There's a pattern where human beings are wired to enjoy things that are important for their survival and thriving, but that these instincts are easily hijacked for aimless gratification.
Eating junk food (vs stuff that gives you health and energy) or whacking off to porn (instead of healthy relationships and procreation) are examples of this.
Anyway "the need for cognition"...
I noticed that there's a class of people who are objectively "smart" in the sense that they can solve hard puzzles, crush it at trivia, etc. But at the same time these folks haven't been able to / bothered to get into lucrative professions that leverage these smarts and actually have a sort of not great lives (eg: unhealthy weight, no partner, etc.)
So they are sort of scratching their itch for cognition, but not in a way that makes their life better in an objective way (which is most likely the reason we have this drive)
Real life puzzles are barely purely logical and there’s a lot of competition and superiority that simply bs you over and uses other methods to undermine your effort.
I solve mathdoku before bedtime for fun, but when it comes to “business” I usually want to take a board and smash these smiling snakefaces with it, because that is the most logical move. E.g. in chess they call it “simplification”. Unfortunately that’s illegal, so the best bet is to leave cognition at home.
but not in a way that makes their life better in an objective way (which is most likely the reason we have this drive)
Most of our features are essential for small groups of 10-100 humans. Individual successes are irrelevant for survival. A whole group wins (over another group) when one ape solves a puzzle and shares benefits.
Mathdoku is a fun way to flex the reasoning circuitry.
But where cognition is needed in business it is knowing how to outsmart these snakefaces, how to think a few moves ahead of them, how to know the stuff that matters before they know it.
Smashing these faces is no more logical than smashing a chessboard when the stupid stubborn pieces won't move the way you had anticipated. It is tantamount to admitting that cognition has not been successfully applied, or maybe even engaged.
Look at artificially produced puzzles that tickle your cognition gland the same way you look at artificially produced snacks, optimized to tickle your taste buds and hijack your sense of "delicious", without providing anything nutritious.
Look at real-world, gnarly, complicated, seemingly self-contradictory problems as you look at natural, raw produce, with its variety of nutrients, vitamins, fibers, etc, all tangled together, with a taste which may not be as refined as refined sugar, but which is really rich.
You’re right, this aggression and escapism reports to anxiety, which interferes with C. But personally I don’t find it worth to tolerate bad feelings (been there) or dig deeper for years (done that) only to own better things or to be at better places. Fine as it is.
Lucrative professions have their own ways of hijacking the need for cognition. For example, programming can be an extremely rewarding activity when pursued for its own sake, but in the corporate world it is often reduced to tedium and drudgery.
Financial reward isn't the only way to make someone's life objectively better. A sense of autonomy, freedom to explore and create, and high satisfaction with one's output are just as important, if not more so. Sometimes pursuing a lucrative career is at odds with these other goals.
I am talking about people who are super smart but whose lives aren't good (agree, I took a narrative shortcut by talking about the financial angle only - it's more than that)
I also think there are a lot of products that hijack the need for cognition, to make people feel like they're achieving something when they're really not - for example dense complicated games like Factorio/Satisfactory/Dwarf Fortress/Paradox games have all at one time completely taken over satisfying that cognitive need.
While I see what you're getting at, I take issue with your main point here:
> So they are sort of scratching their itch for cognition, but not in a way that makes their life better in an objective way (which is most likely the reason we have this drive)
Evolutionarily, there is no such thing "the reason" why we have any drive. Rather over time certain characteristics are selected for by their fitness in the environment. That might seem like a semantic or not important distinction, except that this drive for cognition has effects way beyond the individual.
The key thing is these people who go after what most would consider "unproductive" things, IE not using their smarts to go after lucrative professions, serve an important role in society to break out of local maxima and ultimately bring society to entirely new places. But this drive is obviously not a precise tool, it is just as likely to go towards some non-productive ends as productive (the cognitive equivalent of junk food or whacking off).
Some people simply have a larger drive towards cognition than to social status, and that occasionally leads to changing the world.
