Two Minds Blog

  The dominant approach to behavior change in 2020 was still "cognitive-behavioral therapy" (CBT). If you pick a therapist at random from the phone book, chances are that they will offer this brand of treatment. Furthermore, the majority of behavior-focused grants funded by the National Institutes of Health use either cognitive-behavioral methods, or the related social-cognitive model, to explain and influence people's health choices. Although CBT is the dominant model of behavior change (having replaced older psychodynamic approaches in the 1980s and 1990s), it has a checkered history that shows its combined and sometimes competing roots in both the Intuitive and Narrative systems. In fact, today's CBT is an amalgam of two earlier schools of thought that were once in fierce opposition. Behaviorism was the earlier approach, developed by laboratory-based American psychologists starting around the turn of the 20th century. This school of thought attempted to change peo...

A colleague recently asked me about this sentence in our 2017 article on Two Minds Theory: " people often make one type of decision based on the gist of health information presented (narrative system) but another based on specific details (intuitive system)." He questioned whether this was really true -- wouldn't the Narrative mind be the one that gets the details right, and the Intuitive mind be the one that glosses over them? I still think that my original description of the systems is right, that narratives are broad while intuitions are specific. I'm sharing my argument below. The narrative system (Kahneman’s System II) is the logical, rational mind, so I can see why that might seem tied to specifics, while the heuristic-driven intuitive system (Kahneman’s System I) might seem more vulnerable to errors based on poor attention to data. But in fact I see the intuitive system as excessively driven by details , including some that might not be important. It tends to m...