Concepts

LOQ LearningObjectiveQuestion

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, or 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 could not ask a child to “throw the ball” because there would be no concept of throw or ball. We could not say “They were angry.” We would have to describe expressions and words. Concepts such as ball and anger give us much information with little mental 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. When something closely matches our prototype of a concept, we readily recognize it as an example of the concept.

Sometimes, though, our experiences don’t match up neatly with our prototypes. When this happens, our category boundaries may blur. Is a 17-year-old female a girl or a woman? Is a whale a fish or a mammal? Is a tomato a fruit? Because a tomato fails to match our fruit prototype, we are slower to recognize it as a fruit.

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. Concepts speed and guide our thinking. But they don’t always make us wise.

One tribute to our rationality is our impressive problem-solving skill. What’s the best route around this traffic jam? How should 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 following the steps in an algorithm takes time and effort—sometimes a lot of time and effort. To find a word using the 10 letters in SPLOYOCHYG, for example, you could construct a list, with each letter in each of the 10 positions. But your list of 907,200 different combinations would be very long! In such cases, we often resort 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 avoiding rare combinations (such as YY). 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, with no feeling of getting closer to the answer. Then, suddenly the pieces fall together in a flash of insight—an abrupt, true-seeming, and often satisfying solution (Topolinski & Reber, 2010). Ten-year-old Johnny Appleton had one of these Aha! moments and solved a problem that had stumped many adults. How could they rescue a young robin that had fallen into 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 mound (Ruchlis, 1990).

Bursts of brain activity accompany sudden flashes of insight (Kounios & Beeman, 2009; Sandkühler & Bhattacharya, 2008). In one study, researchers asked people to think of a word that forms a compound word or phrase with each of three words in a set (such as pine, crab, and sauce). When people knew the answer, they were to press a button, which would sound a bell. (Need a hint? The word is a fruit.²) About half the solutions arrived by a sudden Aha! insight. Before the Aha! moment, the problem solvers’ frontal lobes (which are involved in focusing attention) were active. Then, at the instant of discovery, there was a burst of activity in their right temporal lobe, just above the ear (FIGURE 8.1).

Insight gives us a happy sense of satisfaction. The joy of a joke is similarly a sudden “I get it!” reaction to a double meaning or a surprise ending: “You don’t need a parachute to skydive. You only need a parachute to skydive twice.” Comedian Groucho Marx was a master at this: “I once shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know.”

Insightful as we are, other cognitive tendencies may lead us astray. Confirmation bias is our tendency to seek evidence for our ideas more eagerly than we seek evidence against them (Klayman & Ha, 1987; Skov & Sherman, 1986). Peter Wason (1960) demonstrated confirmation bias in a now-classic study. He gave students a set of three numbers (2-4-6) and told them the sequence was based on a rule. Their task was to guess the rule. (It was simple: Each number must be larger than the one before it.) Before giving their answers, students formed their own three-number sets, and Wason told them whether their sets worked with his rule. When they felt certain they had the rule, they could announce it. The result? Most students formed a wrong idea (“Maybe it’s counting by twos”) and then searched only for evidence confirming the wrong rule (by testing 6-8-10, 100-102-104, and so forth). They were seldom right but never in doubt.

In real life, this tendency can have grave results. Having formed 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—we prefer information that supports our belief. And once we get hung up on an incorrect view of a problem, it’s hard to approach it from a different angle. This obstacle to problem solving is called fixation, an inability to come to a fresh perspective. Can you solve the matchstick problem in FIGURE 8.2? (See the solution in FIGURE 8.3.)

Each day we make 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?) As we judge the odds and make our decisions, we seldom take the time and effort to reason systematically. We just follow our intuition, our fast, automatic, unreasoned feelings and thoughts. After interviewing leaders in government, business, and education, one social psychologist concluded that they often made decisions without considered thought and reflection. How did they usually reach their decisions? “If you ask, they are likely to tell you . . . they do it mostly by the seat of their pants” ( Janis, 1986).

Quick-Thinking Heuristics

When we need to make snap judgments, the mental shortcuts we call heuristics enable quick thinking without conscious awareness. As cognitive psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman (1974) showed, these automatic, intuitive strategies, although generally helpful, can sometimes lead even the smartest people into quick but dumb decisions.³ Consider the availability heuristic, which operates when we estimate how common an event is, based on its mental availability. Anything that makes information “pop” into mind—its vividness, recentness, or distinctiveness—can make it seem commonplace. Casinos know this. They entice us to gamble by broadcasting wins with noisy bells and flashing lights. The big losses are soundlessly invisible.

