Once upon a time, when I was in college there was this freshman girl, really cute, bubbly, smiling, attractive. She had a personality that drew people to her. Everyone seemed to like her. One Saturday night at a party I had opportunity to talk to her, just the two of us. Boy howdy, I thought, I was one lucky country boy!
We talked for a while. She laughed a lot. But her thinking was… different. She made non sequitur comments, that seemed deeply philosophical. She would say things like,
“Do you know a horse?”
“Well, My body is mine.”
“I just love long sleeve vests!”
“My past is not a burden.”
“I work at McDonald’s”
What? All the time she talked nearly nonstop, with conviction and the confidence that she knew exactly what she meant.
Was I too dumb or uneducated to understand her deep meanings? After all, I was just an unsophisticated kid. It did not take long before I was confused and intimidated. My confidence was shot. She was too smart for me! So dejected, I politely excused myself and moved on.
We shared a couple of classes early on. Her class comments received admiration from her friends but confused looks from professors who did not bother to question her remarks. I occasionally saw her over the years until graduation, always surrounded by “friends”, intent on everything she said. I became more educated and got a bit smarter during those four years, and finally came to understand that although she had great rote memory, she was not deeply intuitive or even intelligent. Her random language revealed her random thinking — her language was confused because her thoughts were confused. She simply could not think coherently. So why did so many people believe she made so much sense? It dawned on me one day that it was because of her winning personality and her ability to weave those nonsense statements into plausible sounding stories that appealed to what Kahneman called Thought System One. Her stories were simple and emotional, and people could easily follow those stories and believe her without questioning. That in turn made her feel invincible. People who thought analytically (Thought System Two) went away confused.
I lost track of her for many years and one day discovered she had become a lawyer, moved through many jobs, and acquired a national reputation and importance. She still told believable stories comprised of weird comments and frequent untruths. She was still surrounded by “friends” – even more than in college – many of them rich and powerful. I wondered how someone with a head full of cottage cheese had accomplished so much, when a line from a Beatles’ song came to mind…
“I get by with a little help from my friends…”
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