Two Minds Blog

We've had lots of conversation in our household lately on the question of whether to open schools for in-person learning this fall. Even if you don't have children or grandchildren affected, this is a broad question of public health: Not only  should we personally go back?  but also  should anyone be allowed to go back given the current state of the pandemic?  or even should anyone be allowed to keep their kids at home? (e.g., based on hypothesized risks to mental health or learning).   These are difficult questions because they involve competing goals such as education versus health, parents' work demands versus children's support needs, and also because they must be made with limited information and under time constraints. These two features make real-world decisions particularly difficult, as I described in a recent post about naturalistic decision-making . Another framework that may be helpful as we think about whether to re-open school buildings ...

Survey methods are the most widespread tools of behavioral science, and I have advocated for more use of daily surveys to study people's experiences in the context of their everyday lives. A central premise of Two Minds Theory is that Intuitive-level thinking is what actually produces behavior, so if we want to understand behavior we need to sample people's experiences at the Intuitive level.  My argument has been that real-time, real-world surveys provide information closer to the occurrence of actual health behaviors, which tend to unfold on a day-by-day basis in routine contexts. And on the Two Minds Theory website I have published a list of tools that can be used for daily electronic surveys. Yet surveys are based in language, and I have also argued that any type of conscious thought using language is a product of the Narrative system. Because surveys are really people's reports of their thoughts or feelings, can surveys really tell us anything useful about the In...

These past 3 months, most Americans have been waiting: Waiting to see family and friends, waiting for the stores to re-stock their shelves, waiting to get back to work, waiting to see whether or not we develop symptoms during a 2-week quarantine. These experiences of waiting highlight a key difference between the Narrative and Intuitive minds, the property that in Two Minds Theory we call "temporal immediacy." Things that are happening right now are experienced by the Intuitive mind. Things that will happen in the future exist only in the Narrative mind. The difference is as simple as that. The temporal-immediacy difference between our two minds shapes our everyday experiences in many ways. For example, when we are waiting for something good to happen, time seems to stretch out indefinitely. Immediacy means that we actually experience  a positive event if it happens now (the Intuitive system), but we can only anticipate  it in the future via the Narrative system. "I'...