Violent crimes have much to teach us about fast and slow thinking

In 2011 I bought, read, and enjoyed Daniel Kahneman's book, "Thinking, Fast and Slow." In a blog post I wrote about the book, I included some passages from Kahneman about System 1 (fast) and System 2 (slow) modes of thinking.

Some years ago, the psychologist Timothy Wilson wrote a book with the evocative title Strangers to Ourselves. You have now been introduced to that stranger in you, which may be in control of much of what you do, although you rarely have a glimpse of it.

System 1 [the fast brain] provides the impressions that often turn into your beliefs, and is the source of the impulses that often become your choices and your actions. It offers a tacit interpretation of what happens to you and around you, linking the present with the recent past and with expectations about the near future.

It contains the model of the world that instantly evaluates events as normal or surprising. It is the source of your rapid and often precise intuitive judgments. And it does most of this without your conscious awareness of its activities.

System 1 is also, as we will see in the following chapters, the origin of many of the systematic errors in your intuitions.

...Because System 1 operates automatically and cannot be turned off at will, errors of intuitive thought are often difficult to prevent. Biases cannot always be avoided, because System 2 may have no clue to the error. Even when cues to likely errors are available, errors can be prevented only by the enhanced monitoring and effortful activity of System 2.

As a way to live your life, however, continuous vigilance is not necessarily good, and it is certainly impractical. Constantly questioning our own thinking would be impossibly tedious, and System 2 is much too slow and inefficient to serve as a substitute for System 1 in making routine decisions.

The best we can do is a compromise: learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high. The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people's mistakes than our own.

Fast and slow thinking is a core concept in a fascinating article by Malcolm Gladwell in the June 9, 2025 issue of The New Yorker, "The Heat of the Moment: To stop violent crime, we need to grasp what really drives it." Here's a PDF file. (The online version has a different title from the print edition.)
Download What We Get Wrong About Violent Crime | The New Yorker

The article begins with a tale of a killing of a man, Jeremy Brown, who punched a woman in the face in a fast-food restaurant, Maxwell Street Express, on the South Side of Chicago because he was incensed that she was trying to make a time-consuming special order when there were many customers in line.

That impulsive System 1 action would have been bad enough, but it snowballed when the woman, Carlishia Hood, texted her son after the argument started, asking him to come inside. The son got angry when he saw his mother being repeatedly hit. He pulled out a gun and shot Brown in the back. After he ran outside, the son kept firing and killed him.

Gladwell's article is a thoughtful review of a book by Jens Ludwig, "Unforgiving Places." I was surprised that no one apparently had thought of this before, given how much attention is paid to violence in the United States (a decidedly violent country), but it makes a lot of sense.

Ludwig is the director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, and he uses as a heuristic the psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s version of the distinction between System 1 and System 2 thinking. According to Kahneman, these are the two cognitive modes that all human beings toggle between. The first is fast, automatic, and intuitive. The second is slow, effortful, and analytical. Ludwig’s innovation is to apply the dichotomy to criminal acts.

A System 2 crime might be a carefully planned robbery, in which the assailant stalks and assesses his victims before attacking them. This is what criminologists call instrumental violence: acts, Ludwig writes, “committed in order to achieve some tangible or ‘instrumental’ goal (getting someone’s cash or phone or watch or drug turf), where violence is a means to some other, larger end.” A System 1 crime, by contrast, is an act of what Ludwig calls “expressive violence”—aimed not at gaining something tangible but at hurting someone, often in a sudden burst of frustration or anger.

The central argument of “Unforgiving Places” is that Americans, in their attempts to curb crime, have made a fundamental conceptual error. We’ve assumed that the problem is instrumental violence—and have fashioned our criminal-justice system around that assumption. But the real problem is expressive violence. The ongoing bloodshed in America’s streets is just Maxwell Street Express, over and over again.

Recall that Kahneman said in the passage above that System 1 (fast) thinking works fine for most routine decisions. Opening the refrigerator, I don't need to get all analytic about which leftover to have for dinner. My intuition can tell me. But if my doctor says that I really need to lose some weight to reduce the risk of a serious medical condition, repeatedly basing my eating choices on intuition is likely to get me into trouble.

Knowing this, I can choose to do the "slow, effortful, and analytical" System 2 thing to override my snap preference for high calorie meals. This is pretty much what I do to maintain my current weight at just about what I weighed in high school. (I'm proud of this, which is why I'm mentioning it.)

