INTRODUCTION
WHEN I WAS A GRADUATE STUDENT at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, doing research in cognitive psychology, our lab group went out every now and then for nachos and beers. It was a great opportunity for us to ask our advisor about things that wouldn’t likely come up in our more formal individual meetings. At one of those gatherings, I summoned up the courage to ask him a question that had been on my mind for some time: “Do you think cognitive psychology can make the world a better place?”
I felt a bit like my question was coming out of left field; having already committed my life to this area of study, it was a little late to be asking it. But even though I had presented my findings at cognitive science conferences around the world and was on track to publish them in respected psychology journals, I had been having a hard time explaining the real-life implications of my work to my friends from high school. On that particular day, after struggling to read a paper in which the authors’ primary goal appeared to be to show off how smart they were by tackling a convoluted problem that didn’t exist in the real world, I finally found the courage to raise that question—with some help from the beer.
Our advisor was famous for being obscure. If I asked him, “Shall I do A or B for the next experiment?,” he would either answer with a cryptic “Yes,” or turn the question around and ask, “What do you think?” This time I had asked him a simple yes-or-no question, so he chose a simple answer: “Yes.” My lab mates and I sat there silently for what felt like five minutes, waiting for him to elaborate, but that was all he said.
Over the course of the next thirty or so years, I’ve tried to answer that question myself by working on problems that I hope have real-world applications. In my research at Yale University, where I’ve been a professor of psychology since 2003, I’ve examined some of the biases that can lead us astray—and developed strategies to correct them in ways that are directly applicable to situations people encounter in their daily lives.
In addition to the specific biases I’ve chosen to research, I’ve also explored an array of other real-world “thinking problems” that can cause issues for myself and those around me—students, friends, family. I saw how my students procrastinate because they underestimate the pain of doing an assignment in the future as opposed to doing exactly the same thing right now. I heard from a student who told me about a doctor who misdiagnosed her because he only asked questions that confirmed his original hypothesis. I noted the unhappiness of people who blame themselves for all their troubles because they only see one side of reality, and the unhappiness caused by other people who never see themselves as being at fault for anything at all. I witnessed the frustration of couples who thought they were communicating with perfect clarity but actually were completely misunderstanding each other.
And I also saw how “thinking problems” can cause troubles that go far beyond individuals’ lives. These fundamental errors and biases contribute to a wide range of societal issues, including political polarization, complicity in climate change, ethnic profiling, police shootings, and nearly every other problem that stems from stereotyping and prejudice.
I introduced a course called “Thinking” to show students how psychology can help them recognize and tackle some of these real-world problems and make better decisions about their lives. It must have filled a real need, because in 2019 alone, more than 450 students enrolled in it. It seemed they craved the kind of guidance psychology could provide, and they told one another about it. I then noticed a curious thing: when I was introduced to students’ family members who were visiting campus, they would often tell me how the students in my course would call home to talk about how they were learning to handle problems in their lives—and that some had even started advising other family members, their parents included. Colleagues told me they overheard students in the dining halls fiercely debating the implications of some of the experiments the course covered. When I would talk to people outside the profession about the issues discussed in the course, they asked me where they could learn more. All of this suggested that people really wanted and needed these kinds of tools, so I decided to write a book to make some of these lessons more broadly available.
I selected eight topics that I found most relevant to the real-life problems that my students and others (including myself!) face day to day. Each chapter covers one of them, and while I refer to material from throughout the book when relevant, the chapters are written so they can be read in any order.
Although I talk about errors and biases in thinking, this book is not about what is wrong with people. “Thinking problems” happen because we are wired in very particular ways, and there are often good reasons for that. Reasoning errors are mostly by-products of our highly evolved cognition, which has allowed us to get this far as a species and to survive and thrive in the world. As a result, the solutions to these problems are not always easily available. Indeed, any kind of de-biasing is notoriously challenging.
Furthermore, if we are to avoid these errors and biases, merely learning what they are and making a mental note that we should not commit them is not enough. It’s just like insomnia; when it happens, you clearly know what the problem is—you can’t sleep well. But telling insomniacs that they should sleep more will never be a solution for insomnia. Similarly, while some of the biases covered in this book may already be familiar to you, we need to provide prescriptions that are better than simply saying, “Don’t do that.” Fortunately, as a growing number of studies attest, there are actionable strategies we can adopt to reason better. These strategies can also help us figure out which things we can’t control, and even show us how solutions that might initially seem promising can ultimately backfire.