The availability heuristic can distort our judgments of other people. If people from a particular ethnic or religious group commit 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. Despite the much greater risk of death from other causes (FIGURE 8.4), the vivid image of 9/11 terror came more easily to mind. Emotion-laden images of terror fed our fears (Sunstein, 2007). Thus, if terrorists were to kill 1000 people in the United States this year, Americans would be mighty afraid. And yet they would have reason to be 30 times more afraid of homicidal, suicidal, and accidental death by guns, which take more than 30,000 lives annually. The bottom line: We often fear the wrong things (see Thinking Critically About: The Fear Factor).

Over 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). Why? Because we reason emotionally—we overfeel and underthink. In one experiment, donations to a starving 7-year-old were greater when her image appeared alone, without statistics describing the millions of needy African children like her (Small et al., 2007). Dramatic outcomes make us gasp; probabilities we hardly grasp.

Overconfidence: Was There Ever Any Doubt?

Sometimes our decisions and judgments go awry because we are more confident than correct. When answering factual questions such as “Is absinthe a liqueur or a precious stone?” only 60 percent of people in one study answered correctly. (It’s a licorice-flavored liqueur.) Yet those answering felt, on average, 75 percent confident (Fischhoff et al., 1977). This tendency to overestimate our accuracy is overconfidence.

Classrooms are full of overconfident students who expect to finish assignments and write papers ahead of schedule (Buehler et al., 1994, 2002). In fact, such projects generally take about twice the number of days predicted. We also are overconfident about our future free time (Zauberman & Lynch, 2005). Surely we’ll have more free time next month than we do today. So we happily accept invitations, only to discover we’re just as busy when the day rolls around. And believing we’ll surely have more money next year, we take out loans or buy on credit. Despite our past overconfident predictions, we remain overly confident of our next one.

Overconfidence affects us at the group level, too. History is full of leaders who, when waging war, were more confident than correct. In politics, overconfidence feeds extreme political views. Sometimes the less we know, the more definite we sound.

Nevertheless, overconfidence can have adaptive value. Believing that their decisions are right and they have time to spare, self-confident people tend to live happily. They make tough decisions more easily, and they seem competent (Anderson et al., 2012).

Our Beliefs Live On—Sometimes Despite Evidence

Our overconfidence is startling. Equally startling is belief perseverance—our tendency to cling to our beliefs even when the evidence proves us wrong. Consider a classic study of people with opposing views of the death penalty (Lord et al., 1979). Both sides were asked to read the same material—two new research reports. One report showed that the death penalty lowers the crime rate; the other that it has no effect. Each side was impressed by the study supporting its own beliefs, and each was quick to criticize the other study. Thus, showing the two groups the same mixed evidence actually increased their disagreement about the value of capital punishment.

So how can smart thinkers avoid belief perseverance? A simple remedy is to consider the opposite. In a repeat of the death penalty study, researchers asked some participants to be “as objective and unbiased as possible” (Lord et al., 1984). This plea did nothing to reduce people’s biases. They also asked another 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.” In this group, people’s views did change. After imagining the opposite findings, they judged the evidence in a much less biased way.

The more we come to appreciate why our beliefs might be true, the more tightly we cling to them. Once we have explained to ourselves why candidate X or Y will be a better commander-in-chief, we tend to ignore evidence that challenges our belief. Prejudice persists. Once beliefs take root, it takes stronger evidence to change them than it did to create them. Beliefs often persevere.

Framing: Let’s Put It This Way . . .

Framing—the way we present an issue—can be a powerful tool of persuasion. Governments know this. Both Britain and the United States have been exploring ways to gently nudge people in healthy directions (Fox & Tannenbaum, 2015). Consider how the framing of options can affect perceptions (Benartzi & Thaler, 2013; Thaler & Sunstein, 2008):

The point to remember: Framing can influence our decisions.

The Perils and Powers of Intuition

We have seen how our unreasoned thinking can plague our efforts to solve problems, assess risks, and make wise decisions. Moreover, these perils of intuition persist even when people are offered extra pay for thinking smart or when asked to justify their answers. And they persist even among those with high intelligence, including expert physicians, clinicians, and U.S. federal intelligence agents (Reyna et al., 2013; Shafir & LeBoeuf, 2002; Stanovich & West, 2008).

But psychological science is also revealing intuition’s powers:

Did you guess the second group would make the best choice? Most people do, believing that the more complex the choice, the smarter it is to make decisions rationally rather than intuitively (Inbar et al., 2010). Actually, the third group made the best choice in this real-life experiment. When making complex decisions, we benefit by letting a problem “incubate” while we attend to other things (Dijksterhuis & Strick, 2016). Facing a difficult decision involving a lot of facts, we’re wise to gather all the information we can, and then say, “Give me some time not to think about this.” By taking time even to sleep on it, we let our unconscious mental machinery work, and then await the intuitive result of this automatic processing. Thanks to our ever-active brain, nonconscious thinking (reasoning, problem solving, decision making, planning) is surprisingly wise (Creswell et al., 2013; Hassin, 2013; Lin & Murray, 2015).

