the relative importance of System 1 in determiningvoting choices is not the same for all people. We will encounter otherexamples of such individual differences.System 1 understands language
of course
and understanding dependson the basic assessments that are routinely carried out as part of theperception of events and the comprehension of messages. Theseassessments include computations of similarity and representativeness
attributions of causality
and evaluations of the availability of associationsand exemplars. They are performed even in the absence of a specific taskset
although the results are used to meet task demands as they arise.The list of basic assessments is long
but not every possible attribute isassessed. For an example
look briefly at figure 7.A glance provides an immediate impression of many features of thedisplay. You know that the two towers are equally tall and that they aremore similar to each other than the tower on the left is to the array of blocksin the middle. However
you do not immediately know that the number ofblocks in the left-hand tower is the same as the number of blocks arrayedon the floor
and you have no impression of the height of the tower that youcould build from them. To confirm that the numbers are the same
youwould need to count the two sets of blocks and compare the results
anactivity that only System 2 can carry out.
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