This book is based on scientific research, mostly from other cognitive psychologists but also on some that I carried out myself. Many of the studies I cite are considered classics that have stood the test of time; others represent the latest results from the field. As I do in my course, I give a variety of examples taken from widely different aspects of our lives to illustrate each point. There’s a reason for that, and you’ll find out why.
So, back to the question I asked my advisor: “Can cognitive psychology make the world a better place?” In the years since I first posed it, I’ve come to believe ever more strongly that the answer is indeed, as my advisor so aptly replied, “Yes.” Absolutely yes.
1THE ALLURE OF FLUENCY
Why Things Look So Easy
WITH 450 SEATS, LEVINSON AUDITORIUM is one of Yale University’s largest lecture halls, and on Mondays and Wednesdays between 11:35 and 12:50, when my undergraduate course titled “Thinking” meets, nearly every seat is filled. Today’s lecture on overconfidence is likely to be especially entertaining, as my plan is to invite some students to come up to the front and dance to a K-pop video.
I begin my lecture with a description of the above-average effect. When one million high school students were asked to rate their leadership abilities, 70 percent assessed their skills as above average, and 60 percent put themselves in the top tenth percentile in terms of their ability to get along with others. When college professors were polled about their teaching skills, two thirds rated themselves in the top 25 percent. After presenting these and other examples of overly generous self-assessments, I ask the students a question: “What percentage of Americans do you think claimed they are better than average drivers?” Students shout out numbers higher than any of the ones they’ve seen so far, like 80 or 85 percent, giggling because they think they are so outrageous. But as it turns out, their guesses are still too low: the right answer is in fact 93 percent.
To really teach students about the biases in our thinking, it’s never enough to simply describe results from studies; I try to make them experience these biases for themselves, lest they fall prey to the “not me” bias—the belief that while others may have certain cognitive biases, we ourselves are immune. For example, one student might think that he is not overconfident, because he feels insecure sometimes. Another may think that since her guesses about how she did on an exam are generally close to the mark, she is similarly realistic when she assesses her standing with respect to her peers in leadership, interpersonal relationships, or driving skills. This is where the dancing comes in.
I show the class a six-second clip from BTS’s “Boy with Luv,” a music video that has garnered more than 1.4 billion views on YouTube. I purposely chose a segment in which the choreography is not too technical. (If you’ve already found the official music video, it’s between 1:18 and 1:24.)
After playing the clip, I tell the students that there will be prizes and that those who can dance this segment successfully will win them. We watch the clip ten more times. We even watch a slowed-down version that was especially created to teach people how to dance to this song. Then I ask for volunteers. Ten brave students walk to the front of the auditorium in a quest for instant fame, and the rest of the students cheer loudly for them. Hundreds of them, I am sure, think that they can do the steps too. After watching the clip so many times, even I feel like I could do it—after all, it’s only six seconds. How hard could it be?
The audience demands that the volunteers face them, rather than the screen. The song starts playing. The volunteers flail their arms randomly and jump up and kick, all at wildly different times. One makes up completely new steps. Some give up after three seconds. Everybody laughs hysterically.
THE FLUENCY EFFECT
Things that our mind can easily process elicit overconfidence. This fluency effect can sneak up on us in several ways.
Illusion of Skill Acquisition
The class demonstration involving BTS was modeled after a study on the illusion of fluency that can occur when we are learning new skills. In the study, participants watched a six-second video clip of Michael Jackson doing the moonwalk, in which he seems to be walking backwards without lifting his feet off the floor. The steps do not seem complicated, and he does them so effortlessly he doesn’t even appear to be thinking about them.
Some participants watched the clip once, while others watched it twenty times. Then they were asked to rate how well they thought they could do the moonwalk themselves. Those who watched the video twenty times were significantly more confident that they could do it than those who watched it just once. Having seen it so many times, they believed they’d memorized every little movement and could easily replay them in their heads. But when the moment of truth arrived and the participants were asked to actually do the moonwalk, there was absolutely no difference between the two groups’ performances. Watching Michael Jackson perform the moonwalk twenty times without practicing did not make you a better moonwalker than someone who had only seen him do it once.
People often fall for the illusion that they can perform a difficult feat after seeing someone else accomplish it effortlessly. How many times have we replayed Whitney Houston’s “And A-I-A-I-O-A-I-A-I-A will always love you” in our heads, thinking that it can’t be that hard to hit that high note? Or attempted to create a soufflé after watching someone make one on YouTube? Or started a new diet after seeing those before and after pictures?
