Thinking fast and slow: chapters 4 and 5

[elle]

Aiming to read:

• Chapter 4: The Associative Machine
• Chapter 5: Cognitive Ease

MC: @mcgain Notes: @lachlanhardy

See you 12pm Tuesday, Jan 7th @ https://whereby.com/blackmill

Ping gday@blackmill.co if you want a calendar invite and access to the Slack beforehand.

[elle]

Chapter 4: the associative machine

• Associative activation, or priming.
• Words evoke memories, which then evoke emotions.
• Associatively coherent
• Cognition is embodied. We think with our body, not just our brain
• Principles of association:
  • resemblance,
  • continuity in time and place, and
  • causality
• Links:
  • causes linked to their effect: virus -> cold
  • things to their properties: lime -> green
  • things to categories they belong to: banana -> fruit
• Most of the associative work is done subconsciously
• Priming is reciprocal: thinking of old age, makes you act old. and vice versa

Money-primed people become more independent than they would be without the associative trigger. They persevered almost twice as long in trying to solve a very difficult problem before they asked the experimenter for help... are also more selfish

Money primes individualism, a reluctance to be involved

reminding people of their mortality increases the appeal of authoritarian ideas , which may become reassuring in the context of the terror of death.

Lady Macbeth Effect - cleansing yourself:

• Thinking of stabbing a colleague in the back -> more likely to buy soap
• Lying over the phone - more likely to buy mouthwash
• Lying in an email - more likely to buy soap

Office kitchen honesty box experiment: amounts went up with staring eyes posters than generic flowers posters.

Chapter 5: Cognitive ease

• A range between easy and strained
• Easy: no threats, everything is going well
• Strained: a problem exists that needs system 2

Cognitive ease:

• Inputs
  • repeated experience
  • clear display
  • primed idea
  • good mood
• Outputs
  • feels familiar
  • feels true
  • feels good
  • feels effortless

Illusions of:

• visuals
• memories
  • "A word that you have seen recently will appear clearer than unfamiliar words"
• truth

Anything that makes it easier for the associative machine to run smoothly will also bias beliefs. A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.

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If you cannot remember the source of a statement, and have no way to relate it to other things you know, you have no option but to go with the sense of cognitive ease.

How to write a persuasive message

The general principle is that anything you can do to reduce cognitive strain will help, so you should first maximize legibility.

• Use good quality paper and ink
• Prefer blue and red over green, yellow, or light blue
• Use simpler language
• Make it memorable
• Aphorisms are judged more insightful when they rhyme than when they do not.
• Quote a resource with an easy name to pronounce
• Do not contradict known facts

System 2 is lazy and that mental effort is aversive. If possible, the recipients of your message want to stay away from anything that reminds them of effort, including a source with a complicated name.

Students did better in an exam with a barely legible font, because they needed more cognitive strain to begin with.

Familiarity breeds liking

The pleasure of cognitive ease

Cognitive ease -> good feelings

stocks with fluent names like Emmi, Swissfirst, and Comet will earn higher returns than those with clunky labels like Geberit and Ypsomed.

Mere exposure effect: "words that were presented more frequently were rated much more favorably than the words that had been shown only once or twice."

! politics, music...

the mere exposure effect is actually stronger for stimuli that the individual never consciously sees

--

To survive in a frequently dangerous world, an organism should react cautiously to a novel stimulus, with withdrawal and fear. Survival prospects are poor for an animal that is not suspicious of novelty.

--

exposed two sets of fertile chicken eggs to different tones. After they hatched, the chicks consistently emitted fewer distress calls when exposed to the tone they had heard while inhabiting the shell

Ease, mood, and intuition

They found that putting the participants in a good mood before the test by having them think happy thoughts more than doubled accuracy . An even more striking result is that unhappy subjects were completely incapable of performing the intuitive task accurately; their guesses were no better than random. Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.

--

when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors.