Chapter 5: Cognitive Ease
We prefer cognitive ease than cognitive strain. The latter is affected by both the current level of effort and the presence of unmet demands.
Illusion of remembering
- Larry Jacoby, “Becoming Famous Overnight”
- A sense of familiarity induces the illusion (you will see it more clearly).
Illusion of truth
- “Anything that makes it easier for the associative machine to run smoothly will also bias beliefs.”
How to Write a Persuasive Message
1. Do not use complex language where simpler language will do.
2. Make your message simple; try to make it memorable.
3. If you quote a source, choose one with a name that is easy to pronounce.
“Cognitive strain, whatever its source, mobilizes S2, which is more likely to reject the intuitive answer suggested by S1.”
- Machines/Widgets (100 minutes or 5 minutes)
Mere Exposure Effect (Robert Zajonc)
- Repetition induces cognitive ease and a comforting feeling of familiarity.
- Link between repetition of an arbitrary stimulus and the mild affection that people eventually have for it.
- Part of evolution to react with withdrawal and fear to an unknown stimulus.
Sarnoff Mednick: “Creativity is associative memory that works exceptionally well.”
Can we know something has a solution before we know it has?
How does mood influence performance of our intuition?
- Mood affects S1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.
- We form clusters: “good mood, intuition, creativity, gullibility, and increased reliance on S1 form a cluster. At the other pole, sadness, vigilance, suspicion, and analytic approach, and increased effort also go together.”
- A happy mood loosens the control of S2 over performance.
Good feelings can lead to intuitions of coherence (e.g. emotional response in the triad of words experiment, showed that it is actually the basis of judgments of coherence.)