For some of the participants in this study, researchers made the questions more difficult to read, by presenting them in a barely-legible, small, gray font. Most of us, when we read this problem, intuitively want to say 100 minutes-but it’s actually 5. If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets? Consider another experiment, where participants were given problems that were deliberately designed to trip people up. If it’s relatively effortless to process a piece of information, it makes us feel like it must be accurate. The problem with processing fluency is that it can influence our judgments about the accuracy of a claim. 1 Processing fluency even has implications in the business world: stocks with pronounceable trading names (for example, KAR) consistently do better than unpronounceable ones (such as PXG). Still, when processing was made easier in this way, people’s brows relaxed, and they even smiled slightly. Some of the images were made easier to process by having their outlines appear before the rest of the picture-only by a fraction of a second, so briefly that participants didn’t consciously realize it was happening. In one experiment, participants were shown images on a screen while researchers measured the movements of the muscles in their faces. This preference for easy processing (also known as processing fluency) is more deeply rooted than many of us realize. ![]() ![]() So, wherever possible, we prefer to rely on System 1 (even if we don’t realize that’s what we’re doing). 1 System 2, since it’s doing the harder work, drains more of our cognitive resources it’s effortful and straining to engage, which we don’t like. System 1 is fast and automatic, working without our awareness meanwhile, System 2 handles deeper, more effortful processing, and is under our conscious control. We are often cognitively lazyĪccording to the renowned behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman, there are two thinking systems in our brains. There are a few fundamental heuristics and biases that underlie the illusory truth effect. To conserve our limited mental energy, we rely on countless shortcuts, known as heuristics, to make sense of the world, and this can often lead us to make errors in our judgment. ![]() 19 With all of those choices to make, and the huge volume of information that is coming at us every second, we can’t possibly hope to process everything as deeply as we might like. Every single day, we make an average of 35,000 decisions. Unfortunately, humans are rarely rational beings. No rational person would accept a statement as true without first holding it up to the light and critically examining it, right? How do we gauge whether a claim is true or false? Naturally, you would think, we use our existing base of knowledge, and maybe a couple of well-placed Google searches, to compare that claim to the available evidence.
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