Kahneman was inspired by Stanovich:

>”Among the pioneers [of my field] are.. Keith Stanovich, and Richard West. I borrow the terms System 1 and System 2 from early writings of Stanovich and West that greatly influenced my thinking..” > >—‘Thinking Fast and Slow’ p. 450

He made sure to give Stanovich credit in his public talks too. just off the top I think there was a GoogleTalk Q&A when someone asked Kahneman if “the 2 systems are literal systems that map onto the brain,” and he said something like “no, and to make it even worse, the idea wasn’t even my idea, it was Stanovich’s. I just tweaked his metaphor by making it into an image of ‘2 entities inside you’, but they don’t exist! For some reason I thought it would just be easier to grasp these abstract metaphors about cognitive processes if we imagined these processes as 2 quasi-entities in ourselves”

Kahneman often makes himself seem like a mess in his public q&A’s but he’s just hilariously self-deprecating, he’s quite intelligent and accomplished lol 😆

Professor Keith Stanovich’s metaphor of the “cognitive miser” made me appreciate how tiring it would be if someone wanted to be truly “rational” and “fully capable” at all times:

>…”we tend to be cognitive misers. When approaching a problem, we can choose from any of several cognitive mechanisms. Some mechanisms have great computational power, letting us solve many problems with great accuracy, but they are slow, require much concentration and can interfere with other cognitive tasks. Others are comparatively low in computational power, but they are fast, require little concentration and do not interfere with other ongoing cognition. Humans are cognitive misers because our basic tendency is to default to the processing mechanisms that require less computational effort, even when they are less accurate.” > >—Source, ‘Scientific American — Rational & Irrational Thought’ by Keith Stanovich

Edit: others have mentioned that this idea is basically the core argument of Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast & Slow”, but just an FYI Stanovich’s metaphor pre-dates Kahneman’s book , and in that book Kahneman openly says he took some of Stanovich’s terms & was “greatly influenced” by Stanovich’s early writings. Kahneman didn’t steal in some secretive way though, he has given Stanovich a lot of credit & speaks about him as a pioneer.