Thinking
Phoebe Ellsworth was facing a
difficult decision. As ayoung professor at Yale University, she had received a
tempting job offer from the University of Michigan. Should she stay or should
she go?
Following the advice of many
experts in decision making, she took two large sheets of paper—one for each
university—and listed their positives and negatives, assigned numbers to each
item according to how important it was to her, and then added up those numbers.
But, with the numbers neatly summed, Ellsworth discov-ered she wasn’t content
with the result. “It’s not coming out right!” she exclaimed to fellow
psychologist Robert Zajonc.
In the end, she went with her gut
and made her decision based primarily on her feelings about the choice and not
on her calculations. The decision has worked out well for her, and, three
decades later, she’s a distinguished professor of law and psy-chology at
Michigan—where she studies, among many things, how emotions sway people’s
decisions about such crucial matters as murder trials. Meanwhile, Zajonc
continued to research the interplay between feeling and thinking, and ended up
arguing that cases like Ellsworth’s are relatively common, so that, ironically,
people rarely use only their minds to “make up their minds.”
Zajonc’s claim suggests that
people are less “rational” than we believe we are—even when we’re trying to be
thoughtful and careful, and even when we’re thinking about highly consequential
issues. And, in fact, many other lines of evidence—and many other psychologists—raise
their own questions about human rationality. For example, studies suggest that
we tend to pay special attention to information that confirms our hunches and
hopes and ignore (or overrule) evidence that might challenge our beliefs. We
flip-flop in our preferences—even when making important decisions—influenced by
trivial changes in how our options are described. We rely on reasoning
“shortcuts,” even when drawing life-altering conclusions, apparently making our
conclusions using strategies that are efficient but prone to error. And we’re
easily persuaded by “man who” stories—“What do you mean cigarettes cause lung
cancer? I know a man who smokes two packs a day, and he’s perfectly
healthy”—even though, with a moment’s reflection, we see the illogic in this.
What should we make of these
findings? Is it possible that humans—even smart, well-educated humans, doing
their best to think carefully and well—are, in truth, often irrational? And if
so, what does this imply about us? Are our heads filled with false
beliefs—about ourselves, our friends, and our world? Will we make decisions
that fail to bring us happiness? We’ll tackle all these questions later, asking
how people think, and also how well. We’ll focus first on the content of thought and theways that
different types of ideas are represented in the mind. We’ll then turn to the processes of thought, with our main
focus on what psychologists call directed
thinking—the mental activities we use to achieve goals. Specifically, we’ll
look at theprocesses used in interpreting information, judging the truth of an
assertion, solving problems, and weighing the costs and benefits of a decision.
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