Concepts

9-1 What is cognition, and what are the functions of concepts?

Psychologists who study cognition focus on the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating information. One of these activities is forming concepts—mental groupings of similar objects, events, ideas, and people. The concept chair includes many items—a baby’s high chair, a reclining chair, a dentist’s chair.

Concepts simplify our thinking. Imagine life without them. We would need a different name for every event, object, and idea. We could not ask a child to “throw the ball” because there would be no concept of throw or ball. Instead of saying, “They were angry,” we would have to describe expressions, intensities, and words. Concepts such as ball and anger give us much information with little cognitive effort.

We often form our concepts by developing a prototype—a mental image or best example of a category (Rosch, 1978). People more quickly agree that “a robin is a bird” than that “a penguin is a bird.” For most of us, the robin is the birdier bird; it more closely resembles our bird prototype. For people in multiethnic Germany, Caucasian Germans are more prototypically German (Kessler et al., 2010). And the more closely something matches our prototype of a concept—such as bird or German—the more readily we recognize it as an example of the concept (FIGURE 9.1).

Once we place an item in a category, our memory of it later shifts toward the category prototype, as it did for Belgian students who viewed ethnically blended faces. When viewing a blended face in which 70 percent of the features were Caucasian and 30 percent were Asian, the students categorized the face as Caucasian (FIGURE 9.2). Later, as their memory shifted toward the Caucasian prototype, they were more likely to remember an 80 percent Caucasian face than the 70 percent Caucasian face they had actually seen (Corneille et al., 2004). Likewise, if shown a 70 percent Asian face, they later remembered a more prototypically Asian face. So, too, with gender: People who viewed 70 percent male faces categorized them as male (no surprise there) and then later misremembered them as even more prototypically male (Huart et al., 2005).

Move away from our prototypes, and category boundaries may blur. Is a tomato a fruit? Is a 17-year-old female a girl or a woman? Is a whale a fish or a mammal? Because a whale fails to match our mammal prototype, we are slower to recognize it as a mammal. Similarly, when symptoms don’t fit one of our disease prototypes, we are slow to perceive an illness (Bishop, 1991). People whose heart attack symptoms (shortness of breath, exhaustion, a dull weight in the chest) don’t match their heart attack prototype (sharp chest pain) may not seek help. And when behaviors don’t fit our discrimination prototypes—of White against Black, male against female, young against old—we often fail to notice prejudice. People more easily detect male prejudice against females than female against males or female against females (Inman & Baron, 1996; Marti et al., 2000). Although concepts speed and guide our thinking, they don’t always make us wise.

9-2 What cognitive strategies assist our problem solving, and what obstacles hinder it?

One tribute to our rationality is our problem-solving skill. What’s the best route around this traffic jam? How shall we handle a friend’s criticism? How can we get in the house without our keys?

Some problems we solve through trial and error. Thomas Edison tried thousands of light bulb filaments before stumbling upon one that worked. For other problems, we use algorithms, step-by-step procedures that guarantee a solution. But step-by-step algorithms can be laborious and exasperating. To find a word using the 10 letters in SPLOYOCHYG, for example, you could try each letter in each of the 10 positions—907,200 permutations in all. Rather than give you a computing brain the size of a beach ball, nature resorts to heuristics, simpler thinking strategies. Thus, you might reduce the number of options in the SPLOYOCHYG example by grouping letters that often appear together (CH and GY) and excluding rare letter combinations (such as two Y’s together). By using heuristics and then applying trial and error, you may hit on the answer. Have you guessed it?¹

Sometimes we puzzle over a problem and the pieces suddenly fall together in a flash of insight—an abrupt, true-seeming, and often satisfying solution (Topolinski & Reber, 2010). Ten-year-old Johnny Appleton’s insight solved a problem that had stumped construction workers: how to rescue a young robin from a narrow 30-inch-deep hole in a cement-block wall. Johnny’s solution: Slowly pour in sand, giving the bird enough time to keep its feet on top of the constantly rising pile (Ruchlis, 1990).

Teams of researchers have identified brain activity associated with sudden flashes of insight (Kounios & Beeman, 2009; Sandkühler & Bhattacharya, 2008). They gave people a problem: Think of a word that will form a compound word or phrase with each of three other words in a set (such as pine, crab, and sauce), and press a button to sound a bell when you know the answer. (If you need a hint: The word is a fruit.²) EEGs or fMRIs (functional MRIs) revealed the problem solvers’ brain activity. In the first experiment, about half the solutions arrived through a sudden Aha! insight. Before the Aha! moment, the problem solvers’ frontal lobes (which are involved in focusing attention) were active. At the instant of discovery, there was a burst of activity in the right temporal lobe, just above the ear (FIGURE 9.3 below).