(Footnote: this is simplified - obviously evolution/selection happens on the individual level, but as a society we place value on intellectualism because of the outsized impact, which alters the environment to select for this drive - and people often reach their achievements later in life, so the "evolutionary success" of having kids is based on their potential for greatness, even if they never reach it. This way selection can favor drives that actually hurt most individuals with the drive, because the ones that change the world have such an outsized impact - this only works because humans are adaptable enough to alter their selection criteria based on the broader environment - think fat people used to be attractive when nobody had much food)
In some of his better known work, a then little known mathematician wrote about this sort of behaviour, the deep underlying societal causes, and proposed explosive solutions to the problem:
" We use the term “surrogate activity” to designate an activity that is directed toward an artificial goal that people set up for themselves merely in order to have some goal to work toward, or let us say, merely for the sake of the “fulfillment” that they get from pursuing the goal. Here is a rule of thumb for the identification of surrogate activities. Given a person who devotes much time and energy to the pursuit of goal X, ask yourself this: If he had to devote most of his time and energy to satisfying his biological needs, and if that effort required him to use his physical and mental faculties in a varied and interesting way, would he feel seriously deprived because he did not attain goal X? If the answer is no, then the person’s pursuit of goal X is a surrogate activity."
I over indexed on the "financial" part, I am talking about people who aren't living great lives in general despite being very smart. They are scratching their cognitive itch, but only in ways that doesn't do anything concrete for them (not just money.)
> This maps to something I've noticed.
> There's a pattern where human beings are wired to enjoy things that are important for their survival and thriving, but that these instincts are easily hijacked for aimless gratification.
It's late and I'm tired so most likely I'm not understanding your point properly. Aren't those literally the most fundamental and nearly universally known (i.e. preached by popular science) results from (a) evolution and (b) neuroscience research, respectively?
Some people don't have this. A lot of people aren't very curious at all. Last night in Austin I saw a full self driving car from Cruise drive by with no driver while I was at a crosswalk. No one noticed or cared that a car just drove by with no one in it! It was one of the most incredible things I've ever seen, and the people around me did not notice or care.
> and the people around me did not notice or care.
This is such a transient thing.
If you're not primed to notice a self driving car (already thinking about it / having read it) you may miss it.
And once you've seen it a few times, the novelty decreases a lot.
I try to keep wonder for things that I have experienced already (Holy crap; I'm in a metal tube that's going close to the speed of sound 7 miles high!) But pretty soon other things win (How long do I have to sit in this little seat? And I'm hungry...).
Arguably the thing that is most extraordinary is that we've made these wonderful, bizarre things such a matter of routine. Look around you. Nearly every object in the civilized world is a constructed object, borne from human thought. Every street, every edifice, every artifice. Even almost all of the foods and raw ingredients have been crafted to meet our needs. Wow. But flour is a >30,000 year old technology and not something people get excited about...
Oh, wow - I had seen a version of this, years ago, as; I believe, a commercial.
It was a much, much better and far less obvious version, I can't tell because obviously I knew what I was expecting, but I strongly feel with this 1999 version I absolutely would've caught it. Very poorly done compared to the other one I've seen.
Ah, here it is, this one uses a 'moonwalking bear'. Upon seeing them both again, I 110% agree with my assessment that the bear version is far, far superior.
The space the original video uses is too small, and maybe it's that the camera angle is poor; it's so hard to tell but I'd honestly be surprised if too many people fell for the original today.
I actually had troubles following the ball because the gorilla was just too obvious and distracting.
> The space the original video uses is too small, and maybe it's that the camera angle is poor
The whole point is that selective attention can make seeing even very obvious things difficult.
> it's so hard to tell but I'd honestly be surprised if too many people fell for the original today.
I used it on a class full of middle school science students two years ago. 21 out of 24 missed it in the first class. 5 out of 24 in the second, though they insisted no one warned them :D
I actually saw one recently that had a panda walking through, but just to still get everyone who knew what to look for, they altered other properties of the scene and after the panda reveal, then reveal the multiple other, now obvious changes that were made. I won't specify in case someone hasn't seen but it was pretty amazing.
I was curious about the driverless metro trains in Copenhagen, and kind of in wonder. And then I commuted on them for years, and stopped thinking about who was driving.
I’m not that impressed by self driving cars because while the tech is cool it’s not really solving anything in my personal life. A car is basically self driving when I pay someone else to drive me where I go - end result is the same, I get where I need to go without having to drive the car.
