Organized Mind : Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

The researchers hypothesized that this created a template by which their brains could organize and store just the sort of generalized information that would be necessary to succeed at the game.

When I was living among the Sotho, I went into the city one day with one of the villagers. The city is something he had no experience with. This was an intelligent and literate man—he had read the Bible, for example. But when he saw a television for the first time in a shop, he couldn’t make heads or tails of what was going on. The narrative conventions that we use to tell a story in film and TV were completely unknown to him. For example, one scene would end and another would begin at a different time and place. This gap was completely baffling to him. Or during a single scene, the camera would focus on one person, then another, in order to take another perspective. He struggled, but simply couldn’t follow the story. We take these for granted because we grew up with them.

degrees because they can’t move forward—they’re too perfectionistic. The real job in supervising PhD students isn’t teaching them facts; it’s keeping them on track.

Many, many PhD students fall into this category, never finishing their

This constant back-and-forth is one of the most metabolism-consuming things that our brain can do. We step out of time, out of the moment, and survey the big picture. We like what we see or we don’t, and then we go back to the task, either moving forward again, or backtracking to fix a conceptual or physical mistake. As you now know well, such attention switching and perspective switching is depleting, and like multitasking, it uses up more of the brain’s nutrients than staying engaged in a single task

One is the strong desire to conform to others’ behavior in the hope that it will allow us to gain acceptance within our social group, to be seen as cooperative and agreeable.

As the social psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latané say, “‘I didn’t want to get involved’ is a familiar comment, and behind it lies fears of physical harm, public embarrassment, involvement with police procedures, lost work days and jobs, and other unknown dangers.

Why are these interventions so often unsuccessful? Because of in-group and out-group bias, we tend to think that coercion will be more effective with our enemies than with ourselves, and conciliation will be more effective with ourselves than our enemies.

All of the biases we’ve seen accrued: Americans saw themselves as trustworthy, and any aggressive behaviors by the United States (even as judged by international standards) were justified; any aggressive behaviors by the Soviets showed their true nature as vicious, heartless, and irrational agents bent on destruction.

You might say the fate of the world depends (among other things) on abolishing out-group bias. In one particular case, it did

Once we have a stereotype, we tend not to reevaluate the stereotype; we instead discard any new, disconfirming evidence as “exceptions.” This is a form of belief perseveration.

In one experiment, men and women judging one another as a group still fell prey to this cognitive bias.

In cases of in-group/out-group bias, each group thinks of the other as homogeneous and monolithic, and each group views itself as variegated and complex.

of minorities, and some not. ‘White people’ is too broad and meaningless a category to use, and there is no way I can respond to . . . the question . . . in its existing form.”

A white student would often begin a question with the preface, “Don’t black people feel . . .” and Mick would think to himself, “That’s a good question.” But if a black student started a question with “Don’t white people feel . . .” Mick found himself thinking, “What do they mean, ‘white people’? There are all kinds of white people, some conservative, some liberal, some Jewish, some gentile, some sensitive to the problems

For a number of historical and cognitive reasons, humans evolved an unfortunate tendency to do this, and in some instances it is adaptive. I eat a piece of fruit I’ve never eaten before, I get sick, I then assume (inductive reasoning) that all pieces of this particular fruit are potentially inedible.

Racism is a form of negative social judgment that arises from a combination of belief perseverance, out-group bias, categorization error, and faulty inductive reasoning. We hear about a particular undesirable trait or act on the part of an individual, and jump to the false conclusion that this is something completely predictable for someone of that ethnic or national background.

After establishing common fate by the coin toss—one group would win a small prize and the other would not—students in an experiment were then asked to judge how similar or different members of each group were. There was a robust in-group/out-group effect even in this ad hoc grouping. Members of the in-group reported that people in their group—people they had just met—had more desirable qualities, and that they’d rather spend time with them.

Therefore, on a regular basis, we’re confronted with the complexity and diversity of our friends, whom we know well, and while we wrongly believe that the people we don’t know are less complex and diverse.

.” We also tend to prefer members of our own group. In general, a group will be perceived differently, and more accurately, by its own members than by outsiders.