There is a quiet trick that held entire social lives together in the 1960s. It was not taught in classrooms and it did not wear a label. It moved people through crossroads without the fanfare of an ideology or the obvious machinery of institutions. You still see the residue of this shortcut in emails written in a certain polite hurry and in communities that prefer shared ritual to raw debate.
The invisible steering wheel
Call it a social compass if you like but resist tidy names. The people who came of age in the 1960s learned to answer the easier question when the harder one felt too risky. That habit showed up in courtship, in work, in what they voted for and how they spoke about money. You could think of it as practical survival. Or you could see it as a persistent cognitive move that shaped their expectations of other people and of institutions.
Why this feels both liberating and limiting
When you answer a nearby, softer question you get fast closure. That closure feels like competence. It is not the same as having solved the original problem but it behaves like a solution. In conversation it saves friction. In family life it keeps dinners from collapsing into cold squabbles about meaning. The trade off is subtle and slow to reveal itself. Over a lifetime, small substitutions build a personal climate in which curiosity withers slightly and confidence grows in its place. That confidence feels earned because it comes from constant use. But it is mostly an economy of effort, not a rigorous method.
This is the essence of intuitive heuristics When faced with a difficult question we often answer an easier one instead usually without noticing the substitution.
Daniel Kahneman Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs Emeritus Princeton University.
That passage from Thinking Fast and Slow is the clearest public airing of a practice that had been living in social life for decades before Kahneman wrote it down. The 60s generation did not invent substitution. They used it. They polished it into social craft.
How the shortcut ran through daily life
At work there was an instinct to measure loyalty by gestures rather than by formal lists. A boss asked if you would stay late and you answered a softer question about whether you liked the boss enough to accept the inconvenience. In politics the harder question of policy detail was repeatedly sidestepped by an easier posture of trust or distrust toward a candidate. In private, arguments were often resolved by appealing to shared habits rather than dissecting motives. This is not merely nostalgia for gentler times. It was a cognitive economy that produced stable local order.
What it produced
Stability gives a clear advantage. Families, workplaces and small towns could move forward without constant reassessment. That made space for long projects the modern world still benefits from. But the shortcut also made certain blind spots fashionable. People stopped asking whether the glue held because it appeared to be holding. The habit of substituting easier questions for harder ones created a cultural comfort with plausible stories. Those stories were persuasive and they were often incomplete.
My own stubbornness and what I saw
I grew up on stories from relatives who tightened this shortcut into routine. They would immediately convert a policy debate into a conversation about trust. They would convert a complex assessment of a product into a simple judgment about whether the brand felt familiar. I saw the usefulness of these moves. They kept my grandmother calm when stores were scarce. They smoothed over awkward family reunions. Yet I also saw the downside. On matters that required unvarnished facts their method allowed error to persist.
There is a certain stubborn charm in refusing to name a technique. You can treat the world with a softer logical economy and still live an admirable life. But when a community prefers polished closure over messy inquiry you end up with structural weaknesses that are hard to spot from the inside.
Where this shortcut meets the internet era
Imagine bringing that social craft into the age of immediate headlines and algorithmic validation. The muscles that once handled polite substitution now work against people who face endless novelty. The old move of answering an easier question becomes amplified into ideological certainty because algorithms reward confident closure. Communities that once used substitution to protect time and attention find those same moves hijacked by viral content that mimics familiarity.
Not the same but a cousin
The contemporary cousin of the 60s shortcut looks similar but acts faster and louder. Instead of smoothing over the next dinner it coalesces entire audiences into a single judgment about a public figure or a product within hours. The effect is recognisably related to what older generations practiced but the scale makes the consequences stranger and sometimes far more brittle.
The soft institutional cost
Because substitution favors stories with coherence, institutions built in that cognitive climate prize narrative over procedure. A hospital might prefer a confident lead clinician who tells a simple story rather than a committee that lists conflicting evidence. That yields decisiveness. It also yields what Kahneman would call overconfidence in areas where the map does not match the territory. Institutions designed around the shortcut can be efficient and fragile at once.
How to notice it
You notice substitution when people keep returning to analogies and personal recollections instead of asking for new data. You notice it when disagreement is defused by ritual gestures rather than argument. These signs are not always bad. Rituals can be humane. But when ritual repeatedly displaces inquiry you should be suspicious of the calm.
Conclusion that is not a full stop
The 60s generation used a psychological shortcut that carried social life through complexity. It was practical and it left scars. It taught people to love plausible closure. If you grew up within that habit you may recognise the comfort. If you did not you may find the texture of those relationships maddeningly imprecise. Either way the history matters because these cognitive habits have echoes in our institutions and in our feeds.
We can admire the craft of getting things done without pretending the craft is a neutral method of truth finding. The choice is not between scrapheap chaos and perfect knowledge. It is between knowing where you rely on substitution and where you do not.
Summary table
| Idea | What it looked like | Consequence |
|---|---|---|
| Substitution shortcut | Answering an easier related question instead of the original one | Fast social closure and increased risk of persistent error |
| Cultural embedding | Rituals and gestures that replaced debate | Stability in communities and blind spots in institutions |
| Modern amplification | Algorithm friendly confident narratives | Faster spread of plausible but incomplete stories |
| Detecting the habit | Analogies preferences and ritual conflict avoidance | Opportunity to introduce deliberate inquiry |
FAQ
How did people in the 60s learn this shortcut?
They learned it by doing. In an era of slower news cycles and tighter social circles there was ample incentive to stop messy disputes before they escalated. People who managed families workplaces and local institutions practised quick closure because it was often the most expensive currency they had which was time and calm. That repeated practice turned a patchwork habit into an implicit social skill.
Is this the same as being lazy intellectually?
Not necessarily. The shortcut is an economic decision more than a moral one. It is efficient when stakes are small or when the cost of prolonged debate outweighs benefits. It becomes problematic when used habitually in situations that demand evidence and fresh scrutiny. Judging a whole generation as lazy misses the nuance that many of these decisions were careful calculations in context.
Can communities change this pattern?
Yes but change requires incentives. You nudge a group away from substitution by creating practices that make slower inquiry cheaper and socially rewarded. When institutions value dissent when they build rituals that invite data instead of just stories the habit softens. The shift is practical not theatrical and takes time.
Why does this matter now?
Because remnants of the shortcut survive in contemporary decision making and they interact unpredictably with technology. Awareness matters. If your organisation or family relies on polished closure you should at least know where it is carrying you and where it is leaving questions unanswered. Naming the move does not strip it of usefulness. It simply lets you pick where to use it and where to refuse it.
Is this purely a British social thing?
No. The shortcut shows up wherever small scale social economies exist. Its form adapts to local norms. In Britain it often blended with reserve and ritual which made it particularly effective at keeping public friction low. But the psychological move itself is universal.