Be careful assuming that humans (especially the humans you see) are the lion's share of cost for any system.
Sure, Uber passes 60-75% of the fare to drivers, but that pays for the depreciation/opportunity cost of the vehicle, the energy to move the vehicle, the insurance, the cleaning, etc.
A lot of the problems that these 'no brainer' new technology start-ups face (e.g., the autonomous delivery robots) is actually that they aren't that much cheaper than humans (for now).
Not having to deal with a driver would be worth even the same $50, for a while. I live in a relatively nice-drivers area, but from what I’ve heard about Uber, people would probably pay extra for an empty car (in some situations).
> It was one of the most incredible things I've ever seen, and the people around me did not notice or care.
This reminds me of a flight I was on a few months ago. There was a new flight attendant on board, and amazingly it was also her first time traveling in an airplane. She was looking out the window and commented to another flight attendant about how astonishing it was that you could see the snow-capped Sierra Nevadas or the canyons in Utah from that vantage point. Then she paused, looked around the cabin, and asked "Why does everyone have their window shade down? This view is breathtaking." The other flight attendant laughed and replied, "They're all desensitized to it by now."
And the opportunity for curiosity for purely seeing a thing is only the first few times you see it. You were in that window, but how do you know they were in that window?
I don't think the underlying instinct here is curiosity, but rather the need for some coherence and the bias towards both having things match our preconceived models of reality, and fit our models to reality. Even though very often there just isn't solid information to make that coherence happen without just making up stuff to fit the gaps.
This might be the problem I have with my in-laws. They’re good and mostly happy people but they’re incredibly… simple? Visiting with them is one of the most excruciating things in my life. All they want to do is talk about complete drivel. Gossip about the neighbour’s garbage cans or their visit to Costco.
I’m not judging. It makes them happy. Great. But spending hours there I just feel my brain dying. It’s not for me.
But the opposite happens at my family’s dinner table. My poor wife once commented, “my brain began dying about 30 mins into you and your brothers discussing the philosophy of his Supreme Court brief.”
Furthermore: my incessant “need for cognition” is kind of screwing me up. I can’t sleep without medication anymore. My brain will not go to sleep on its own. I think and think and think. My wife puts on a stupid firefighter show where nobody ever wears helmets and passes out in ten minutes.
I understand what you’re saying and I can relate to some degree, but it’s hard to read comments like this and not think I’m browsing r/IAmVerySmart.
I have some friends with whom I might try to poke at the nuances of the philosophy of a Supreme Court decision, but I have other friends who would be bored out of their mind. They also have a need for cognition and love to tear topics apart, but _different_ topics.
Are your in-laws happy? If yes, perhaps how they communicate is more important than topic. Costco, tulips, volcanos, whatever. I'm sure they ran out of new things to say decades ago.
Forging a healthy, functional, durable marriage is quite the trick. Maybe they figured it out.
> my incessant “need for cognition” is kind of screwing me up.
Hah. Same. I have to pace around for hours and hours a day, thinking about random shit. I do an unhealthy amount of pacing. I'm not anxiously pacing. Just thinking about stuff. At least I get my steps in.
> My poor wife once commented, “my brain began dying about 30 mins into you and your brothers discussing the philosophy of his Supreme Court brief.”
Haha, my wife is similar—"If you and your dad start another four hour conversation about AI, I'm going to bed". My response: "You're more than welcome to discuss Solomonoff induction along with us."
Somehow we do manage to find topics that we both enjoy though.
> Psychological research on the need for cognition has been conducted using self-report tests, where research participants answered a series of statements such as "I prefer my life to be filled with puzzles that I must solve" and were scored on how much they felt the statements represented them.
This seems counter intuitive to me; I would consider myself someone that has a "need for cognition", but I am good at puzzles precisely because _I do not like being puzzled_. When I encounter something that doesn't make sense to me (a puzzle), it disturbs me so that I need to solve the puzzle and figure out why my assumptions were incorrect. I therefore dislike puzzles and I do not want them in my life. Puzzles are a contradiction of my assumptions. Maybe this is all "intolerance of ambiguity"
Your last assertion is correct. You’re (deliberately?) conflating puzzles (challenging but ultimately solvable games) with the emotion of being puzzled (confusion/dissonance from an experience which doesn’t align with your priors).
