I was reading the "Professing and Cheering" article and it reminded me about some of my own ideas about the role of religious dogma as group identity badges. Here's the gist of it:
Religious and other dogmas need not make sense. Indeed, they may work better if they are not logical. Logical and useful ideas pop-up independently and spread easily, and widely accepted ideas are not very good badges. You need a unique idea to identify your group. It helps to have a somewhat costly idea as a dogma, because they are hard to fake and hard to deny. People would need to invest in these bad ideas, so they would be less likely to leave the group and confront the sunk cost. Also, it's harder to deny allegiance to the group afterwards, because no one in their right minds would accept an idea that bad for any other reason.
If you have a naive interpretation of the dogma, which regards it as an objective statement about the world, you will tend to question it. When you’re contesting the dogma, people won’t judge your argument on its merits: they will look at it as an in-group power struggle. Either you want to install your own dogma, which makes you a pretender, or you’re accepted a competing dogma, which makes you a traitor. Even if they accept that you just don’t want to yield to the authority behind the dogma, that makes you a rebel. Dogmas are just off-limits to criticism.
Public display of dismissive attitude to your questioning is also important. Taking it into consideration is in itself a form of treason, as it is interpreted as entertaining the option of joining you against the authority. So it’s best to dismiss the heresy quickly and loudly, without thinking about it.
Do you know of some other texts which shed some light on this idea?
For example, it could be expected that this lower-level burden would drain cognitive "energy" from higher functions trying to solve the mathematical problem.
In observing how people take tests, I've seen that people first 'extract' the information from the question and then move on to deriving its answer. Your point is valid, however.
Yes, I think that theory goes that, since you "fired up" the higher-level cognitive "engine" of your mind, you might as well use it to solve the problem. Perhaps it's a sunk-cost type of thinking, where you feel that you should justify your efforts in understanding the problem by solving the problem properly. Or, perhaps the lower-level, less intelligent mind agents are not triggered by the slower process of understanding the problem.
Do you think that people could behave rationally with such a simple intervention?
A higher cognitive burden on comprehension tautologically requires more thought per unit of information occur.
I don't know if it's a question of rational behavior but of necessary.
I don't think it's self-evident that effort put in recognizing letters should translate into significant improvement in problem solving. For example, it could be expected that this lower-level burden would drain cognitive "energy" from higher functions trying to solve the mathematical problem.
Maybe it's this paper: http://web.princeton.edu/sites/opplab/papers/Diemand-Yauman_Oppenheimer_2010.pdf
From the abstract:
Previous research has shown that disfluency – the subjective experience of difficulty asso- ciated with cognitive operations – leads to deeper processing. Two studies explore the extent to which this deeper processing engendered by disfluency interventions can lead to improved memory performance. Study 1 found that information in hard-to-read fonts was better remembered than easier to read information in a controlled laboratory setting. Study 2 extended this finding to high school classrooms. The results suggest that superficial changes to learning materials could yield significant improvements in educational outcomes.
Thanks! I've followed references and I think I have the original paper: http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~aalter/intuitive.pdf
We recruited 40 Princeton University undergraduate volunteers at the student campus center to complete the three-item CRT (Frederick, 2005). Participants were seated either alone or in small groups, and the experimenter ensured that they completed the questionnaire individually. Those in the fluent condition completed a version of the CRT written in easy-to-read black Myriad Web 12-point font, whereas participants in the disfluent condition completed a version of the CRT printed in difficult-to-read 10% gray italicized Myriad Web 10-point font. Participants were randomly assigned to complete either the fluent or the disfluent version of the CRT (...) As predicted, participants answered more items on the CRT correctly in the disfluent font condition ... Whereas 90% of participants in the fluent condition answered at least one question incorrectly, only 35% did so in the disfluent condition.
The title of this post has a misspelling.
thanks, fixed
What is the proposed mechanism? Is it that they think harder about it or simply that they read more carefully? Test design criteria often specify a number of interventions to prevent mistaken readings (for example, using "NOT" rather than "not" or emphasizing queries in bold type after a long paragraph).
Author continues:
Cognitive strain, whatever its source, mobilizes System 2, which is more likely to reject the intuitive answer suggested by System 1.
System 1 is the impulsive, unconscious, eager but not very intelligent aspect of the mind. System 2 is slow, conscious and more thoughtful, but "lazy" and prone to accept suggestions from the System 1. Theory is that inducing cognitive strain diverts more mental resources to the System 2, which then tends to do a proper job at solving the test.
I'm reading Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow and I've stopped on this:
90% of the students who saw the CRT in normal font made at least one mistake in the test, but the proportion dropped to 35% when the font was barely legible. You read this correctly: performance was better with the bad font.
This seems like an important finding, but I can't find references in the book (Kindle) or on the Web. Does anybody know any real evidence for this claim? EDIT: I found the original paper
Do you think that people could behave rationally with such a simple intervention?
EDIT: fixed spelling in title
Hello everyone.
I live in Croatia, currently working as an IT consultant after working some years at the University. Along with software development I was always interested in psychology, particularly evolutionary psychology, social psychology and human rationality.
I guess I've been a rationalist for as long as I can remember. My interest in science and (oddly) my exposure to catechism at an early age - in a then socialist country - made me question people's approach to knowledge and reasoning.
I hope to find ways to effectively communicate facts and ideas about human rationality to people, especially young people in my region of Europe. However, I'm still struggling to understand the laws and mechanisms of human reasoning, so I'm hoping my participation here will go a long way in helping me with that.
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Well -- there's also the human habit of skimming over text to extract the "useful" information -- especially in timed tests or where we believe the text extraneous to the actual function. Word problems are pretty much always an exercise in "these words are an obstacle between me and the formula". So it stands to reason -- superficially that is -- that making it harder to read the font (without increasing the difficulty of the language) would act as a "counterbalance" to the impetus to get done as quickly as possible with the verbal and on to the mathematical.
In other words; I'm asserting a hypothesis that this is illustrating an underlying mechanism regarding how test-takers handle reading their examination questions.
Is it "more rational" to spend more time on the exam question? Perhaps. (Almost definitely, since doing so increases their scores as shown here.) But then we have to ask what the actual goal of test-takers is at the time of taking the exam. Is it truly to "get the highest score"? Or is it "avoid the greatest amount of anxiety this exam produces in me {where 'me'='person taking the test'}"? Very often I have found the latter to be the case -- but I would suspect that this is hardly irrational; those individuals frequently aren't much invested in higher exam scores than are necessary to achieve a passing score. Getting the exam done quicker without falling below that score, then, is the rationally optimum resolution.
Hence my doubt as to whether it would be called a "rational" behavior over a "necessary" one.
I guess I'm confused about your use of the word "necessary".
But you're right. What is the motivation of the test-taker? How much are they trying to get the answers right and how much they want to "just get it over with"? At least part of the cognitive system is lazy/avoidant, but it doesn't seem that test-takers consciously think "I'll just write down the first answer that comes to mind".
But the real question is this: when they read the smaller text, do they feel less anxiety? Probably not. Then, maybe solving the problem requires less effort once you have spent more time at reading the question. But take a look at the CRT: to me, it seems that problems are clear any way you read them.