It seems that logic is the language of cognitive fluency. Cognitive fluency, being how easy something is to understand, would be able to utilize logic in many ways. For one, with logic comes understanding, if something is misunderstood it must not have been logical, and the goal of having high cognitive fluency is for better understanding therefore logic and cognitive fluency go hand in hand since they both aim to achieve similar or the same goal.
I have never thought of simplicity to be something that humans lean towards but in a way it makes sense and in a way it does not and I think this article addresses both sides of that. Bennet shows this comparison by showing how disfluency can used as opposed to fluency. I like the use of this because it does not make humans seem as simplistic as they would if Bennet would have just used fluency, or simplicity, to describe the way that human minds work the best. This disfluency is used because it causes your brain to think more into something and makes you realize the opposite, or what fluency/simplicity would have made you realize. Bennet’s example of this is with writing down ways to succeed, he says that writing down 3 ways to succeed and writing down 12 ways to fail would equate in the outcome. I think this comparison is very logical because simply knowing ways to succeed gives you a mechanism to use to achieve success, but writing down many ways of failure makes one think of different situations and how one would have to solve those failures. I almost think that this would give someone more of an ability to succeed because they would be equipped to recognize failure and would then be able to fight it.
I do think that in a lot of situations though simplicity would work over disfluency. And Bennet gives examples of this and a lot of them come from media and why we buy the things we do or vote for the people we vote for as Bennet describes. Bennet later describes that we tend to lean toward things that are easier for us, for example rhymes can help us makes sense of things like the example of the aphorism where it was put into equivalent meanings but one rhymed and the other did not, the outcome was that people tended to choose the rhyming one as more true.
I thought the funniest part of the article comes at the beginning with the example of people investing in companies with simpler names. I actually think this may be a little inaccurate, it could play a bit of part but I don’t think it does entirely. I think something as important as investing money, something that can change your future, is not something that most people take or should take advantage of. However it may play a part in deciding between two things that are equivalent in every other way, because sometimes just picking one that your gut is telling you to pick is the best thing to do, and you r gut could be telling you to pick the most simplistic one.
Finally I really like the connection between fluency and familiarity, and how we sometimes strive for that familiarity in order to justify decisions that we make. People feel an attraction towards something that is familiar to them and I think that is just human nature because people become wary in situations that are unfamiliar to them because they do not know what to expect or how to handle some of those situations. The example that Bennet uses to show our appeal toward familiarity is with an experiment where people were just shown different stimuli and people choose the ones that they liked and it just so happened that the ones that people liked the most were ones that they were shown repeatedly.
Cognitive fluency goes much deeper then the surface when it comes to the way people think and people do not necessarily prefer fluency over disfluency in every situation. As we have seen it very much depends on the situation that people are in and what they want to get out of it. And maybe simplicity can be attributed to familiarity more then to itself alone. With all of this information it is easy for one to see that our minds are very complex and having concrete answer to the questions of how they think about things, how they decide or choose things, or why we make the judgments that we make is not possible.
Bennet's article made a lot of sense to me. The idea of using something that is confusing to draw attention is not a new concept. In public relations you are taught to draw in a columnist by using a hook. A leading statement or paragraph that introduces the most newsworthy angle in a way that the reporter feels that they are "discovering" a story. This could be as simple as a clever title that contrasts two seemingly unrelated themes (ex: "The Snowmen Heating Up"). Since we can’t write a story for the reporter (most of the time) we must be content with guiding them towards a given topic. This enforces live_for_today_19’s point that sometimes it is necessary to violate cognitive fluency in order to affect the situation the most.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, I do not feel that Bennet’s article had anything to do with logic. In fact, if anything, this article exposes how illogical people are. “True=Easy” was a study of pathos, all the study was based on feelings. While all the statistics represent quantifiable statistics (numbers of participants, relative percentages) they ask the participants to report a qualitative statistic (willingness to do (x), level of happiness, level of satisfaction). To illustrate: “Students asked to come up with a longer list of reasons they would fail reported feeling more confident than those asked for a shorter list. Indeed, they reported feeling as confident as the students who had been asked to come up with the short list of ways to succeed.”
This simply proves the dogma that any good advertisers, or musician has known for ages. People are ruled by emotions. While any good consumer compares prices they eventually buy the product they feel more confident of. If a buyer’s upper limit is $800 and they are comparing two different televisions they most often chose the brand that they have been exposed to the most. If Sony bombards you with enough representations of their product you will probably chose their TV over an unknown brand, even if you get less TV per dollar. This illustrates live_for_today_19’s connection between familiarity and fluency.