Chapter 4: The Associative Machine
“System 1 provides the impressions that often turn into your beliefs, and is the source of the impulses that often become your choices and your actions. It offers a tacit interpretation of what happens to you and around you, linking the present with the recent past and with expectations about the near future. It contains the model of the world that instantly evaluates events as normal or surprising. It is the source of you rapid and often precise intuitive judgments. And it does most of this without your conscious awareness of its activities. S1 I also the origin of the systematic errors in your intuitions.”
It is completely automatic and almost beyond our control to associate things we encounter in the outside world.
We can make temporal sequence and a casual connection (Bananas Vomit).
Associative activation: ideas that have been evoked trigger many other ideas, in a spreading cascade of activity in the brain.
“The word evokes memories, which evoke emotions, which in turn evoke facial expressions and other reactions.”
Associatively coherent: yielding a self-reinforcing pattern of cognitive, emotional, and physical responses that is both diverse and integrated.
Principles of Association (David Hume)
1. Resemblance
2. Contiguity in time and place
3. Causality
Ideas as a vast network (three types of links)
1. Causes are linked to their effects (virus - cold)
2. Properties (lime - green)
3. Categories (banana - fruit)
Priming effect: if we have something in mind (consciously or unconsciously), we tend to respond (body and mind) according to that association.
Ideomotor effect: influencing of an action by the idea (“Florida effect”). Also works the reverse way. “Simple, common gestures can also unconsciously influence our thoughts and feelings.” (Body language and who we are).
“Studies of priming effects have yielded discoveries that threaten our self-image as conscious and autonomous authors of our judgments and our choices.”
- The idea of money primes individualism (Kathleen Vohs).
- Freudian insights about the role of symbols and metaphors in unconscious associations. (“Lady Macbeth effect”)
- Dictatorial situations
We are not at the mercy of the “trivial manipulations” of the environment, although it does affect us.
*Timothy Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves
Notes on Ch3 and Ch4 dialogue – with Dylan Evans
- Cognitively busy à selfish actions, rude?Hunter, gatherers and laziness.
- What is the environment and behavior we have adapted?
- We need long-term commitments to counterbalance gratification. We discount the future (hyperbolic discount) biology of why it’s easy to say to no to the cupcakes. Our preferences change.
- Ego depletion
- Analogy of working out with the capacity of will power. A more character building, long term. Know your resources, don’t pretend you are Superman; otherwise you’ll burn out.
- Alcohol diminishes the will power; maybe that’s their escape. The importance to know yourself and have that retrospective psychology.
- Am I really tired or I’m just thinking I’m tired? How our psychological state affects our physiological state?
- Is that a trick of our brain?
· Baumaster – Will Power
· Will vs. Will Power
- Getting up in the morning, quitting a lazy state
- Materialism, there is only one way to explain the world.
- Dualism, there are two types to explain the world
- The mind/body problem.
- Descartes, The physiology of sleep.