I haven't looked at the research yet, but this feels like it may have some correlation with a psychological trait called dogmatism, which is a defined as exhibiting great certainty about the correctness of one's views and an unwillingness to consider new evidence, or an unwillingness to adjust one's views in light of new evidence.
Obviously, they're not the same. NFC pertains more to the desire to go through the process of cognition, whereas dogmatism pertains more to defects of cognition (e.g. giving too much weight to our priors, being unwilling to update our priors).
But in the cases of both low NFC and high dogmatism, it feels like there's a type of intellectual laziness or cognitive immaturity at play. Almost like "It's too overwhelming for me to actually think this through, so I'm choosing to just not."
Similarly, both point to a lack of curiosity about the world or anything other that what we already know. (And, I would wager, both probably have a link to anti-intellectualism and authoritarianism, where we assume that whoever is in charge knows what they're doing better than the rest of us do.)
> Almost like "It's too overwhelming for me to actually think this through, so I'm choosing to just not."
At some point the algorithms in our head has to stop trying to think about things and instead just go with an option. That happens at different points for everyone, some stop thinking earlier while others basically never stops thinking about things so have a hard time getting started with anything.
I don't think that it is fair to say that one is better than the other, they are just different and are good at solving different kinds of problems.
Yep. I would say a crucial cognitive skill is to realize when it's a good point to stop processing and apply a probability heuristic (e.g., "dogma").
When do you stop doing your own research about vaccines and trust doctors? When do you stop writing your own code and trust a software library?
The world literally is too overwhelmingly complicated. It seems like the more you know about a facet of the world, the more complicated it starts to seem. At some point, you have appeal to specialization of authority and stop thinking or you'll be permanently DDoSed into inaction, make horrible mistakes, or both.
The article discusses this explicitly, if what you're calling dogmatism is the inverse of the "openness to ideas" or "openness to experience", one of the Big 5 traits:
> NFC has been found to be strongly associated with a number of independently developed constructs, specifically epistemic curiosity, typical intellectual engagement, and openness to ideas.
I haven't come across the term "dogmatism" in the psychological literature. But the way you're presenting it seems extremely judgmental ("defects", "laziness", "immaturity"). You might be more interested in the more objective formulation:
Thanks. Of course there's literature generally around it, although most of the citations seem to be in areas of philosophy, anthropology, and religion -- where you'd expect.
Just meant it's not really a term that's commonly used in psychology, not a standard viewpoint that's used much when discussing personality traits generally today. Unless there's a paradigm here I'm not familiar with. (And I'm sure there are niche studies on dogmatism specifically, as opposed to part of a broader model.)
I wonder if we need better role models for embracing uncertainty. If you're a low NFC person, there are a bunch of high status people that take public dogmatic stances, and demonstrate that you have high confidence in a worldview of sweeping generalizations without having to think too hard if only you adopt the Dogma. But I can't really think of role models where someone says "X, Y, Z are all complex and the thing that's valuable in my life is W, so it's healthy and intentional that I neither think about X, Y, Z or have an opinion on them" and that's socially validated or even celebrated.
> I wonder if we need better role models for embracing uncertainty.
I've felt this way for a long time. American fiction and films are heavily skewed towards protagonists strong-willed protagonists that "trust their gut" and have a high bias to action. That leads people to believe that if you're right, you will immediately know that you're right and that spending time thinking about a problem means you're weak-willed.
It's a toxic aspect of our culture. Obviously, courage and action are important. But so is learning from others, cooperating, and understanding ambiguity.
Very true. Anyone urging caution, or any government department with “standards” is universally the bad guy in film.
There’s a huge gap between what is entertaining and what is good outside of fiction. “reality tv” makes this particularly dangerous as horrible (though entertaining) people become more and more famous, again and again. This spills over into some really dire consequences globally. For example — and you wouldn’t believe this unless you’d seen it happen — the most powerful nation on Earth actually went so far as to elect a reality tv star to their highest office!
The Dogma usually includes statements like "people who don't care about X are part of the problem" and considerable social effort is spent on recruiting more "soldiers" and influencing group norms.
