pupil of the eye: Eckhard H. Hess, “Attitude and Pupil Size,” Scientific American 212 (1965): 46–54.
on the subject’s mind: The word subject reminds some people of subjugation and slavery, and the American Psychological Association enjoins us to use the more democratic participant. Unfortunately, the politically correct label is a mouthful, which occupies memory space and slows thinking. I will do my best to use participant whenever possible but will switch to subject when necessary.
heart rate increases: Daniel Kahneman et al., “Pupillary, Heart Rate, and Skin Resistance Changes During a Mental Task,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 79 (1969): 164–67.
rapidly flashing letters: Daniel Kahneman, Jackson Beatty, and Irwin Pollack, “Perceptual Deficit During a Mental Task,” Science 15 (1967): 218–19. We used a halfway mirror so that the observers saw the letters directly in front of them while facing the camera. In a control condition, the participants looked at the letter through a narrow aperture, to prevent any effect of the changing pupil size on their visual acuity. Their detection results showed the inverted-V pattern observed with other subjects.
Much like the electricity meter: Attempting to perform several tasks at once may run into difficulties of several kinds. For example, it is physically impossible to say two different things at exactly the same time, and it may be easier to combine an auditory and a visual task than to combine two visual or two auditory tasks. Prominent psychological theories have attempted to attribute all mutual interference between tasks to competition for separate mechanisms. See Alan D. Baddeley, Working Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). With practice, people’s ability to multitask in specific ways may improve. However, the wide variety of very different tasks that interfere with each other supports the existence of a general resource of attention or effort that is necessary in many tasks.
Studies of the brain: Michael E. Smith, Linda K. McEvoy, and Alan Gevins, “Neurophysiological Indices of Strategy Development and Skill Acquisition,” Cognitive Brain Research 7 (1999): 389–404. Alan Gevins et al., “High-Resolution EEG Mapping of Cortical Activation Related to Working Memory: Effects of Task Difficulty, Type of Processing and Practice,” Cerebral Cortex 7 (1997): 374–85.
less effort to solve the same problems: For example, Sylvia K. Ahern and Jackson Beatty showed that individuals who scored higher on the SAT showed smaller pupillary dilations than low scorers in responding to the same task. “Physiological Signs of Information Processing Vary with Intelligence,” Science 205 (1979): 1289–92.
“law of least effort”: Wouter Kool et {ute979): 1289al., “Decision Making and the Avoidance of Cognitive Demand,” Journal of Experimental Psychology—General 139 (2010): 665–82. Joseph T. McGuire and Matthew M. Botvinick, “The Impact of Anticipated Demand on Attention and Behavioral Choice,” in Effortless Attention, ed. Brian Bruya (Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books, 2010), 103–20.
balance of benefits and costs: Neuroscientists have identified a region of the brain that assesses the overall value of an action when it is completed. The effort that was invested counts as a cost in this neural computation. Joseph T. McGuire and Matthew M. Botvinick, “Prefrontal Cortex, Cognitive Control, and the Registration of Decision Costs,” PNAS 107 (2010): 7922–26.
read distracting words: Bruno Laeng et al., “Pupillary Stroop Effects,” Cognitive Processing 12 (2011): 13–21.
associate with intelligence: Michael I. Posner and Mary K. Rothbart, “Research on Attention Networks as a Model for the Integration of Psychological Science,” Annual Review of Psychology 58 (2007): 1–23. John Duncan et al., “A Neural Basis for General Intelligence,” Science 289 (2000): 457–60.
under time pressure: Stephen Monsell, “Task Switching,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7 (2003): 134–40.
working memory: Baddeley, Working Memory.
tests of general intelligence: Andrew A. Conway, Michael J. Kane, and Randall W. Engle, “Working Memory Capacity and Its Relation to General Intelligence,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7 (2003): 547–52.
Israeli Air Force pilots: Daniel Kahneman, Rachel Ben-Ishai, and Michael Lotan, “Relation of a Test of Attention to Road Accidents,” Journal of Applied Psychology 58 (1973): 113–15. Daniel Gopher, “A Selective Attention Test as a Predictor of Success in Flight Training,” Human Factors 24 (1982): 173–83.