Frequently, like just about every night, I have an urge to have a dessert that goes beyond the two low sugar cookies that only have 100 calories total. But when I get on the scale every morning, the System 2 pleasure I feel at keeping my weight down compensates for the System 1 disappointment of me saying "no" when my mind says, "Hey, Brian, you really should be eating a slice of frosted cake rather than those pathetic low-carb, high fiber cookies."

Here's how Gladwell's article ends. It contains some good advice for all of us.

He [Ludwig] wants us, instead, to take System 1 behavior seriously. First, stop talking about criminals as if they occupy some distinct moral category. Neither Jeremy Brown nor Hood’s son was evil. They were caught in an unforgiving moment. Second, stop locking up so many people for long prison terms. The best way to keep arguments among teen-agers from turning violent is for adults to step in and tell them to cool down—and mass incarceration drains adults from troubled neighborhoods.

Third, spend more time thinking about what makes one neighborhood safe and another unsafe. Ludwig cites a randomized trial in New York City’s public-housing projects, which found that developments given upgraded outdoor lighting experienced a thirty-five-per-cent reduction in serious crimes compared with those left as is. A well-lit space makes it easier for bystanders to see a confrontation unfold—and makes those involved a little more self-conscious.

But the biggest opportunity, Ludwig argues, lies in behavioral modification. He writes about a program in Chicago called BAM—Becoming a Man—which teaches teen-agers how to navigate potentially volatile encounters. In a large randomized trial, Ludwig compared students on Chicago’s West Side and South Side who had participated in BAM with those who hadn’t, and found that participation reduced arrests for violent crime by fifty per cent.

He describes one of the program’s exercises, in which students are paired off. One is given a ball; the other is told he has thirty seconds to take it.

Almost all of them rely on force to try to complete the assignment; they try to pry the other person’s hand open, or wrestle or even pummel the other person. During the debrief that follows, a BAM counselor asks why no one asked for the ball. Most youths respond by saying their partner would have thought they were a punk (or something worse—you can imagine). The counselor then asks the partner what he would have done if asked. The usual answer: “I would have given it, it’s just a stupid ball.”

Exactly. It’s almost always a stupid ball. Or someone asking to hold the pickle. No one walked into Maxwell Street Express that night expecting to die, or to kill. But that’s the nature of expressive violence: no plan, no purpose—just a match struck in passing. As Ludwig reminds us, we have been trying to stop violent offenders without understanding what goes on in the mind of the violent offender.

Comments

[Appreciative Reader]

That's interesting! (Haven't read the PDF yet. Will, later.)

Two questions:

1. These systems, are they metaphors, just a schema? Or do they represent observed thought patterns, corresponding with observed brain-neural pathways?

2. How does that tie in with no-free-will? The latter paradigm tells us both systems are "automatic", as is the choice which system we " choose".

[Spence Tepper]

All progress is the result of flow, not force.

Where there is force, flow is impeded.

Where there is flow, no force is needed. The only force there is, is in flow. All else is illusion.

Where you see obstruction, where you witness frustration, complaint, conflict, this is misaligned attention.

Withdraw from it, into a state of flow.

What has happened has already happened. Stay here and now in your own flow. Accept and adapt.

Flow isn't quick. It is instantaneous and eternal.

These are the basic concepts anyone can be taught. A child can learn to see the world in this way. They emerge and confirm themselves in that space that is their birthright, and that is the joy of mindful observation.

Nothing on earth is worth losing that space, so stay there, it is often an act of courage.

[Louie]

The universe is not an atheism vs. Sant Mat.

The world is full of rainbows.

Basically, I avoid anything that’s strictly RSSB or atheist bbecaboth of those “religions” are SOOOO extreme.

[manjit]

Best comment I've read here in years!

Cheers Louie!

[Appreciative Reader]

Read the full article, just now.

Doesn't seem to be a full-on neuorscience thing after all, as I'd originally imagined. So, I don't know, maybe the two questions I'd asked earlier are a matter of over-analyzing a simple discussion? This is just a general commonsense idea that, so far as it goes, actually makes a great deal of sense. Agreed, slowing down consciously does often help with making better decisions, absolutely. Great idea to make that one's default when things start getting heated.