Insight strikes suddenly, with no prior sense of “getting warmer” or feeling close to a solution (Knoblich & Oellinger, 2006; Metcalfe, 1986). When the answer pops into mind (apple!), we feel a happy sense of satisfaction. The joy of a joke may similarly lie in our sudden comprehension of an unexpected ending or a double meaning: “You don’t need a parachute to skydive. You only need a parachute to skydive twice.” Groucho Marx was a master at this: “I once shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I’ll never know.”

Insightful as we are, other cognitive tendencies may lead us astray. For example, we more eagerly seek out and favor evidence that supports our ideas than evidence that refutes them (Klayman & Ha, 1987; Skov & Sherman, 1986). In a classic experiment, Peter Wason (1960) demonstrated this tendency, known as confirmation bias, by giving British university students the three-number sequence 2-4-6 and asking them to guess the rule he had used to devise the series. (The rule was simple: any three ascending numbers.) Before submitting answers, students generated their own three-number sets and Wason told them whether their sets conformed to his rule. Once certain they had the rule, they could announce it. The result? Seldom right but never in doubt. Most students formed a wrong idea (“Maybe it’s counting by twos”) and then searched only for confirming evidence (by testing 6-8-10, 100-102-104, and so forth).

“Ordinary people,” said Wason (1981), “evade facts, become inconsistent, or systematically defend themselves against the threat of new information relevant to the issue.” Thus, once people form a belief—that vaccines cause (or do not cause) autism spectrum disorder, that people can (or cannot) change their sexual orientation, that gun control does (or does not) save lives—they prefer belief-confirming information.

Once we incorrectly represent a problem, it’s hard to restructure how we approach it. If the solution to the matchstick problem in FIGURE 9.4 eludes you, you may be experiencing fixation—an inability to see a problem from a fresh perspective. (For the solution, see FIGURE 9.7.)

A prime example of fixation is mental set, our tendency to approach a problem with the mind-set of what has worked for us previously. Indeed, solutions that worked in the past often do work on new problems. Consider:

Given the sequence O-T-T-F-?-?-?, what are the final three letters?

Most people have difficulty recognizing that the three final letters are F(ive), S(ix), and S(even). But solving this problem may make the next one easier:

Given the sequence J-F-M-A-?-?-?, what are the final three letters? (If you don’t get this one, ask yourself what month it is.)

As a perceptual set predisposes what we perceive, a mental set predisposes how we think; sometimes this can be an obstacle to problem solving, as when our mental set from our past experiences with matchsticks predisposes us to arrange them in two dimensions. To suppress these impediments to our natural creativity, researchers have used electrical stimulation to decrease left hemisphere activity and to increase right hemisphere activity (associated with novel thinking). The result was improved insight, less restrained by the assumptions created by past experience (Chi & Snyder, 2011).

9-3 What is intuition, and how can the availability heuristic, overconfidence, belief perseverance, and framing influence our decisions and judgments?

When making each day’s hundreds of judgments and decisions (Should I take a jacket? Can I trust this person? Should I shoot the basketball or pass to the player who’s hot?), we seldom take the time and effort to reason systematically. We just follow our intuition—our fast, automatic, unreasoned feelings and thoughts. After interviewing policy makers in government, business, and education, social psychologist Irving Janis (1986) concluded that they “often do not use a reflective problem-solving approach. How do they usually arrive at their decisions? If you ask, they are likely to tell you . . . they do it mostly by the seat of their pants.”

The Availability Heuristic

When we need to act quickly, the mental shortcuts we call heuristics enable snap judgments. Thanks to our mind’s automatic information processing, intuitive judgments are instantaneous. They also are usually effective (Gigerenzer & Sturm, 2012). However, research by cognitive psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman (1974) showed how these generally helpful shortcuts can lead even the smartest people into dumb decisions.³ The availability heuristic operates when we estimate the likelihood of events based on how mentally available they are—how easily they come to mind. Casinos entice us to gamble by signaling even small wins with bells and lights—making them mentally vivid—while keeping big losses invisible.

The availability heuristic colors our judgments of other people, too. Anything that makes information pop into mind—its vividness, recentness, or distinctiveness—can make it seem commonplace. While this generally helps us to evaluate people and situations quickly, it can also distort our perceptions. If someone from a particular ethnic or religious group commits a terrorist act, as happened on September 11, 2001, our readily available memory of the dramatic event may shape our impression of the whole group.

