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Cognition, or thinking, involves mental activities such as understanding, problem-solving, and decision-making. Cognition also makes creativity possible. When humans think, they manipulate mental representations of objects, actions, events, and ideas. Humans commonly use mental representations such as concepts, prototypes, and cognitive schemas.
A concept is a mental category that groups similar objects, events, qualities, or actions. Concepts summarize information, enabling humans to think quickly.
Example: The concept “fish” includes specific creatures, such as an eel, a goldfish, a shark, and a flying fish.
A prototype is the most typical or ideal example of a concept. When people encounter something new, they try to match it to the prototype it fits best.
Example: Goldfish and eels are both fish, but most people will agree that a goldfish is a fish more quickly than they will agree that an eel is a fish. A goldfish fits the “fish” prototype better than an eel does.
Cognitive schemas are mental models of different aspects of the world. They contain knowledge, beliefs, assumptions, associations, and expectations.
Example: People may have a schema about New York that includes information they have learned about New York in school, their memories of New York, things people have told them about New York, information from movies and books about New York, what they assume to be true about New York, and so on.
Assimilation and Accommodation
People form and modify schemas through assimilation and accommodation, processes whose existence was proposed by Jean Piaget. Assimilation occurs when people integrate new information into an existing schema without changing the schema itself. Accommodation involves adjusting an existing schema to incorporate new information that doesn’t fit the original framework.
Example of assimilation: A child who knows dogs as four-legged animals might encounter a new breed of dog and immediately categorize it as a dog without altering their schema.
Example of accommodation: When a child familiar with dogs encounters a cat for the first time, they may need to adjust their schema for animals, now realizing that not all four-legged animals are dogs.
Together, concepts, prototypes, and schemas form the basis of thought, helping people interpret their surroundings and solve problems efficiently. By constantly modifying schemas through assimilation and accommodation, individuals develop a more nuanced understanding of the world.
Problem-Solving and Decision-Making Strategies
Problem-solving and decision-making are essential cognitive processes, but they are subject to obstacles and biases. Problem-solving is the active effort people make to achieve a goal that cannot be easily attained. Decision-making involves weighing alternatives and choosing between them. People don’t always make rational decisions. In the 1950s, economist Herbert Simon proposed that people’s capacity to process and evaluate multiple alternatives limits their ability to make rational decisions. He introduced the concept of bounded rationality, suggesting that when it is difficult to simultaneously evaluate all possible options, people rely on shortcuts instead. This can result in less than optimal decisions.
Several strategies help people make decisions and solve problems:
Trial and error: Involves trying out different solutions until one works. This type of strategy is practical only when the number of possible solutions is relatively small.
Example: It’s dark, and a man is trying to figure out which button on the dashboard of his newly rented car switches on the headlights. He might press all the available buttons until he finds the right one.
Algorithms: Step-by-step procedures that are guaranteed to achieve a particular goal.
Example: A chocolate chip cookie recipe is an algorithm for baking chocolate chip cookies.
Heuristics: Mental shortcuts or rules of thumb that may lead to a correct solution but doesn’t guarantee one.
Example: A useful heuristic for finishing a timed exam might be “Do the easy questions first.”
Insight: A sudden realization of a solution to a problem, an “aha moment.”
Example: Figuring out the punchline to a joke after hearing it.
Obstacles to Effective Problem-Solving
Researchers have described many obstacles that prevent people from solving problems effectively. These obstacles include:
Functional fixedness: The tendency to think only of an object’s most common use in solving a problem.
Example: Charlotte’s car breaks down while she is driving through the desert. She is terribly thirsty. She finds several soda bottles in the trunk but no bottle opener. She doesn’t think of using the car key to open the bottles because of functional fixedness.
Mental set: A tendency to use only those solutions that have worked in the past, even when it’s ineffective.
Example: When Ethan’s flashlight hasn’t worked in the past, he’s just shaken it to get it to work again. One day when it doesn’t come on, he shakes it, but it still doesn’t work. He would be subject to mental set if he keeps shaking it without checking whether it needs new batteries.
Making assumptions: Incorrectly assuming constraints that don’t exist.
Example: Another familiar riddle goes as follows: A father and his son are driving on a highway and get into a terrible accident. The father dies, and the boy is rushed to the hospital with major injuries. When he gets to the hospital, a surgeon rushes in to help the boy but stops and exclaims, “I can’t operate on this boy—he’s my son!” How can this be? If people have a hard time answering, they may be making a false assumption. The surgeon is the boy’s mother.
Biases in Decision-Making
Biases often impair judgment and lead to poor decision-making:
Framing effect: Refers to the way in which the framing or presentation of a problem or question influences the decisions people make.
Example: A doctor tells a patient that a surgery has a 90 percent survival rate. The patient feels optimistic. But if the doctor instead says there is a 10 percent chance of death, the same patient might feel much more anxious, despite the facts being identical.
Priming: Exposure to certain stimuli influences future decisions without conscious awareness.
Example: Seeing happy images before a survey can lead participants to report higher levels of life satisfaction.
Confirmation bias: The tendency for people to look for and accept evidence that supports what they want to believe and to ignore or reject evidence that refutes their beliefs.
Example: If Ava is a believer in herbal nutritional supplements, she may willingly accept research that supports their benefits while ignoring or rejecting research that disproves their benefits.
Sunk-cost fallacy: Involves continuing with a decision due to previously invested resources, even if it is no longer beneficial.
Example: Watching a bad movie to the end because you already bought the ticket.
Belief perseverance: Involves clinging to initial beliefs even after they have been discredited.
