Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

by Charles Duhigg

  hardly aware it’s occurring For more on the decision-making aspect of scaffolding and cognition, please see Gerd Gigerenzer and Wolfgang Gaissmaier, “Heuristic Decision Making,” Annual Review of Psychology 62 (2011): 451–82; Laurence T. Maloney, Julia Trommershäuser, and Michael S. Landy, “Questions Without Words: A Comparison Between Decision Making Under Risk and Movement Planning Under Risk,” Integrated Models of Cognitive Systems (2007): 297–313; Wayne Winston, Decision Making Under Uncertainty (Ithaca, N.Y.: Palisade Corporation, 1999); Eric J. Johnson and Elke U. Weber, “Mindful Judgment and Decision Making,” Annual Review of Psychology 60 (2009): 53; Kai Pata, Erno Lehtinen, and Tago Sarapuu, “Inter-Relations of Tutor’s and Peers’ Scaffolding and Decision-Making Discourse Acts,” Instructional Science 34, no. 4 (2006): 313–41; Priscilla Wohlstetter, Amanda Datnow, and Vicki Park, “Creating a System for Data-Driven Decision Making: Applying the Principal-Agent Framework,” School Effectiveness and School Improvement 19, no. 3 (2008): 239–59; Penelope L. Peterson and Michelle A. Comeaux, “Teachers’ Schemata for Classroom Events: The Mental Scaffolding of Teachers’ Thinking During Classroom Instruction,” Teaching and Teacher Education 3, no. 4 (1987): 319–31; Darrell A. Worthy et al., “With Age Comes Wisdom: Decision Making in Younger and Older Adults,” Psychological Science 22, no. 11 (2011): 1375–80; Pat Croskerry, “Cognitive Forcing Strategies in Clinical Decisionmaking,” Annals of Emergency Medicine 41, no. 1 (2003): 110–20; Brian J. Reiser, “Scaffolding Complex Learning: The Mechanisms of Structuring and Problematizing Student Work,” The Journal of the Learning Sciences 13, no. 3 (2004): 273–304; Robert Clowes and Anthony F. Morse, “Scaffolding Cognition with Words,” in Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Epigenetic Robotics: Modeling Cognitive Development in Robotic Systems (Lund, Sweden: Lund University Cognitive Studies, 2005), 101–5.

  make a choice For more on disfluency, please see Adam L. Alter, “The Benefits of Cognitive Disfluency,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 22, no. 6 (2013): 437–42; Adam L. Alter et al., “Overcoming Intuition: Metacognitive Difficulty Activates Analytic Reasoning,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 136, no. 4 (2007): 569; Adam L. Alter, Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces That Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave (New York: Penguin, 2013); Adam L. Alter et al., “Overcoming Intuition: Metacognitive Difficulty Activates Analytic Reasoning,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 136, no. 4 (2007): 569; Adam L. Alter and Daniel M. Oppenheimer, “Effects of Fluency on Psychological Distance and Mental Construal (or Why New York Is a Large City, but New York Is a Civilized Jungle),” Psychological Science 19, no. 2 (2008): 161–67; Adam L. Alter and Daniel M. Oppenheimer, “Uniting the Tribes of Fluency to Form a Metacognitive Nation,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 13, no. 3 (2009): 219–35; John Hattie and Gregory C. R. Yates, Visible Learning and the Science of How We Learn (London: Routledge, 2013); Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (New York: Random House, 2012); Daniel M. Oppenheimer, “The Secret Life of Fluency,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 12, no. 6 (2008): 237–41; Edward T. Cokely and Colleen M. Kelley, “Cognitive Abilities and Superior Decision Making Under Risk: A Protocol Analysis and Process Model Evaluation,” Judgment and Decision Making 4, no. 1 (2009): 20–33; Connor Diemand-Yauman, Daniel M. Oppenheimer, and Erikka B. Vaughan, “Fortune Favors the Bold (and the Italicized): Effects of Disfluency on Educational Outcomes,” Cognition 118, no. 1 (2011): 111–15; Hyunjin Song and Norbert Schwarz, “Fluency and the Detection of Misleading Questions: Low Processing Fluency Attenuates the Moses Illusion,” Social Cognition 26, no. 6 (2008): 791–99; Anuj K. Shah and Daniel M. Oppenheimer, “Easy Does It: The Role of Fluency in Cue Weighting,” Judgment and Decision Making 2, no. 6 (2007): 371–79. In an email sent in response to fact-checking questions, Adam Alter, a professor at NYU who has studied disfluency, explained disfluency as “the sense of mental difficulty that people experience when they try to process (make sense of) certain pieces of information—complex words; text printed in ornate fonts; text printed against background of a similar color; drawing dimly remembered ideas from memory; struggling to remember a phone number; etc. You don’t have to be manipulating or using data, per se, for an experience to be disfluent. Some of this turns on how you define data—it sounds like you’re defining it very broadly, so perhaps your definition comes close to mine if you think of every cognitive process as ‘using data.’ ”