Even during that horrific year, terrorist acts claimed comparatively few lives. Yet when the statistical reality of greater dangers (see FIGURE 9.5) was pitted against the 9/11 terror, the memorable case won: Emotion-laden images of terror exacerbated our fears (Sunstein, 2007).

Although our fears often protect us, we sometimes fear the wrong things. (See Thinking Critically About: The Fear Factor below.) We fear flying because we visualize air disasters. We fear letting our sons and daughters walk to school because we see mental snapshots of abducted and brutalized children. We fear swimming in ocean waters because we replay Jaws with ourselves as victims. Even passing by a person who sneezes and coughs can heighten our perceptions of various health risks (Lee et al., 2010). And so, thanks to such readily available images, we come to fear extremely rare events.

Meanwhile, the lack of available images of future climate change disasters—which some scientists regard as “Armageddon in slow motion”—has left most people little concerned (Pew, 2014). What’s more cognitively available than slow climate change is our recently experienced local weather, which tells us nothing about long-term planetary trends (Egan & Mullin, 2012; Zaval et al., 2014). Unusually hot local weather increases people’s worry about global climate warming, while a recent cold day reduces their concern and overwhelms less memorable scientific data (Li et al., 2011). After Hurricane Sandy devastated New Jersey, its residents’ vivid experience of extreme weather increased their environmentalism (Rudman et al., 2013).

Dramatic outcomes make us gasp; probabilities we hardly grasp. As of 2013, some 40 nations have sought to harness the positive power of vivid, memorable images by putting eye-catching warnings and graphic photos on cigarette packages (Riordan, 2013). This campaign has worked (Huang et al., 2013). As psychologist Paul Slovic (2007) points out, we reason emotionally and neglect probabilities. We overfeel and underthink. In one experiment, donations to a starving 7-year-old were greater when her image was not accompanied by statistical information about the millions of needy African children like her (Small et al., 2007). “The more who die, the less we care,” noted Slovic (2010).

Overconfidence

Sometimes our judgments and decisions go awry simply because we are more confident than correct. Across various tasks, people overestimate their performance (Metcalfe, 1998). If 60 percent of people correctly answer a factual question, such as “Is absinthe a liqueur or a precious stone?,” they will typically average 75 percent confidence (Fischhoff et al., 1977). (It’s a licorice-flavored liqueur.) This tendency to overestimate the accuracy of our knowledge and judgments is overconfidence.

It was an overconfident BP that, before its exploded drilling platform spewed oil into the Gulf of Mexico, downplayed safety concerns, and then downplayed the spill’s magnitude (Mohr et al., 2010; Urbina, 2010). It is overconfidence that drives stockbrokers and investment managers to market their ability to outperform stock market averages (Malkiel, 2012). A purchase of stock X, recommended by a broker who judges this to be the time to buy, is usually balanced by a sale made by someone who judges this to be the time to sell. Despite their confidence, buyer and seller cannot both be right.

Overconfidence can also feed extreme political views. People with a superficial understanding of proposals for cap-and-trade carbon emissions or a national flat tax often express strong pro or con views. Asking them to explain the details of these policies exposes them to their own ignorance, which in turn leads them to express more moderate views (Fernbach et al., 2013). Sometimes the less people know, the more immoderate they are.

Classrooms are full of overconfident students who expect to finish assignments and write papers ahead of schedule (Buehler et al., 1994, 2002). In fact, these projects generally take about twice the number of days predicted. This “planning fallacy” (underestimating the time and cost of a project) routinely occurs with construction projects, which often finish late and over budget.

Overconfidence can have adaptive value. People who err on the side of overconfidence live more happily. Their seeming competence can help them gain influence (Anderson et al., 2012). Moreover, given prompt and clear feedback, as weather forecasters receive after each day’s predictions, we can learn to be more realistic about the accuracy of our judgments (Fischhoff, 1982). The wisdom to know when we know a thing and when we do not is born of experience.

Belief Perseverance

Our overconfidence is startling. Equally so is our belief perseverance—our tendency to cling to our beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. One study of belief perseverance engaged people with opposing views of capital punishment (Lord et al., 1979). After studying two supposedly new research findings, one supporting and the other refuting the claim that the death penalty deters crime, each side was more impressed by the study supporting its own beliefs. And each readily disputed the other study. Thus, showing the pro- and anti-capital-punishment groups the same mixed evidence actually increased their disagreement.

