According to Daniel Kahneman(author of Thinking, Fast and Slow), There are two systems in our brain:
System1 —the one which operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.
System 2 —the one which allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations.
We will see how these systems in our brain help us in decision making and performing other tasks.
Whenever we are conscious, and perhaps even when we are not, multiple computations are going on in our brain, which maintains and update current answers to some key questions: Is anything new going on? Is there a threat? Are things going well? Should my attention be redirected? The answers to these questions are carried out by System 1 and many times the answer is not a straightforward yes or no, it may lie between them. That’s where cognitive ease comes in the picture.
So, let’s talk about what is COGNITIVE EASE.
Cognitive ease is a measure of how hard your brain is working trying to process a situation. It ranges from “easy to “strained”.
Easy when you are not doing a task that requires your mental attention like listening to a song. It gives a sign that things are going well, there are no threats and there is no need to redirect attention.
Strained when you need to do a task that requires your mental attention like solving a complex mathematical problem. It gives a sign to your brain that things are not going well and you need to redirect your attention immediately.
The various causes of ease or strain have interchangeable effects. When you are in a state of ease, you are probably in a good mood, like what you see, trust your intuitions and feel that the current situation is currently familiar. When you feel strained, you are more likely to be vigilant and suspicious, invest more effort in what you are doing, feel less comfortable, but you also become less intuitive and less creative than usual.
How your mind tricks you into believing something
When you hear a statement repeatedly, then you will more likely to accept the next statement that seems similar to the previous one.
For example, Daniel Kahneman shared an example in which People who were repeatedly exposed to the phrase “the body temperature of a chicken” were more likely to accept as true the statement that “the body temperature of a chicken is 144 degrees”(or any arbitrary number).
The familiarity of one phrase in the statement sufficed to make the whole statement feel familiar, and therefore true. If you cannot remember the source of a statement, you have no option but to go with the sense of cognitive ease. This is called ILLUSION OF TRUTH.
That is why it is truly said that do not believe everything you hear because people get tricked in believing even a false statement due to cognitive ease. If we hear a lie often enough, we tend to believe it.
How your mood affects your intuitive performance
In an experiment, it was found that putting the participants in a good mood before any test by having them think happy thoughts more than doubled accuracy. An even more striking result is that unhappy subjects were completely incapable of performing the intuitive task accurately. Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.
It is evident that a happy mood loosens the control of System 2 over performance: when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors.
So, before making any intuitive decision, just think what your mood is because it will totally affect your decision.
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