The unaligned are considered "fodder" by the ideologically committed.
Not everyone needs to be recruited. Most people can be kept in line by ensuring everyone knows what the "safe" view is within a specific group and occasionally punishing defectors.
Lets make an imaginary situation where you live on an island and are running out of trees. There are mostly two sides here. The people that are burning though trees at a faster rate than they grow are the problem. Not caring about the problem, especially in the case you are the ones burning those trees is going to ensure 'Tree 0 day' comes.
Everyone will get affected if you reach that point.
I think we might be talking slightly past each other.
It's absolutely true that for many values of X, being "unaligned" or "uncertain" on X does some harm.
What I'm saying is that human social dynamics mean that there's usually a range of acceptable beliefs for issues X, Y & Z and it's wise to understand when it's acceptable to express uncertainty and when it's not.
Uncertainty is a stance, a position, which can easily be outside the range of socially acceptable beliefs.
For example, I have zero opinion on "body positivity". But I know that many groups will hold the opinion "it does no good if only we believe in body positivity, ALL of society needs to change". Expressing uncertainty or indifference in these situations will be construed as social defection by True Believers and punished.
perhaps it can be looked at as a function of bodily resource consumption. taking in new ideas and updating your priors is very, very energy intensive and I would guess requires the use of expensive bodily nutrients to build the pathways
since I'm guessing about the nutrient usage, I'm less comfortable including it in a hypothesis, but perhaps low NFC and high dogmatism are related to low maximum energy output or poor energy efficiency in the brain.
in my own personal experience, when I'm energy-tired, or ill, or depressed, I'm much less willing to approach new ideas, new experiences, or really anything that doesn't just follow pre-existing pathways
Update:
I agree. Seems like low NFC is related to high dogmatism, and/or low openness.
See: the Big 5 personality matrix.
> Need for cognition is closely related to the five factor model domain openness to experience, typical intellectual engagement, and epistemic curiosity
> but this feels like it may have some correlation with a psychological trait called dogmatism, which is a defined as exhibiting great certainty about the correctness of one's views
I mean, maybe. It also feels like how you describe a particular dog as needing a lot of mental stimulation (food puzzles, fulfilling work, etc)
>But in the cases of both low NFC and high dogmatism, it feels like there's a type of intellectual laziness or cognitive immaturity at play. Almost like "It's too overwhelming for me to actually think this through, so I'm choosing to just not."
NO. You are completely wrong. Dogmatism Is not laziness.
It's fear of social dominance. It's too overwhelming to be humiliated socially by some other person on hacker news so dogmatic people end up taking the dogmatic route in order to defend their integrity. It's purely a social thing, not an intellectual thing.
In fact, it takes more intelligence, more effort, more grit to defend a point that is, in actuality, wrong. It's basically hard mode.
Here's the other thing. sometimes, these "dogmatic" people are actually RIGHT. Galileo was essentially a flat earther during his time. So the reality is nobody really knows the difference between dogmatism and high NFC. You could be either, it all depends on whether you're in actuality right or wrong.
>But in the cases of both low NFC and high dogmatism, it feels like there's a type of intellectual laziness or cognitive immaturity at play. Almost like "It's too overwhelming for me to actually think this through, so I'm choosing to just not."
This is wrong and insulting. Because the fact of the matter is most people have extremely high dogmatism. Who on the face of this earth will believe in something for 10 years and suddenly flip that belief in an instant when presented with solid evidence that the belief isn't true? Nobody. Because everyone is dogmatic.
99.99% of all debates and arguments on Hacker news are people finding evidence support a point, not using evidence to find a point. Key difference. People just don't function like that.
The meta meta thing about this is that not only am I dogmatically arguing for dogmatism, but what I say is logically true in such a way that people who disagree with me can't formulate an argument against it. They can only dogmatically downvote me rather then keep an open mind about dogmatism.
It's a bit of joke. But it's more commentary about how everyone on HackerNews gets off on these "intelligence" articles when really they're just normal human beings with normal NFC and normal dogmatic tendencies.
" People low in need for cognition are also more likely to rely on stereotypes alone in judging other people than those high in need for cognition."