3: The Lazy Controller
“optimal experience”: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper, 1990).
sweet tooth: Baba Shiv and Alexander Fedorikhin, “Heart and Mind in Conflict: The Interplay of Affect and Cognition in Consumer Decision Making,” Journal of Consumer Research 26 (1999): 278–92. Malte Friese, Wilhelm Hofmann, and Michaela Wänke, “When Impulses Take Over: Moderated Predictive Validity of Implicit and Explicit Attitude Measures in Predicting Food Choice and Consumption Behaviour,” British Journal of Social Psychology 47 (2008): 397–419.
cognitively busy: Daniel T. Gilbert, “How Mental Systems Believe,” American Psychologist 46 (1991): 107–19. C. Neil Macrae and Galen V. Bodenhausen, “Social Cognition: Thinking Categorically about Others,” Annual Review of Psychology 51 (2000): 93–120.
po {"><21; : Sian L. Beilock and Thomas H. Carr, “When High-Powered People Fail: Working Memory and Choking Under Pressure in Math,” Psychological Science 16 (2005): 101–105.
exertion of self-control: Martin S. Hagger et al., “Ego Depletion and the Strength Model of Self-Control: A Meta-Analysis,” Psychological Bulletin 136 (2010): 495–525.
resist the effects of ego depletion: Mark Muraven and Elisaveta Slessareva, “Mechanisms of Self-Control Failure: Motivation and Limited Resources,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 29 (2003): 894–906. Mark Muraven, Dianne M. Tice, and Roy F. Baumeister, “Self-Control as a Limited Resource: Regulatory Depletion Patterns,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 (1998): 774–89.
more than a mere metaphor: Matthew T. Gailliot et al., “Self-Control Relies on Glucose as a Limited Energy Source: Willpower Is More Than a Metaphor,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 92 (2007): 325–36. Matthew T. Gailliot and Roy F. Baumeister, “The Physiology of Willpower: Linking Blood Glucose to Self-Control,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 11 (2007): 303–27.
ego depletion: Gailliot, “Self-Control Relies on Glucose as a Limited Energy Source.”
depletion effects in judgment: Shai Danziger, Jonathan Levav, and Liora Avnaim-Pesso, “Extraneous Factors in Judicial Decisions,” PNAS 108 (2011): 6889–92.
intuitive—incorrect—answer: Shane Frederick, “Cognitive Reflection and Decision Making,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 19 (2005): 25–42.
syllogism as valid: This systematic error is known as the belief bias. Evans, “Dual-Processing Accounts of Reasoning, Judgment, and Social Cognition.”
call them more rational: Keith E. Stanovich, Rationality and the Reflective Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
cruel dilemma: Walter Mischel and Ebbe B. Ebbesen, “Attention in Delay of Gratification,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 16 (1970): 329–37.
“There were no toys…distress”: Inge-Marie Eigsti et al., “Predicting Cognitive Control from Preschool to Late Adolescence and Young Adulthood,” Psychological Science 17 (2006): 478–84.
higher scores on tests of intelligence: Mischel and Ebbesen, “Attention in Delay of Gratification.” Walter Mischel, “Processes in Delay of Gratification,” in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 7, ed. Leonard Berkowitz (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1974), 249–92. Walter Mischel, Yuichi Shoda, and Monica L. Rodriguez, “Delay of Gratification in Children,” Science 244 (1989): 933–38. Eigsti, “Predicting Cognitive Control from Preschool to Late Adolescence.”
improvement was maintained: M. Rosario Rued { Rocenca et al., “Training, Maturation, and Genetic Influences on the Development of Executive Attention,” PNAS 102 (2005): 14931–36.
co
nventional measures of intelligence: Maggie E. Toplak, Richard F. West, and Keith E. Stanovich, “The Cognitive Reflection Test as a Predictor of Performance on Heuristics-and-Biases Tasks,” Memory & Cognition (in press).
4: The Associative Machine
Associative Machine: Carey K. Morewedge and Daniel Kahneman, “Associative Processes in Intuitive Judgment,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 14 (2010): 435–40.
beyond your control: To avoid confusion, I did not mention in the text that the pupil also dilated. The pupil dilates both during emotional arousal and when arousal accompanies intellectual effort.
think with your body: Paula M. Niedenthal, “Embodying Emotion,” Science 316 (2007): 1002–1005.
WASH primes SOAP: The image is drawn from the working of a pump. The first few draws on a pump do not bring up any liquid, but they enable subsequent draws to be effective.
“finds he it yellow instantly”: John A. Bargh, Mark Chen, and Lara Burrows, “Automaticity of Social Behavior: Direct Effects of Trait Construct and Stereotype Activation on Action,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 71 (1996): 230–44.
words related to old age: Thomas Mussweiler, “Doing Is for Thinking! Stereotype Activation by Stereotypic Movements,” Psychological Science 17 (2006): 17–21.
