Module 26 Thinking, Concepts, and Problem Solving

Cognition and Metacognition

  • Cognition: Mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating information.
  • Metacognition: Thinking about our thinking; monitoring and evaluating one's own learning, which leads to better academic performance (Daboer et al, 2018).
  • Improving grades involves identifying what you don't know.
  • Adaptive quizzing can be a useful tool.

Concepts and Prototypes

  • Concepts: Mental groupings of similar objects, events, ideas, or people.
  • Prototypes: Mental images or best examples of a category.
  • Moving away from prototypes can blur category boundaries (e.g., a tomato being a fruit).
  • Recognition of items is slower when they don't match our prototypes (Bishop, 1991).
  • Heart attack symptoms not matching typical prototypes (sharp chest pain) can delay seeking help.
  • Failure to notice prejudice when behaviors don't fit discrimination prototypes.

Problem Solving Strategies

  • Problem-solving involves skills in finding routes, handling criticism, or gaining entry without keys.
  • Trial and error: Trying various solutions until one works (e.g., Edison's light bulb filaments).
  • Algorithms: Step-by-step procedures that guarantee a solution.
  • Heuristics: Mental shortcuts to reduce alternatives, followed by trial and error.
  • Insight: Abrupt, true-seeming solutions to a problem (Topolinski & Reber, 2010; Webb et al, 2019).
  • Example: A child solving a problem of rescuing a robin from a narrow hole by slowly pouring sand (Rockless, 1990).

The Aha! Moment

  • Brain scans show bursts of activity during moments of insight (Kounios & Beeman, 2014).
  • Frontal lobes are active before the insight moment.
  • A burst of activity in the right temporal lobe occurs at the instant of discovery (Figure 26.2; Yunghansen et al., 2004).
  • Insight often leads to a sense of satisfaction (Knoblich et al, 2006; Metcalfe, 1986).

Insight and Humor

  • The joy of a joke relates to the sudden comprehension of an unexpected ending or double meaning.

Obstacles to Problem Solving

  • Confirmation bias: Seeking evidence that confirms our ideas more eagerly than evidence that refutes them (Klayman & Ha, 1987; Scott Van Schoyck, 1986).
  • Wason's experiment: Students guessing a rule for a series of numbers, often searching only for confirming evidence (Wason, 1960).
  • People prefer information that supports their beliefs.
  • Fixation: Inability to come to a fresh perspective, an obstacle to problem-solving.
  • Example: The matchstick problem (Figure 26.3) requiring thinking outside the box (Figure 26.4).

Intuition, Heuristics, and Judgments

  • Intuition: Fast, automatic feelings and thoughts that guide daily judgments and decisions.
  • Policymakers often use intuition rather than reflective problem-solving approaches (Janus, 1986).
  • Heuristics: Quick thinking that often serves us well, but can lead to poor decisions (Gigerenzer, 2015).

Representativeness Heuristic

  • Judging the likelihood of things based on how well they represent particular prototypes (Kahneman, 1974).
  • Example: Judging a poetry-loving person as an English professor rather than a truck driver, failing to consider base rates (Tversky, 1985; Miss Bettman Ross, 1980; Bordalo et al, 2021).
  • Can result in social consequences such as racial bias (Roper, 2016).

Availability Heuristic

  • Evaluating the commonality of an event based on its mental availability.
  • Vividness, recency, or distinctiveness make information seem commonplace.
  • Examples: Fear of global terrorism after a beheading, or public concern rises about climate change after extreme weather events (Redmond et al., 2019).
  • Can distort judgments of risks; fearing the wrong things.
  • Lack of available images can result in people being unconcerned about Climate change (Eckon & Mullen, 2012; Kaufman et al., 2017; Zavil et al., 2014).
  • Vivid depictions like graphic photos on cigarette packages can harness the power of emotional reasoning (Reardon, 2013; Hwang et al., 2013).
  • Dramatic incidents make us misjudge probabilities (Slavik, 2017).

Overconfidence

  • Tendency to overestimate the accuracy of our knowledge and judgments (Fischhoff et al, 1977).
  • Leads to the planning fallacy: Expecting to finish assignments ahead of schedule.
  • Can affect life-or-death decisions in politics and medicine (Zobberman & Lynch, 2005; Beuler et al, 1994; Saposnik et al, 2016).
  • Overconfidence can have adaptive value; self-confident people tend to live more happily.
  • Prompt and clear feedback can help us be more realistic about our judgments (Anderson et al, 2012; Fischhoff, 1982).

Belief Perseverance

  • Tendency to cling to our beliefs in the face of contrary evidence.
  • Capital punishment study: Mixed evidence increased disagreement between proponents and opponents (Lord et al, 1979).
  • People use their conclusions to assess evidence, a phenomenon known as motivated reasoning.
  • To rein in belief perseverance, consider the opposite (Lord et al, 1984).
  • Considering opposing arguments reduces bias (Katapano et al, 2019; Van Boven et al, 2019).
  • It takes more compelling evidence to change beliefs than to create them.

Framing

  • The way we present an issue can powerfully persuade.
  • Solutions framed as gains (e.g., 200 people will be saved) are preferred over those framed as losses (e.g., 400 people will die) (Tversky & Kahneman, 1981).
  • Framing can nudge people towards beneficial decisions (Benartzi et al, 2017; Daniels & Aznlada, 2019; Thaler & Sunstein, 2008).
  • Examples:
    • Healthier eating: Tasty-sounding food labels.
    • Saving for retirement: Automatic enrollment in retirement plans.
    • Making moral decisions: Notching people to take a moral mince.
    • Becoming an organ donor: Opt-in versus opt-out arrangements.