You know, I could believe that, but I can't help wondering if the people who do research in psychology (or most people in academia really) are not more likely to be high-NFC types, and thus not exactly objective in deciding what potential advantages/disadvantages to research. For example, who is less likely to be swayed by empirical evidence?
Some people are just natural philosophers. I was always one, and an un-analyzed life gets drab very quickly, for me at least. I like to entertain various ideas without taking them too seriously. I like Stoicism which I find very useful, and eastern philosophies like Buddhism. Too easy to become over-zealous about both of those philosophies.
A test of your own personal philosophy is when you encounter adversity. Do you apply what you've learned, or make up something on-the-fly?
I interpreted it as the pain being caused by experiencing one's own perceptions and the importance is put on conceptualizing life (the experiencing) and dropping the self :)
Too much thinking is like a heavy dish, it makes you sluggish and sleepy. Remember that everything that moves quickly and elegantly through the world does so without too much thought.
My default is deeper thought, occasionally to my detriment. I can only operate quickly if I have extensive experience doing that thing.
Learning new sports or new mental tasks is slow and requires a lot of discomfort, intentionally pushing my body and mind to just do something they don't feel ready for.
I sometimes do wish I could act more quickly but thus far the only method which works is to do the thing a lot.
“It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.” -Whitehead
Unfortunately in contrast, academics are fans of yesterday's newspaper headlines, conspiracy theorists have repeatedly proven to be fans of tomorrow's newspaper headlines.
However, big brother has never lied to us and only the worst people do not love big brother, so I don't officially support or believe any conspiracy theories. Also its too much work to check legacy media to see what's been admitted recently.
This article does not use the word 'genuine' (or 'real', for that matter, though I have not searched for other synonyms.) In fact, my comment was prompted by the way that the definitions given here seem to avoid implying that those exhibiting this need are sticklers for the truth. It seems likely that they all think they are getting closer to the truth, and this would seem more pertinent, in defining a personality trait, than whether they actually succeed in doing so.
>Need for cognition has been variously defined as "a need to structure relevant situations in meaningful, integrated ways" and "a need to understand and make reasonable the experiential world"
It is not a crazy idea to conceptualize some conspiracy theorists as people who (1) have a high need for cognition (brain wheels are always turning), and (2) direct that at developing wrong/misguided/motivated frameworks for the world.
I would say it's more about low empathy and ability to scrutinize their beliefs. This is very often paired with a nice dose of narcissism which makes them think that everyone else is an idiot and has flawed thinking, while they're immune to it.
Conspiracy theorists demote things like "parsimony" in favor of "holism" and "explanatory power". There's a reason the text says "reasonable" and not merely "comprehensible".
One could make the argument that "good-faith" is subjective, except that would imply that things like logical fallacies cannot exist. However it is true that values frameworks shape how we investigate questions and what we feel comfortable proposing as solutions. Many proposals can be "reasonable" and simultaneously mutually exclusive or even destructive.
An interesting meta observation is that google searches and machine learning can find a lot of stuff, but I couldn't find a path between the drive to rationalize and the drive toward cognition although the two are obviously in some way closely linked.
"Thinking Fast and Slow" seems to cover some of the same ground, especially Kahneman's and Tverski's Type II or slow thinking, though I think they approach thinking more as a means to solve problems (i.e. decision making/economics) rather than personality and how one sees the world (i.e. perception, attitude, and cognition). But Kahneman does discuss one's personal willingness to employ Type II, which should intersect with NFC.
There's a pattern where human beings are wired to enjoy things that are important for their survival and thriving, but that these instincts are easily hijacked for aimless gratification.
Eating junk food (vs stuff that gives you health and energy) or whacking off to porn (instead of healthy relationships and procreation) are examples of this.
Anyway "the need for cognition"...
I noticed that there's a class of people who are objectively "smart" in the sense that they can solve hard puzzles, crush it at trivia, etc. But at the same time these folks haven't been able to / bothered to get into lucrative professions that leverage these smarts and actually have a sort of not great lives (eg: unhealthy weight, no partner, etc.)
So they are sort of scratching their itch for cognition, but not in a way that makes their life better in an objective way (which is most likely the reason we have this drive)