The Far Side: Fritz Strack, Leonard L. Martin, and Sabine Stepper, “Inhibiting and Facilitating Conditions of the Human Smile: A Nonobtrusive Test of the Facial Feedback Hypothesis,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54 (1988): 768–77.
upsetting pictures: Ulf Dimberg, Monika Thunberg, and Sara Grunedal, “Facial Reactions to Emotional Stimuli: Automatically Controlled Emotional Responses,” Cognition and Emotion 16 (2002): 449–71.
listen to messages: Gary L. Wells and Richard E. Petty, “The Effects of Overt Head Movements on Persuasion: Compatibility and Incompatibility of Responses,” Basic and Applied Social Psychology 1 (1980): 219–30.
increase the funding of schools: Jonah Berger, Marc Meredith, and S. Christian Wheeler, “Contextual Priming: Where People Vote Affects How They Vote,” PNAS 105 (2008): 8846–49.
Reminders of money: Kathleen D. Vohs, “The Psychological Consequences of Money,” Science 314 (2006): 1154–56.
appeal of authoritarian ideas: Jeff Greenberg et al., “Evidence for Terror Management Theory II: The Effect of Mortality Salience on Reactions to Those Who Threaten or Bolster the Cultural Worldview,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology {gy
“Lady Macbeth effect”: Chen-Bo Zhong and Katie Liljenquist, “Washing Away Your Sins: Threatened Morality and Physical Cleansing,” Science 313 (2006): 1451–52.
preferred mouthwash over soap: Spike Lee and Norbert Schwarz, “Dirty Hands and Dirty Mouths: Embodiment of the Moral-Purity Metaphor Is Specific to the Motor Modality Involved in Moral Transgression,” Psychological Science 21 (2010): 1423–25.
at a British university: Melissa Bateson, Daniel Nettle, and Gilbert Roberts, “Cues of Being Watched Enhance Cooperation in a Real-World Setting,” Biology Letters 2 (2006): 412–14.
introduced to that stranger: Timothy Wilson’s Strangers to Ourselves (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002) presents a concept of an “adaptive unconscious” that is similar to System 1.
5: Cognitive Ease
“Easy” and “Strained”: The technical term for cognitive ease is fluency.
diverse inputs and outputs: Adam L. Alter and Daniel M. Oppenheimer, “Uniting the Tribes of Fluency to Form a Metacognitive Nation,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 13 (2009): 219–35.
“Becoming Famous Overnight”: Larry L. Jacoby, Colleen Kelley, Judith Brown, and Jennifer Jasechko, “Becoming Famous Overnight: Limits on the Ability to Avoid Unconscious Influences of the Past,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 56 (1989): 326–38.
nicely stated the problem: Bruce W. A. Whittlesea, Larry L. Jacoby, and Krista Girard, “Illusions of Immediate Memory: Evidence of an Attributional Basis for Feelings of Familiarity and Perceptual Quality,” Journal of Memory and Language 29 (1990): 716–32.
The impression of familiarity: Normally, when you meet a friend you can immediately place and name him; you often know where you met him last, what he was wearing, and what you said to each other. The feeling of familiarity becomes relevant only when such specific memories are not available. It is a fallback. Although its reliability is imperfect, the fallback is much better than nothing. It is the sense of familiarity that protects you from the embarrassment of being (and acting) astonished when you are greeted as an old friend by someone who only looks vaguely familiar.
“body temperature of a chicken”: Ian Begg, Victoria Armour, and Thérèse Kerr, “On Believing What We Remember,” Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science 17 (1985): 199–214.
low credibility: Daniel M. Oppenheimer, “Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly,” Applied Cognitive Psychology 20 (2006): 139–56.
when they rhymed: Matthew S. Mc Glone and Jessica Tofighbakhsh, “Birds of a Feather Flock Conjointly (?): Rhyme as Reas {RhyPsychological Science 11 (2000): 424–28.
fictitious Turkish companies: Anuj K. Shah and Daniel M. Oppenheimer, “Easy Does It: The Role of Fluency in Cue Weighting,” Judgment and Decision Making Journal 2 (2007): 371–79.
engaged and analytic mode: Adam L. Alter, Daniel M. Oppenheimer, Nicholas Epley, and Rebecca Eyre, “Overcoming Intuition: Metacognitive Difficulty Activates Analytic Reasoning,” Journal of Experimental Psychology—General 136 (2007): 569–76.
pictures of objects: Piotr Winkielman and John T. Cacioppo, “Mind at Ease Puts a Smile on the Face: Psychophysiological Evidence That Processing Facilitation Increases Positive Affect,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81 (2001): 989–1000.
