Thought experiment

Let's run a quick thought experiment.  I promise it won't take very long - just watch this trailer for the 2003 American comedy film, "It's a Guy Thing" starring Julia Stiles, Selma Blair, and Jason Lee.  If you've seen the movie, just skip the trailer and read on.

You've just watched a 2:21 movie trailer clip of a movie that is 1 hour and 41 minutes long.  Now tell me exactly what happens in the movie.  Describe Selma Blair's character - her career, her personality, and whatever else comes to mind.  Now do the same for Julia Stiles' character.  What about the character played by Jason Lee.  Who gets the guy in the end?

I would be willing to bet that your answers are all very similar.  I've run this thought experiment for the past several years, and I usually get the same, consistent answers.  Here is how most of my test subjects have described the movie.

Selma Blair plays a rather stuck-up, prudish character.  She's wealthy, and she's probably a lawyer.  Julia Stiles, on the other hand, is happy, go lucky, and a little scatterbrained.  She bounces around from job to job, and she really doesn't know what she is going to do with her life.  Finally, Jason Lee's character isn't sure what he wants in life either.  He's probably a little introverted, and while he likes to have fun, he rarely if ever takes risks.  Most of you say that Jason Lee's character ends up with Julia Stiles' character.  

To this day, I've never seen this movie.  I actually have no idea what happens in the movie, nor do I know if any of the character descriptions above are correct.  But again, the results of my thought experiment have been fairly consistent over the years.  Why?

Our brains are really quite remarkable!  Whenever there is missing information, our brains will fill in the gaps.  The Israeli psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics and author of "Thinking, Fast and Slow" would call this System 1 thinking (as opposed to System 2 thinking).  We use System 1 thinking whenever we need to make quick decisions based on limited information.  Here, our brain's conserve limited resources to make decisions almost automatically and based on instinct.  System 1 thinking is fast and efficient, but it is also prone to bias.  Conversely, System 2 thinking is more analytical and based on reason.  It is slower and uses more mental energy.

We used our System 1 to fill in the gaps.  We completed the story using information from other similar movies that we may have seen (as it turns out, the plot elements of most romcoms are fairly similar).  Stereotype and implicit bias also likely played a role here.  Our brains constructed a complete story based on a short sequence of movie clips lasting just over two minutes.  

As it turns out, we use System 1 thinking all the time.  We are therefore subject to biases and stereotypes, and we often make mistakes.  As my one of my former bosses said, "Whenever there are two people involved, there's always three versions of the story, only one of which is 100% true."  There are times when System 1 thinking is appropriate.  But as leaders, there are other times when we would be better served by using System 2 thinking.