Critics remind us, however, that with most complex tasks, deliberate, conscious thought helps (Lassiter et al., 2009; Newell, 2015; Nieuwenstein et al., 2015; Payne et al., 2008). With many sorts of problems, smart thinkers may initially fall prey to an intuitive option but then reason their way to a better answer. Consider a random coin flip. If someone flipped a coin six times, which of the following sequences of heads (H) and tails (T) would seem most likely: HHHTTT or HTTHTH or HHHHHH?

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (1972) reported that most people believe HTTHTH would be the most likely random sequence. (Ask someone to predict six coin tosses and they will likely tell you a sequence like this.) Actually, each of these exact sequences is equally likely (or, you might say, equally unlikely).

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.

Creativity is the ability to produce ideas that are both novel and valuable (Hennessey & Amabile, 2010). Consider Princeton mathematician Andrew Wiles’ incredible, creative moment. Pierre de Fermat (1601–1665), a mischief-loving genius, dared scholars to match his solutions to various number theory problems. Three centuries later, one of those problems continued to baffle the greatest mathematical minds, even after a $2 million prize (in today’s money) had been offered for cracking the puzzle.

Wiles had searched for the answer for more than 30 years and reached the brink of a solution. One morning in 1994, out of the blue, an “incredible revelation” struck him. “It was so . . . beautiful . . . 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’ requires a certain level of aptitude (ability to learn). But creativity is more than school smarts, and it requires a different kind of thinking. Aptitude tests (such as the SAT) typically require convergent thinking—an ability to provide a single correct answer. Creativity tests (How many uses can you think of for a brick?) require divergent thinking—the ability to consider many different options and to think in novel ways.

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

Would you like some research-based tips to boost your own creative process? Try these:

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TABLE 8.1 summarizes the cognitive processes and strategies discussed in this section.

Other species are smarter than many humans realize. Neuroscientists have agreed that “nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds” possess the neural networks “that generate consciousness” (Low, 2012). Consider, then, what animal brains can do.

USING CONCEPTS AND NUMBERS Black bears have learned to sort pictures into animal and nonanimal categories, or concepts (Vonk et al., 2012). The great apes—a group that includes chimpanzees and gorillas—also form concepts, such as cat and dog. After monkeys have learned these concepts, certain frontal lobe neurons in their brains fire in response to new “cat-like” images, others to new “dog-like” images (Freedman et al., 2001). Even pigeons—mere birdbrains—can sort objects (pictures of cars, cats, chairs, flowers) into categories. Shown a picture of a never-before-seen chair, pigeons will reliably peck a key that represents chairs (Wasserman, 1995).

Until his death in 2007, Alex, an African Grey parrot, displayed jaw-dropping numerical skills. He categorized and named objects (Pepperberg, 2009, 20012, 2013). He could comprehend numbers up to 8. He could speak the number of objects. He could add two small clusters of objects and announce the sum. He could indicate which of two numbers was greater. And he gave correct answers when shown various groups of objects. Asked, for example, “What color four?” (meaning “What’s the color of the objects of which there are four?”), he could speak the answer.

DISPLAYING INSIGHT We are not the only creatures to display insight. Psychologist Wolfgang Köhler (1925) 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, the chimpanzee 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.

Birds, too, have displayed insight. One experiment brought to life one of Aesop’s fables (ancient Greek stories), in which a thirsty crow is unable to reach the water in a partly filled pitcher. See the crow’s solution (exactly as in the fable) in FIGURE 8.5.

USING TOOLS AND TRANSMITTING CULTURE Like humans, other animals 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, a light, flexible stick for fishing for termites, a pointed stick for roasting marshmallows. (Just kidding: They don’t roast marshmallows, but they have surprised us with their sophisticated tool use [Sanz et al., 2004].) Researchers have found at least 39 local customs related to chimpanzee tool use, grooming, and courtship (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, while their neighbors use a piece of wood. These group differences, along with differing communication and hunting styles, are the chimpanzee version of cultural diversity.

Chimpanzees have shown altruism, cooperation, and group aggression. Like humans, they will kill their neighbor to gain land, and they grieve over dead relatives (C. A. Anderson et al., 2010; D. Biro et al., 2010; Mitani et al., 2010). Elephants have demonstrated self-awareness by recognizing themselves in a mirror. They have also displayed their abilities to learn, remember, discriminate smells, empathize, cooperate, teach, and spontaneously use tools (Byrne et al., 2009).

So there is no question that other species display many remarkable cognitive skills. Are they also capable of what we humans call language, the topic we consider next?