To rein in belief perseverance, a simple remedy exists: Consider the opposite. When the same researchers repeated the capital-punishment study, they asked some participants to be “as objective and unbiased as possible” (Lord et al., 1984). The plea did nothing to reduce biased evaluations of evidence. They asked a different group to consider “whether you would have made the same high or low evaluations had exactly the same study produced results on the other side of the issue.” Having imagined and pondered opposite findings, these people became much less biased.

The more we come to appreciate why our beliefs might be true, the more tightly we cling to them. Once beliefs form and get justified, it takes more compelling evidence to change them than it did to create them. Prejudice persists. Beliefs often persevere.

The Effects of Framing

Framing—the way we present an issue—sways our decisions and judgments. Imagine two surgeons explaining a surgery risk. One tells patients that 10 percent of people die during this surgery. The other tells patients that 90 percent survive. Although the information is the same, the effect is not. Both patients and physicians perceive greater risk when they hear that 10 percent die (Marteau, 1989; McNeil et al., 1988; Rothman & Salovey, 1997).

Framing can be a powerful persuasion tool. Carefully posed options can nudge people toward decisions that could benefit them or society as a whole (Benartzi & Thaler, 2013; Thaler & Sunstein, 2008):

The point to remember: Those who understand the power of framing can use it (for good or ill) to nudge our decisions.

The Perils and Powers of Intuition

9-5 How do smart thinkers use intuition?

The perils of intuition—irrational fears, cloudy judgments, illogical reasoning—feed gut fears and prejudices. Irrational thinking can persist even when people are offered extra pay for thinking smart, even when they are asked to justify their answers, and even when they are expert physicians or clinicians (Shafir & LeBoeuf, 2002). Highly intelligent people (including U.S. federal intelligence agents, in one study) are similarly vulnerable to intuition’s distortions of reality (Reyna et al., 2014; Stanovich et al., 2013). Even very smart people can make not-so-smart judgments. So, are our heads indeed “filled with straw,” as T. S. Eliot suggested?

Throughout this book you will see examples of smart intuition. In brief,

Critics note that some studies have not found the supposed power of unconscious thought and remind us that deliberate, conscious thought also furthers smart thinking (Lassiter et al., 2009; Newell, 2015; Nieuwenstein et al., 2015; Payne et al., 2008). In challenging situations, superior decision makers, including chess players, take time to think (Moxley et al., 2012). And with many sorts of problems, deliberative thinkers are aware of the intuitive option, but know when to override it (Mata et al., 2013). Consider:

A bat and a ball together cost 110 cents.
The bat costs 100 cents more than the ball.
How much does the ball cost?

Most people’s intuitive response—10 cents—is wrong, and a few moments of deliberate thinking reveals why.⁴

The bottom line: Our two-track mind makes sweet harmony as smart, critical thinking listens to the creative whispers of our vast unseen mind and then evaluates evidence, tests conclusions, and plans for the future.

9-6 What is creativity, and what fosters it?

Creativity is the ability to produce ideas that are both novel and valuable (Hennessey & Amabile, 2010). Consider Princeton mathematician Andrew Wiles’ incredible, creative moment in 1994. Pierre de Fermat, a seventeenth-century mischievous genius, had challenged mathematicians of his day to match his solutions to various number theory problems. His most famous challenge—Fermat’s last theorem—baffled the greatest mathematical minds, even after a $2 million prize (in today’s dollars) was offered in 1908 to whoever first created a proof.

Wiles had pondered Fermat’s theorem for more than 30 years and had come to the brink of a solution. One morning, out of the blue, the final “incredible revelation” struck him. “It was so indescribably beautiful; it was so simple and so elegant. I couldn’t understand how I’d missed it. . . . It was the most important moment of my working life” (Singh, 1997, p. 25).

Creativity like Wiles’ is supported by a certain level of aptitude (ability to learn). Those who score exceptionally high in quantitative (math) aptitude as 13-year-olds, for example, are more likely to obtain graduate science and math degrees and create published or patented work (Park et al., 2008; Robertson et al., 2010). Greater intelligence and working memory also boost creativity (Arneson et al., 2011; Hambrick & Meinz, 2011). But creativity is more than school smarts, and it requires a different kind of thinking: Aptitude tests such as the SAT, which demand a single correct answer, require convergent thinking. Creativity tests (How many uses can you think of for a brick?) require expansive, divergent thinking.

