Neglect of Ambiguity and Suppression of Doubt

NEGLECT OF AMBIGUITY AND SUPPRESSION OF DOUBT

Figure 6

What do the three exhibits in figure 6 have in common? The answer is that all are ambiguous. You almost certainly read the display on the left as A B C and the one on the right as 12 13 14, but the middle items in both displays are identical. You could just as well have read them as A 13 C or 12 B 14, but you did not. Why not? The same shape is read as a letter in a context of letters and as a number in a context of numbers. The entire context helps determine the interpretation of each element. The shape is ambiguous, but you jump to a conclusion about its identity and do not become aware of the ambiguity that was resolved.

In the sentence Ann approached the bank, you probably imagined a woman with money on her mind, walking toward a building with tellers and secure vaults. But this plausible interpretation is not the only possible one; the sentence is ambiguous. If an earlier sentence had been “They were floating gently down the river,” you would have imagined an altogether different scene. When you have just been thinking of a river, the word bank is not associated with money. In the absence of an explicit context, System 1 generated a likely context on its own. We know that it is System 1 because you were not aware of the choice or of the possibility of another interpretation. Unless you have been canoeing recently, you probably spend more time going to banks than floating on rivers, and you resolved the ambiguity accordingly. When uncertain, System 1 bets on an answer, and the bets are guided by experience. The rules of the betting are intelligent: recent events and the current context have the most weight in determining an interpretation. When no recent event comes to mind, more distant memories govern. Among your earliest and most memorable experiences was singing your ABCs; you did not sing your A13Cs.

The most important aspect of both examples is that a definite choice was made, but you did not know it. Only one interpretation came to mind, and you were never aware of the ambiguity. System 1 does not keep track of alternatives that it rejects, or even of the fact that there were alternatives. Conscious doubt is not in the repertoire of System 1; it requires maintaining incompatible interpretations in mind at the same time, which demands mental effort. Uncertainty and doubt are the domain of System 2.