I say this recognizing that my ability to predict my future actions is pretty poor.  But understanding the traps I’ve previously fallen into will make me more aware of what to look for in the future to try and avoid repeating some of those same mistakes.