Robert Sternberg and his colleagues believe creativity has five components (Sternberg, 1988, 2003; Sternberg & Lubart, 1991, 1992):

For those seeking to boost the creative process, research offers some ideas:

9-7 What do we know about thinking in other animals?

Other animals are smarter than we often realize. In her 1908 book, The Animal Mind, pioneering psychologist Margaret Floy Washburn explained that animals’ consciousness and intelligence can be inferred from their behavior. In 2012, neuroscientists convening at the University of Cambridge added that animal consciousness can also be inferred from animals’ brains: “Nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds,” possess the neural networks “that generate consciousness” (Low et al., 2012). Consider, then, what animal brains can do.

Using Concepts and Numbers

Even pigeons—mere birdbrains—can sort objects (pictures of cars, cats, chairs, flowers) into categories, or concepts. Shown a picture of a never-before-seen chair, pigeons have reliably pecked a key that represents chairs (Wasserman, 1995). By touching screens in quest of a food reward, black bears have learned to sort pictures into animal and nonanimal categories (Vonk et al., 2012). The great apes also form concepts, such as cat and dog. After monkeys learned these concepts, certain frontal lobe neurons in their brain fired in response to new “catlike” images, others to new “doglike” images (Freedman et al., 2001).

Displaying Insight

Psychologist Wolfgang Köhler (1925/1957) showed that we are not the only creatures to display insight. He placed a piece of fruit and a long stick outside the cage of a chimpanzee named Sultan, beyond his reach. Inside the cage, he placed a short stick, which Sultan grabbed, using it to try to reach the fruit. After several failed attempts, he dropped the stick and seemed to survey the situation. Then suddenly (as if thinking “Aha!”), Sultan jumped up and seized the short stick again. This time, he used it to pull in the longer stick—which he then used to reach the fruit. Apes have even exhibited foresight by storing a tool they could use to retrieve food the next day (Mulcahy & Call, 2006). Birds, too, have displayed insight. One experiment, by (yes) Christopher Bird and Nathan Emery (2009), has brought to life an Aesop fable in which a thirsty crow was unable to reach the water in a partly filled pitcher. See its solution in FIGURE 9.8a.

Using Tools and Transmitting Culture

Like humans, many other species invent behaviors and transmit cultural patterns to their observing peers and offspring (Boesch-Achermann & Boesch, 1993). Forest-dwelling chimpanzees select different tools for different purposes—a heavy stick for making holes, or a light, flexible stick for fishing for termites (Sanz et al., 2004). Researchers have found at least 39 local customs related to chimpanzee tool use, grooming, and courtship (Claidière & Whiten, 2012; Whiten & Boesch, 2001). One group may slurp termites directly from a stick, another group may pluck them off individually. One group may break nuts with a stone hammer, their neighbors with a wooden hammer. These group differences, along with differing communication and hunting styles, are the chimpanzee version of cultural diversity.

Other animals have also shown surprising cognitive talents. In tests, elephants have demonstrated self-awareness and displayed their abilities to learn, remember, discriminate smells, empathize, cooperate, teach, and spontaneously use tools (Byrne et al., 2009). As social creatures, chimpanzees have shown altruism, cooperation, and group aggression. Like humans, they will purposefully kill their neighbor to gain land, and they grieve over dead relatives (Anderson et al., 2010; Biro et al., 2010; Mitani et al., 2010).

There is no question that other species display many remarkable cognitive skills. But one big question remains: Do they, like humans, exhibit language? First, let’s consider what language is, and how it develops.

* * *

Returning to our debate about how deserving we humans are of our name Homo sapiens, let’s pause to issue an interim report card. On decision making and risk assessment, our error-prone species might rate a C+. On problem solving and creativity, where humans are inventive yet vulnerable to fixation, we would probably receive a better mark, perhaps a B. And when it comes to cognitive efficiency, our fallible but quick heuristics and divergent thinking would surely earn us an A.

Learning Objectives

Test Yourself by taking a moment to answer each of these Learning Objective Questions (repeated here from within the chapter). Research suggests that trying to answer these questions on your own will improve your long-term memory of the concepts (McDaniel et al., 2009).

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Terms and Concepts to Remember

Test yourself on these terms.

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Experience the Testing Effect

Test yourself repeatedly throughout your studies. This will not only help you figure out what you know and don’t know; the testing itself will help you learn and remember the information more effectively thanks to the testing effect.

Question 9.1

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Question 9.7

Use to create your personalized study plan, which will direct you to the resources that will help you most in .