LIKE many people over the past few years, I have found myself transitioning to audiobooks as my main means of devouring literature. After a day of squinting at my laptop, I find it far more comfortable to 鈥渞ead with my ears鈥� while my eyes are resting. My consumption of new books has doubled as a result 鈥� but a recent paper makes me wonder if this will come at the price of my comprehension. When we listen to a text, it seems, we may engage in less deliberative thinking and rely more on our gut feelings to appraise its content.
The comes from Boaz Keysar and Janet Geipel, both then at the University of Chicago, and it draws from the 鈥渄ual process model鈥� of mental processing popularised in Daniel Kahneman鈥檚 best-selling book Thinking, Fast and Slow. According to this view of the mind, we have two ways of appraising information. System 1 is intuitive, relying on instinct and feeling. It is quick, but vulnerable to misinformation and cognitive bias. System 2 is analytical: when it is engaged, we think our way through the material step by step. It is more effortful, but also more rational.
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Over the past two decades, psychologists have devised various tests to determine which of these two systems a person is using. As one example, consider the following question: How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the Ark?
If you answered two, you were probably only considering the gist of the question, which is System 1 thinking. To get to the right answer 鈥� zero 鈥� you need to think more carefully about the wording, which would allow you to remember it was Noah who built the Ark, not Moses. That is thelit kind of analytical process that requires System 2.
Geipel and Keysar鈥檚 stroke of genius was to investigate whether the sensory modality 鈥� seeing versus hearing 鈥� of the information would make a difference. They found that it did: when answering these kinds of simple-but-deceptive questions, participants were significantly more likely to make errors when the sentences were spoken out loud, rather than written. The researchers repeated the experiment with a greater range of tasks, in more diverse populations. The results were the same: when listening rather than reading, people were more likely to lean on System 1.
A greater reliance on our intuitions could be a problem if we are consuming information that needs logical scrutiny. If I am tackling a book about science, I want to be sure I am fully engaged, not just nodding along to dubious arguments. For this reason, I will return to reading non-fiction with my eyes rather than my ears. But I won鈥檛 stop listening to novels. If I am revelling in a story, I am quite happy to go with the flow of my emotions while my critical mind takes a break.
David Robson is an award-winning science writer and the author of The Expectation Effect: How your mindset can transform your life
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