Narrative and Intuitive Thinking as a Cycle

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I’m excited to announce the publication of a major advance in Two Minds Theory! After the 2018 publication of TMT, I struggled to explain how the narrative system might have any effect at all on behavior. Based on many people’s experiences it seemed true that it did, but all my efforts to describe how led back to the old idea of the Narrative Mind as “executive control” and the goal of making people’s behavior more Narratively and less Intuitively controlled. This is similar to Kahneman’s idea that we would all be better off if only our “lazy” Narrative System would be more active.

Unfortunately, I also knew there was no room in TMT for any direct influence of the Narrative System on behavior — it’s a central point of the theory that narratives exert no direct control. You can also see this in your own experience: Imagine trying to catch a ball. If you take the time to think “now I am raising my arm; now I am opening my fingers; now I am wrapping them around ...” the result will be the ball hitting you in the face while you cogitate. The process of conscious thought is simply too slow to effectively oversee any of our everyday behaviors.

CU PhD student Laurel Messer solved my problem by suggesting that the relationship between the Intuitive and Narrative systems can be most clearly seen as a cycle. Her new cycle diagram, above, replaces the more linear diagram in our original TMT publication. Laurel’s version adds a time lag in between the Intuitive response and the Narrative one, which is a better representation than my original diagram showing the two processes in parallel.

In Laurel’s version of the TMT diagram, a stimulus leads to an immediate reaction at the Intuitive level of the mind, and this “gut reaction” then leads right away to behavior. The behavior in many cases then has consequences (recognizing of course that other consequences are delayed — eating a slice of cake now feels good, but maybe later I will regret it). By the time the Narrative mind gets to weigh in, all of these things are available data with which to construct a narrative — the stimulus itself, the subjective perception and emotional response, the behavior, and the consequence (at least the immediate one). The Narrative mind then has the role of commentator, observing the action and telling a story about what just happened.

In what way, then, does the Narrative mind affect behavior? TMT posits that narratives themselves can lead to different Intuitive-level responses. Laurel’s contribution was to clarify that the Narrative response comes too late to affect behavior THIS time around, but a new narrative can make a difference the NEXT time one finds oneself in a similar situation. 

The Narrative mind is still just one of many influences on the Intuitive mind, and much of Intuitive thinking remains a black box, so even with this new understanding we can’t expect people to suddenly become rational Narrative beings. But the new version of TMT might help to generate better understandings and methods or helping people change.

You can read Laurel’s full paper here. It also features an application of TMT to the self-management behaviors of adolescents with type 1 diabetes, a population that we haven’t discussed before. I’m excited by the many possible applications of this new way of representing Two Minds Theory.