# [[vn-2025-06-30 Effort and energy in system two thinking]] Date: 2025-06-30 ![[EWB1Mss1.mp3]] ## Transcript Chapters 2 and 3 of Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. These two chapters talked about how System 2 requires a lot of effort, but interestingly that effort really, really attacks System 2, regardless of whether it's emotional effort or cognitive effort or rational effort or even self-control. So they found out through some studies that people who were already cognitively or emotionally under some strain found it really difficult to engage System 2. And so they would fall back to System 1. There was a lot more intentionality that was required for people under this type of effort, under some effort, to go and still use and still engage in System 2 thinking. They found that this was true even for people that should be using System 2, like for example judges. There was a study where they looked at how System 2 requires glucose to function properly. And to test that, they looked at how judges awarded parole or not to some criminals. They found out that just before judges were fed again, they had like the lowest rate of parole that they would allow, going to zero percent even just before lunch, and then after lunch it would be higher again. So this shows us that System 2 thinking not only requires more, you know, effort that we can't really see, but it also requires more energy, like actual physiological energy in the form of glucose. So the problem is that these things can be still fought against. You know, now that we know that System 2 requires both effort and energy, we can still deliberately engage in it or act in such a way as to refuel ourselves, our effort and our energy, before we engage in System 2 thinking. But the lazy controllers, Daniel Kahneman puts it, do not do either of those. The lazy controller will just let System 1 thinking occur. And that's the problem. There was also a correlation that was found between System 1 thinkers, so people who just defaulted to their System 1, even when a task called for System 2, were more likely to be racist or fall prey to stereotypes or act in discriminatory ways. ## Related Notes - [[vn-2025-06-26 Understanding System 1 and System 2 thinking]] - [[vn-2025-06-26 Tackling debt and emotional boundaries]] - [[vn-2025-06-26 Remediations before ghosting and the role of doubt]]