Quotes About Cognition

The automatic processes of the mental shotgun and intensity matching often make available one or more answers to easy questions that could be mapped onto the target question.

He had noticed that the pupils are sensitive indicators of mental effort—they dilate substantially when people multiply two-digit numbers, and they dilate more if the problems are hard than if they are easy. His observations indicated that the response to mental effort is distinct from emotional arousal.

System 1 runs ahead of the facts in constructing a rich image on the basis of scraps of evidence.

Researchers have applied diverse methods to examine the connection between thinking and self-control. Some have addressed it by asking the correlation question: If people were ranked by their self-control and by their cognitive aptitude, would individuals have similar positions in the two rankings?

simple mechanical rules were generally superior to human judgment.

Intuitive predictions are almost completely insensitive to the actual predictive quality of the evidence.

The list of indications of depletion is also highly diverse: deviating from one's diet overspending on impulsive purchases reacting aggressively to provocation persisting less time in a handgrip task performing poorly in cognitive tasks and logical decision making

The hot hand is a massive and widespread cognitive illusion.

We are confident when the story we tell ourselves comes easily to mind, with no contradiction and no competing scenario. But

I propose a simple account of how we generate intuitive opinions on complex matters. If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 will find a related question that is easier and will answer it.

However, we are not all rational, and some of us may need the security of distorted estimates to avoid paralysis.

puzzles were legible, but the font induced cognitive strain. The results tell a clear story: 90% of the students who saw the CRT in normal font made at least one mistake in the test, but the proportion dropped to 35% when the font was barely legible. You read this correctly: performance was better with the bad font. Cognitive strain, whatever its source, mobilizes System 2, which is more likely to reject the intuitive answer suggested by System 1.

It is very likely that intrinsic variability in the functioning of the brain also affects the quality of our judgments in ways that we cannot possibly hope to control.

These students can solve much more difficult problems when they are not tempted to accept a superficially plausible answer that comes readily to mind.

We focus on what we know and neglect what we do not know, which makes us overly confident in our beliefs.

The dominance of conclusions over arguments is most pronounced where emotions are involved. The psychologist Paul Slovic has proposed an affect heuristic in which people let their likes and dislikes determine their beliefs about the world.

when System 2 is otherwise engaged, we will believe almost anything. System 1 is gullible and biased to believe

When System 1 runs into difficulty, it calls on System 2 to support more detailed and specific processing that may solve the problem of the moment. System 2 is mobilized when a question arises for which System 1 does not offer an answer, as probably happened to you when you encountered the multiplication problem 17 × 24. You can also feel a surge of conscious attention whenever you are surprised.

when System 2 is otherwise engaged, we will believe almost anything. System 1 is gullible and biased to believe, System 2 is in charge of doubting and unbelieving, but System 2 is sometimes busy, and often lazy. Indeed, there is evidence that people are more likely to be influenced by empty persuasive messages, such as commercials, when they are tired and depleted.

We found that people, when engaged in a mental sprint, may become effectively blind. The authors of The Invisible Gorilla had made the gorilla "invisible" by keeping the observers intensely busy counting passes.

The law of least effort is operating here. He will think as little as possible.

once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws.

We call this a priming effect and say that the idea of EAT primes the idea of SOUP, and that WASH primes SOAP.

The mind is good with stories, but it does not appear to be well designed for the processing of time.