  easier to digest Alter wrote in an email that some recent work “challenges the disfluency literature….Some of my friends/colleagues have written another piece [“Disfluent Fonts Don’t Help People Solve Math Problems”] that shows how finicky the effect is; [and] how hard it can be to replicate at least one of the effects (the cognitive reflection test effects).”

  “using it in conversations” In an email sent in response to fact-checking questions, Adam Alter expanded on his quote to note that disfluency causes learning to be “longer lasting, perhaps, but certainly deeper. We don’t comment much on decay rates—how long the information is retained—but it probably follows that ideas last longer when they’re processed more deeply….The more they elaborate on that information, the more they tend to remember it. That’s a general principle from cognitive psychology. If I ask you to remember the word ‘balloon,’ you’ll remember it more easily if, at the point of storing it in memory, you imagine a red balloon floating into the sky, or you think of a baboon carrying a balloon, or you otherwise do more than just trying to cram the word into your already overstuffed memory bank.”

  pay their credit card bills Chase Manhattan Bank, now known as JPMorgan Chase, was provided with a summary of all facts contained in this chapter. A representative for the company wrote: “Given that more than 15 years have passed [since] the merger of Bank One and J. P. Morgan Chase in 2004, it’s been difficult to find the right internal sources for this.”

  “pick up on things” In an email sent in response to fact-checking questions, Fludd wrote that there were other elements to her management style that she believes contributed to her success: “I also was able to identify that the collectors had different learning styles that caused them to interpret the data in different ways that could either negatively or positively impact their performance….Management would accuse me of spoiling my collectors because sometimes I would cook them breakfast on the weekends. Food always helped. Being a minister often helped me relate to the collectors and assist them in ways that other managers couldn’t. I would visit family members in the hospital, perform marriages, prayer requests. Collectors knew I was a no nonsense manager, but they also knew I cared about them….Knowing how to interpret data and explaining it in a way that is meaningful and relevant is important. The collectors having access to data that was relevant to their performance was important. However if you cannot give the employee a road map on how to take the data that they are receiving and show them how to get to their desired performance destination, then it means nothing. How you relay that data is just as important. The important thing every manager needs to remember is not to forget the human side of the data they are relating.”

  various experiments In an email sent in response to fact-checking questions, Niko Cantor wrote: “It is also true that Charlotte was a better manager than most peers, more engaging, more enrolling her people in a quest to become better. She did make the job feel more like a game. I think some of the effects of the collectors listening better and therefore connecting better because the collectors were more engaged were important.”

  “So you’re Ms. Johnson” Johnson started her teaching career at Pleasant Hill Elementary, and then later joined South Avondale, serving as a teacher coach.

  over the PA system The “Hot Pencil Drills” were unique to South Avondale, and not done in all of the schools participating in the Elementary Initiative.

  Delia Morris was a “Delia Morris” is a pseudonym used to protect the privacy of a student who was a minor when these event
s occurred.