When we see final products that look fluent, masterful, or just perfectly normal, like a lofty soufflé or a person in good shape, we make the mistake of believing the process that led to those results must have also been fluent, smooth, and easy. When you read a book that’s easy to understand, you may feel like that book must have also been easy to write. If a person hasn’t done any figure skating, she may wonder why a figure skater falls while attempting to perform a double axel when so many others pull it off so effortlessly. It’s easy to forget how many times that book was revised, or how much practice went into those double axels. As Dolly Parton famously said, “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.”
TED Talks provide another great example of how we can be misled by fluency. These talks are typically eighteen minutes long, which means their scripts are only about six to eight pages. Given that the speakers must be experts in their topics, one might think that preparing for such a short talk would be a piece of cake; perhaps some speakers simply wing it. Yet according to TED’s guidelines, speakers should dedicate weeks or months to prepare. Speaking coaches have provided more specific guidelines for TED-style talks—at least one hour of rehearsal for every minute that you speak. In other words, you need to rehearse your talk sixty times. And those twenty or so hours are just for rehearsals—they don’t include the hours, days, and weeks that go into figuring out what to include in those six to eight pages of script, and even more importantly, what you should leave out.
Short presentations are actually harder to prepare for than long ones, because you don’t have time to think about your next sentence or feel your way toward the perfect transition. I once asked a former student who was working at a prestigious consulting firm whether he thought Yale had prepared him for his job. He said the one thing he wished he’d learned was how to convince a client of something in three minutes. That’s the hardest kind of presentation to pull off because every word counts—but it looks so easy when it’s done right.
Illusion of Knowledge
The fluency illusion isn’t limited to skills like dancing, singing, or giving talks. You see a second type in the realm of knowledge. We give more credence to new findings once we understand how those findings came about.
Consider duct tape, for example. We use it to fix nearly everything, from patching a hole in a sneaker to making an emergency hem in a pair of pants. Studies have found that duct tape can also remove warts as well as or sometimes even better than the standard therapy of liquid nitrogen. It’s hard to believe, until you hear the explanation: warts are caused by a virus, which can be killed when it’s deprived of air and sunlight. Cover a wart with duct tape, and that’s exactly what happens. Given this explanation of the underlying process, the therapeutic power of duct tape sounds that much more credible.
Some of my earlier studies were about this sort of phenomenon: namely, that people are more willing to derive a cause from a correlation when they can picture the underlying mechanism. Even though the actual data remains the same, we are much more willing to leap to a causal conclusion when we can envision the fluent process by which an outcome is generated. There’s no problem with that, unless the underlying mechanism is flawed. When we are wrongly convinced that we understand a fluent process, we are more likely to draw a flawed causal conclusion.
Let me give you a specific example. While pursuing this line of research, I came across a book entitled The Cosmic Clocks: From Astrology to a Modern Science, which was written in the 1960s by a self-styled “neo-astrologer” named Michel Gauquelin. The book began with a presentation of statistics (although some of them are questionable, for the sake of this illustration, let’s just assume they are all true). For example, Gauquelin says that those who were born immediately after the rise and culmination of Mars—whatever that means—are more likely to grow up to be eminent physicians, scientists, or athletes. He had hundreds or sometimes thousands of data points and used sophisticated statistics to draw his conclusions. Nonetheless, there were skeptics. Even he was puzzled by his own discoveries and searched for an explanation. He dismissed the less scientific hypothesis that planets somehow bestow certain talents on babies at the moment of their birth. He instead offered a seemingly fluent explanation. To some extent, he wrote, our personalities, traits, and intelligence are innate, which means they are already present within us when we are in utero. Fetuses send chemical signals when they are ready to be born, precipitating labor. And fetuses with particular personality traits signal when they are ready for labor in response to subtle gravitational forces that are determined by extraterrestrial events. Given such an elaborate explanation, even a skeptic may err by switching their response from “no way” to “hmm.”
Perhaps the illusion of knowledge explains why some conspiracy theories are so persistent. The theory that Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated John F. Kennedy because he was a CIA agent may seem far-fetched, but when an additional explanation is added—that the CIA was concerned about the way the president was handling communism—it sounds more plausible. QAnon’s theory that President Trump was secretly fighting a cabal of satanic pedophiles and cannibals who were hidden in the “Deep State” was said to have come from a source, “Q,” whose high-level security clearance gave him access to the inner workings of the government. Of course, none of it is true, but the illusion of knowledge Q created by sprinkling his posts with operational jargon convinced many of their veracity.
Copyright © 2022 by Woo-kyoung Ahn
