Daniel Kahneman on Associative Coherence
Introduction
In the book Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, he gives an example of how our subconscious associations can effect our understanding of a given piece of information. This is a concept described as a part of System 1 thinking.
Excerpt
Read this sentence: After spending a day exploring beautiful sights in the crowded streets of New York, Jane discovered that her wallet was missing.
When people who had read this brief story (along with many others) were given a surprise recall test, the word pickpocket was more strongly associated with the story than the word sights, even though the latter was actually in the sentence and the former was not.
The rules of associative coherence tell us what happened. The event of a lost wallet, New York, and crowds are juxtaposed, they jointly evoke the explanation that a pickpocket caused the loss.
Thoughts
This is an interesting example of how our mind (System 1) takes the quickest route to keep a coherent mental model, even at the expense of accuracy.
I can see this regularly happening in IT. A lot of our work is tied to specific technologies, vendors and communities. With people having preferences, agendas and sometimes even religiously promoting a specific methodology or technology, it can easily influence our perception of any given piece of information.
What might color you or your teams’ perception?