Automatic and reflective thinking
First of all, it is important to understand that people have two distinctive styles of thinking, that they use during the day: automatic thinking and reflective thinking.
- Automatic thinking is quick, emotional, impulsive, and instinctive.
- Reflective thinking is slow, rational, effortful and deliberate.
Automatic thinking has worked great for us in the past as it saves time. If I ask you the answer to 2 + 2 you’ll quickly, and automatically, answer 4. If you were asked to answer to 32 x 144, it’s likely that you would need to think differently. You would want to reflect, and put more effort and time into finding the right answer.
These two different methods of thinking and deciding are not bad or good in themselves. For many decision-making situations, the ability to make quick instinctive decisions is a valuable capability. However it can cause people to make irrational unhelpful decisions— influenced by distractions such as advertising and mass media. The choice for one of the two methods depends mainly on whether in the end you want to make a decision that is right for the short- or long-term. This is because one of our main biases in our automatic thinking is that we can’t resist short-term temptations even though they might harm us on the long term.
The insight into this dual way of thinking poses opportunities for you to use when working with service, marketing or policy innovations. First you need to consider whether your customer will make a better decision with their automatic, instinctive thinking or with their reflective, rational thinking. Then either play on the biases and flaws to have customers make use of their automatic thinking, or “shock” them by confronting them with their biases, to lead them towards more reflective thinking.