Sidney Winter has a knack of asking very good questions about routine. Recently, he wrote me that he was rewriting a symposium contribution and relying on the habit/intelligence/instinct (or emotion) triad that Dewey sketches out in Human Nature and Conduct. He considered whether he might do as well by relying instead on the partially parallel distinction between System 1 and System 2 put forward by Daniel Kahneman in his widely read 2011 book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Sid wondered what I thought about the relative usefulness for routine researchers of the two frameworks. Here's a slightly edited version of my answer.
When the word first came out that Kahneman was working on this book, I had very high hopes, and perhaps my later impression was somewhat undermined by those initial aspirations. (This is just the sort of mechanism that Kahneman and his longtime partner, Amos Tversky, have helped us to recognize, and try to discount.) I had hoped for a milestone synthesis of contemporary psychological progress with the problems of understanding economic action by a Nobel laureate in economics who is also, as Steven Pinker has said, "one of the world's great psychologists".
While the resulting book is a welcome contribution to the way the broad public understands choice and decision, in the end I don't think it as useful to researchers studying organizational routine as Dewey's views. I wish Kahneman had brought more of modern psychology to bear in his definition of his Systems 1 and 2. But, of course, 'Psychology' labels a gigantic tent, and one can hardly fault Kahneman for producing a book that makes one corner of the expanse more intelligible and credible for a large audience of serious readers, especially when he has played such a key role in delineating that section of the larger territory, the area we now call 'behavioral decision theory'.
The basic shortcoming of the book for my purposes is its failure to transcend its roots in the cognitive psychology of roughly the 1980s. The whole turn to neuropsychology might as well not have happened. And with it, the book omits our developing understanding the mechanisms producing much what Kahneman groups together as System 1. It sticks instead to a formulation of System 1 as basically driven by associative memory and as the source of biases that prevent individuals from using System 2 to achieve a better approximation of the kind of rationality in decision making that economists have traditionally posited.
The book is well-titled. It is centered on thinking, not on acting. It never really lets go of the presumption that thinking precedes and determines action, rather than taking thinking as a process of repairing or improving action in light of its results, which would be much closer to Dewey's Pragmatist view. Rather than make emotion a major faculty with first class status in determining action, it is treated as part of System 1, and hence as a source of biases and errors. Though there many discussions that bring up a wider perspective, the book doesn't advance its overall focus beyond the direction Herbert Simon set out in Administrative Behavior (1947) when he argued we had paid too much attention to action, and not enough to "the choice which prefaces all action" (p.1). It is essentially a thorough compendium of evidence for Simon's bounded notion of rationality.
A little tour of the 15-page index for the book provides instructive illustrations. Here are some topics I looked for (with number of indexed mentions - footnotes excluded).
amygdala - an important brain region for emotion (1); anchors and anchoring - with various sub-categories (18); Nassim Taleb (5); Antonio Damasio - a major emotion researcher (1); William James + John Dewey (0); habit (0); routine (0); Danny Kaye (1); affordance (0); J. J. Gibson - a principle theorist of affordances (0); Cass Sunstein (7); declarative memory +non-declarative memory +procedural memory (0) ; major theorists of non-declarative memory such John Anderson +Larry Squire +Eric Kandel – himself a Nobel winner (0); mirror neurons (0); decision weights (15); Richard Thaler (15); neuro-economics (1) ; theory-induced blindness (5); representativeness (19); John Bargh - theorist of priming effects (2); associative memory (13); basal ganglia (0); base rates (15); prefrontal cortex (0); Gary Klein (6); perception+dorsal+ventral (0).
The zeroes in this little index-sampling are signposts for the kinds of topics for which we need an integrated synthesis if we are to better understand routines. To name just a few: we need to know better how action possibilities are perceived; how the speed, coherence, likelihood and attractiveness of action patterns are affected by their repetition; how emotions are mobilized around experiences of action failure (or of surprising success), how tools afford, or prime, action possibilities; what makes it harder, or easier, for large patterns of action to be de- or re- composed into smaller chunks and novel larger patterns; and how all these processes function in the context of social groups.
It's not that the lightly indexed topics never come up in the text, of course. But they are positioned as subsidiary to the main points. Emotion, as mentioned, comes up as an element of System 1, since it is obviously a source of bias in decision making. (This is odd in another way, though, since emotions, are often mediated by diffusion of hormones (0) like cortisol (0) or oxytocin (0), and are among the slower processes in the brain, while System 1 is characterized as the "fast" system.) Specific phenomena like the Zajonc mere exposure effect come up, but also as illustrations of biases. Although Zajonc also did this work in the 1980s, he moved on in more recent reviews of the literature to link the effect to studies of the amygdala and show how the fast action path predisposes slower conscious perception. To my disappointment, Kahneman doesn't follow up – or even allude to – any of these connections Zajonc saw. There are many more examples of potentially important material that loses much of the impact it could have had by being constrained to a framework that, at bottom, is rooted in a category of residuals.
It's not that the lightly indexed topics never come up in the text, of course. But they are positioned as subsidiary to the main points. Emotion, as mentioned, comes up as an element of System 1, since it is obviously a source of bias in decision making. (This is odd in another way, though, since emotions, are often mediated by diffusion of hormones (0) like cortisol (0) or oxytocin (0), and are among the slower processes in the brain, while System 1 is characterized as the "fast" system.) Specific phenomena like the Zajonc mere exposure effect come up, but also as illustrations of biases. Although Zajonc also did this work in the 1980s, he moved on in more recent reviews of the literature to link the effect to studies of the amygdala and show how the fast action path predisposes slower conscious perception. To my disappointment, Kahneman doesn't follow up – or even allude to – any of these connections Zajonc saw. There are many more examples of potentially important material that loses much of the impact it could have had by being constrained to a framework that, at bottom, is rooted in a category of residuals.
So I end up glad that popular discourse has such a good and authoritative account of what behavioral economics has accomplished. It's being on the best seller lists (along with Charles Duhigg's book on habit) raises my hopes that the public has some thirst for more realistic accounts of how behavior is generated. But I don't think we've gotten the intellectual platform we need for future research on skill and routine in organizational contexts. That modern retelling of the Dewey/James world view we'll apparently have to wait for. In the meantime, the originals, supplemented with a patchwork of cites to modern studies, seem to be the best we have.