Example: After learning that a news article he believed was false, Mark continues to insist that the story was true because it aligns with his worldview.
Overconfidence bias: The tendency for people to be too certain that their beliefs, decisions, and estimates are correct. People can minimize the effects of overconfidence by collecting a lot of information and evaluating it carefully before making a decision.
Example: At the outset of the US Civil War, young Southern men eagerly enlisted in the Confederate Army, believing superior gallantry would help them make speedy work of the Union soldiers.
Heuristics and Errors in Thinking
Heuristics help simplify decision-making but can also lead to biases:
People often use heuristics to estimate probabilities. One heuristic people frequently use is the availability heuristic. When people use this rule-of-thumb strategy, they estimate probability based on how readily they can remember relevant instances of an event. If people can quickly remember instances of some event, then they will estimate that event as being quite likely.
Example: If William can think of several friends who have won raffles, he will judge that he is likely to win the raffle.
Using the availability heuristic can cause people to overestimate improbable events. This happens because rare but memorable events come to mind easily.
Example: Recalling a few dramatic TV reports of plane crashes could make people overestimate the likelihood of a plane crash.
Using the availability heuristic can also cause people to underestimate likely events. This can happen when events are hard to visualize and don’t easily come to mind.
Example: Isabella may have unprotected sex because she doesn’t think anyone she knows has a sexually transmitted disease (STD), and she doesn’t know what the symptoms of an STD might be. In reality, the majority of the adult American population has contracted one or more STDs, and Isabella has a very high chance of contracting one herself through unprotected sex.
People also use the representativeness heuristic to estimate probability. The representativeness heuristic is a rule-of-thumb strategy that estimates the probability of an event based on how typical that event is.
Example: If William the raffle ticket buyer lives in the United States, has several tattoos, and often wears dark sunglasses and a leather jacket, is it more likely that he owns a motorcycle or a car? If people use the representativeness heuristic, they may judge that William is more likely to own a motorcycle. This happens because the description of William is more representative of motorcycle owners.
The representativeness heuristic can also make people susceptible to the gambler’s fallacy. The gambler’s fallacy is the false belief that a chance event is more likely if it hasn’t happened recently. This belief is false because the laws of probability don’t apply to individual independent events.
Example: Olivia tosses a coin and get heads. Because of this, she believes that on her second toss, she will get tails, since 50 percent of her tosses should yield tails. This belief is incorrect. Over a series of tosses, she can estimate that the probability of tails will be about 50 percent, but this logic can’t be correctly applied to a single toss.
Executive Functions
Executive functions are high-level cognitive processes that help individuals manage thoughts and behaviors in order to achieve goals. These processes enable people to plan, organize, and execute tasks effectively, allowing them to focus their attention, regulate their emotions, and adapt to changing situations. Executive functions are essential for goal-directed behavior and critical thinking, which both help a person solve problems and make decisions.
Goal-directed behavior involves setting objectives, planning the steps necessary to accomplish those objectives, and staying on task until the goal is met. This type of behavior is guided by executive functions such as attention, self-regulation, and problem-solving skills.
Critical thinking refers to the ability to analyze, evaluate, and synthesize information in a logical and objective manner. Critical thinking often involves questioning assumptions, recognizing biases, and evaluating evidence to form reasonable conclusions.
Some of the core executive functions are:
Working memory: The ability to temporarily hold and manipulate information to complete complex tasks.
Example: Remembering a phone number long enough to dial it, or following multi-step instructions.
Cognitive flexibility: The capacity to switch between tasks, adjust to new rules, or change perspectives.
Example: Shifting from writing an essay to solving a math problem, or adapting plans after encountering unexpected obstacles.
Creativity
Creativity is the ability to generate novel, valuable ideas. People need a minimum level of intelligence to be creative, but not all people who get high scores on intelligence tests are creative.
Divergent versus Convergent Thinking
Creativity is characterized by divergent thinking. In divergent thinking, people’s thoughts go off in different directions as they try to generate many different solutions to a problem. In convergent thinking, on the other hand, people narrow down a list of possibilities to arrive at a single right answer.
Example: Amelia would have to use divergent thinking if her professor asked her to think of a hundred different uses for a fork. She uses convergent thinking when she considers the list of possibilities on a multiple-choice question and picks the one correct answer.
Characteristics of Creative People
Researchers have identified several characteristics that creative people share:
Expertise: Creative people usually have considerable training, knowledge, and expertise in their field.
Imaginative thinking skills: provide the ability to see things in novel ways, recognize patterns, and make connections.
Nonconformity: Creative people tend to think independently and have relatively little concern for what others think of them.
Curiosity: Creative people tend to be open to new experiences and willing to explore unusual events.
Persistence: Creative people are usually willing to work hard to overcome obstacles and take risks.
Intrinsic motivation: Creative people tend to be motivated more by intrinsic rewards, such as a sense of accomplishment or satisfaction of curiosity, rather than by extrinsic rewards, such as money or social approval.
On the other hand, creative thinking can be hindered by functional fixedness, a cognitive bias that causes individuals to see objects only in their typical roles or uses. This mental block limits the ability to think outside the box and explore innovative solutions. Overcoming functional fixedness is crucial to enhancing creativity, as individuals need to be able to approach problems in novel ways to find creative solutions.
Environmental Influences on Creativity
People can best realize their creative potential if they are in circumstances that promote creativity. Families, organizations, and institutions promote creativity when they allow people to have control over problem-solving and task completion, minimize judgment and evaluation of work, and encourage new ways of doing things.
Creative environment: External factors or conditions, such as people, resources, and atmosphere, that spark, support, and refine creativity are part of the creative environment.