small advantage: Adam L. Alter and Daniel M. Oppenheimer, “Predicting Short-Term Stock Fluctuations by Using Processing Fluency,” PNAS 103 (2006). Michael J. Cooper, Orlin Dimitrov, and P. Raghavendra Rau, “A Rose.com by Any Other Name,” Journal of Finance 56 (2001): 2371–88.
clunky labels: Pascal Pensa, “Nomen Est Omen: How Company Names Influence Shortand Long-Run Stock Market Performance,” Social Science Research Network Working Paper, September 2006.
mere exposure effect: Robert B. Zajonc, “Attitudinal Effects of Mere Exposure,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 9 (1968): 1–27.
favorite experiments: Robert B. Zajonc and D. W. Rajecki, “Exposure and Affect: A Field Experiment,” Psychonomic Science 17 (1969): 216–17.
never consciously sees: Jennifer L. Monahan, Sheila T. Murphy, and Robert B. Zajonc, “Subliminal Mere Exposure: Specific, General, and Diffuse Effects,” Psychological Science 11 (2000): 462–66.
inhabiting the shell: D. W. Rajecki, “Effects of Prenatal Exposure to Auditory or Visual Stimulation on Postnatal Distress Vocalizations in Chicks,” Behavioral Biology 11 (1974): 525–36.
“The consequences…social stability”: Robert B. Zajonc, “Mere Exposure: A Gateway to the Subliminal,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 10 (2001): 227.
triad of words: Annette Bolte, Thomas Goschke, and Julius Kuhl, “Emotion and Intuition: Effects of Positive and Negative Mood on Implicit Judgments of Semantic Coherence,” Psychological Science 14 (2003): 416–21.
association is retrieved: The analysis excludes all cases in which the subject actually found the correct solution. It shows that even subjects who will ultimately fail to find a common association have some idea of whether there is one to be found.
increase cognitive ease: Sascha Topolinski and Fritz Strack, “The Architecture of Intuition: Fluency and Affect Determine {ectition Intuitive Judgments of Semantic and Visual Coherence and Judgments of Grammaticality in Artificial Grammar Learning,” Journal of Experimental Psychology—General 138 (2009): 39–63.
doubled accuracy: Bolte, Goschke, and Kuhl, “Emotion and Intuition.”
form a cluster: Barbara Fredrickson, Pos
itivity: Groundbreaking Research Reveals How to Embrace the Hidden Strength of Positive Emotions, Overcome Negativity, and Thrive (New York: Random House, 2009). Joseph P. Forgas and Rebekah East, “On Being Happy and Gullible: Mood Effects on Skepticism and the Detection of Deception,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 44 (2008): 1362–67.
smiling reaction: Sascha Topolinski et al., “The Face of Fluency: Semantic Coherence Automatically Elicits a Specific Pattern of Facial Muscle Reactions,” Cognition and Emotion 23 (2009): 260–71.
“previous research…individuals”: Sascha Topolinski and Fritz Strack, “The Analysis of Intuition: Processing Fluency and Affect in Judgments of Semantic Coherence,” Cognition and Emotion 23 (2009): 1465–1503.
6: Norms, Surprises, and Causes
An observer: Daniel Kahneman and Dale T. Miller, “Norm Theory: Comparing Reality to Its Alternatives,” Psychological Review 93 (1986): 136–53.
“tattoo on my back”: Jos J. A. Van Berkum, “Understanding Sentences in Context: What Brain Waves Can Tell Us,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 17 (2008): 376–80.
the word pickpocket: Ran R. Hassin, John A. Bargh, and James S. Uleman, “Spontaneous Causal Inferences,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 38 (2002): 515–22.
indicate surprise: Albert Michotte, The Perception of Causality (Andover, MA: Methuen, 1963). Alan M. Leslie and Stephanie Keeble, “Do Six-Month-Old Infants Perceive Causality?” Cognition 25 (1987): 265–88.
explosive finale: Fritz Heider and Mary-Ann Simmel, “An Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior,” American Journal of Psychology 13 (1944): 243–59.
identify bullies and victims: Leslie and Keeble, “Do Six-Month-Old Infants Perceive Causality?”
as we die: Paul Bloom, “Is God an Accident?” Atlantic, December 2005.
7: A Machine for Jumping to Conclusions
elegant experiment: Daniel T. Gilbert, Douglas S. Krull, and Patrick S. Malone, “Unbelieving the Unbelievable: Some Problems in the Rejection of False Information,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 59 (1990): 601–13.
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