  “the engineering design process” Yousef Haik and Tamer Shahin, Engineering Design Process (Independence, Ky.: Cengage Learning, 2010); Clive L. Dym et al., Engineering Design: A Project-Based Introduction (New York: Wiley, 2004); Atila Ertas and Jesse C. Jones, The Engineering Design Process (New York: Wiley, 1996); Thomas J. Howard, Stephen J. Culley, and Elies Dekoninck, “Describing the Creative Design Process by the Integration of Engineering Design and Cognitive Psychology Literature,” Design Studies 29, no. 2 (2008): 160–80.

  teacher’s manual explained “What is the Engineering Design Process?” Innovation First International, http://​curriculum.​vexrobotics.​com/​curriculum/​intro-​to-​engineering/​what-​is-​the-​engineering-​design-​process.

  their own experiences Stephen J. Hoch, “Availability and Interference in Predictive Judgment,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 10, no. 4 (1984): 649.

  question was framed In an email sent in response to fact-checking questions, the author of this study, Stephen Hoch, wrote: “The only other thing that I might add is that old ideas can get in the way of new ideas, creating interference and essentially blocking the thought process. One way to overcome the interference is to take a break so that the old ideas die down in terms of their salience.”

  hard to dislodge Irwin P. Levin, Sandra L. Schneider, and Gary J. Gaeth, “All Frames Are Not Created Equal: A Typology and Critical Analysis of Framing Effects,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 76, no. 2 (1998): 149–88; Hilary A. Llewellyn-Thomas, M. June McGreal, and Elaine C. Thiel, “Cancer Patients’ Decision Making and Trial-Entry Preferences: The Effects of ‘Framing’ Information About Short-Term Toxicity and Long-Term Survival,” Medical Decision Making 15, no. 1 (1995): 4–12; David E. Bell, Howard Raiffa, and Amos Tversky, Decision Making: Descriptive, Normative, and Prescriptive Interactions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Rational Choice and the Framing of Decisions,” The Journal of Business 59, no. 4, part 2 (1986): S251–78.

  “inside their heads” In response to a fact-checking email, Johnson wrote: “The idea is that we think of a subset of the relevant information.”

  program named “Gen-1” Lekan Oguntoyinbo, “Hall Sweet Home,” Diverse Issues in Higher Education 27, no. 25 (2011): 8; Dana Jennings, “Second Home for First Gens,” The New York Times, July 20, 2009.

  the difference between students Pam A. Mueller and Daniel M. Oppenheimer, “The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand over Laptop Note Taking,” Psychological Science 25, no. 6 (2014).

  verbatim phrases In a note sent in response to fact-checking questions, the first author of this study, Pam Mueller of Princeton, wrote: “Only because a lot of people (on the Internet) seem to assume that we didn’t randomly assign participants to groups, and therefore the conclusions are invalid, it might be worth mentioning that the two groups were, in fact, randomly assigned. We did ask students about their underlying note-taking preference, but due to small numbers of participants in certain conditions (e.g., longhand-preferring students at Princeton assigned to the laptop condition) we can’t draw strong conclusions about any interactions there. There is some suggestion that those who preferred longhand in their regular note taking were more effective than others when using a laptop (i.e., continuing to take shorter, non-verbatim notes). One thing to note is that a strong majority of students at Princeton reported that they generally took notes on a laptop, while a majority of UCLA students reported that they took notes longhand. It is heartening that our second study (run at UCLA) did replicate our first study (run at Princeton).”

  the lecture’s content In a note sent in response to fact-checking questions, Mueller wrote: “Laptop note-takers had far more content in their notes. Thus, we thought that the laptop note-takers’ performance would rebound when they had a chance to look back on their notes—the laptop note takers just had so much more information available at the time of study. However (as we were quite surprised to find), it seems that if they didn’t process the information at the time of encoding (i.e., during the lecture), the increased quantity of notes didn’t help, or at least didn’t help within a short study period. Perhaps with a longer time to study, they could piece together the content of the lecture, but at that point, the process is pretty inefficient, and it would be better to have taken ‘better’ (i.e., longhand-style, with less verbatim overlap) notes the first time around.”

  BY CHARLES DUHIGG

  Smarter Faster Better

  The Power of Habit

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHARLES DUHIGG is a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter for The New York Times and the author of The Power of Habit. He is a winner of the National Academies of Sciences, National Journalism, and George Polk awards. A graduate of Harvard Business School and Yale College, he lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two children.

  charlesduhigg.​com

  Facebook.​com/​charlesduhigg

  @cduhigg

  To inquire about booking Charles Duhigg for a speaking engagement, please contact the Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau at speakers@penguinrandomhouse.​com.

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