Intuition's Powers

  • Intuition is recognition born of experience and implicit, unconscious knowledge (Chassi & Gobet, 2011; Gore & Sadler Smith, 2011; TS Eliot).
  • Smart, quick judgments by experienced nurses, firefighters, or athletes.
  • Intuition is usually adaptive and aids survival.
  • Gut-level attitudes predict marital happiness (Adal, 2017).
  • Constant unconscious, automatic influences guide our judgments (Custard & Bart's, 2010; Kilstrom, 2019).
  • In making complex decisions, we sometimes benefit by letting our brain work on a problem without consciously thinking about it.
  • Letting a problem incubate while attending to other things can pay (Strick, 2016).

Limits of Intuition

  • Deliberate thinking beats instant intuition in challenging situations like chess or distinguishing true and false news (Bego et al, 2020; Moxley et al, 2012).
  • Intuitive responses can be wrong.
  • Two-track mind requires smart, critical thinking that listens to the creative whispers of intuition but evaluates evidence, tests conclusions, and plans for the future.

Creativity

  • Creativity: The ability to produce novel and valuable ideas (Hennessy & Amabile, 2010).
  • Creative moment example: Andrew Wiles and Fermat's Last Theorem (Singh, 1997).
  • Creative writers and physicists experience many significant ideas during mind-wandering (Gable et al, 2019).

Components of Creativity (Sternberg)

  • Expertise: Well-developed knowledge furnishes the ideas (Louis Pasteur). The longer you work on a problem, the more creative are our solutions. (Lucas and Nordrin, 2020)
  • Imaginative thinking skills: See things in new ways and make connections.
  • A venturesome personality: Seeks new experiences, tolerates ambiguity and risk.
  • Intrinsic motivation: Driven by interest, satisfaction, and challenge (Emma by land Hennessy, 1992).
  • A creative environment: Sparks, supports, and refines creative ideas (Holzshager et al., 2009).
  • Creativity-fostering environments support innovation, team building, and communication.

Boosting Creativity

  • Develop your expertise: Broaden your knowledge base.
  • Allow time for incubation: Set a problem aside and come back to it later (John et al, 2008).
  • Set aside time for the mind to roam freely: Detach from attention-grabbing media or meditate (Simonon, 2012 a, b; Haney, 2016).
  • Experience other cultures and ways of thinking: View life from a different perspective (Goddard et al, 2015; Lou et al, 2018; Kim et al, 2013; Ritter et al, 2012).

Cognitive Processes and Strategies (Table 26.1)

  • Algorithm: Methodical rule that guarantees a solution; requires time and effort.
  • Heuristic: Simple thinking shortcut; lets us act quickly but risks errors.
  • Insight: Sudden realization of solution; may not happen.
  • Confirmation Bias: Tendency to seek supporting evidence; hinders recognition of contradictory evidence.
  • Fixation: Inability to view problems from a new angle; hinders creative problem-solving.
  • Intuition: Fast, automatic feelings; huge and adaptive but can lead us to overfeel and underthink.
  • Overconfidence: Overestimating accuracy; allows easier decisions but risks errors.
  • Belief Perseverance: Ignoring contradictory evidence; closes our mind to new ideas.
  • Framing: Wording evokes a desired response; can produce misleading results.
  • Creativity: Innovating valuable ideas; may distract from structured routine work.

Thinking in Other Species

  • Other animals are surprisingly smart (DeWaal, 2016).
  • Animal consciousness and intelligence can be inferred from their behavior and brains (Low, 2012).
  • Nonhuman animals possess neural networks that generate consciousness.

Animal Cognition

  • Alex, an African gray parrot, could categorize and name objects, comprehend numbers (Pepperberg, 2009, 2012, 2013).
  • Black bears sort pictures into animal and non-animal categories (Bonk et al., 2012).
  • Great apes form concepts such as cat and dog (Friedman et al, 2001).
  • Pigeons can sort objects into categories (Wasserman, 1995).

Insight in Animals

  • Humans are not the only creatures displaying insight (Kuller, 1925).
  • Crows raise water levels to reach food by dropping stones (Bird & Emory, 2009).
  • Crows fashion wire or sticks for extracting food (Gilbert et al, 2018; Roots et al, 2016).
  • African Gray parrot equals or betters human performance in visual memory tasks (Palin et al., 2020)

Transmitting Culture in Animals

  • Species invent behaviors and transmit cultural patterns (Bosch, German, & Bosch, 1993).
  • Chimpanzees:
    • Select different tools for different purposes.
    • One discovered tree moss could absorb water (Habater et al., 2014).
    • Transmitted behaviors are the chimpanzee version of cultural diversity.

Other Cognitive Skills in Animals

  • Great apes, dolphins, magpies, and elephants recognize themselves in a mirror.
  • Elephants display abilities to learn, remember, discriminate smells, empathize, cooperate, teach, and spontaneously use tools (Bernadol, 2009).
  • Chimpanzees show altruism, cooperation, and group aggression (D Byron et al, 2010; Mittany et al, 2010).