The role of the environment

Table of Contents:

The environment can provide useful information to aid our thinking or generate constraints that limit what we can do. If you are sitting round a table at a meeting, there are several constraints on your behaviour that both the physical and social environment dictate. When travelling, the physical layout of streets or buildings or forests will determine how we get from point A to point B. If you have to get to the train station 10 miles away and you don't drive, don’t feel like walking, and you are not on a bus route, then call a taxi. In this case environmental constraints make the decision simpler (see Chapter 3).

The environment can also provide useful information that guides our actions. For example, the redness of strawberries indicates that they are edible. A cave represents a place for shelter for an animal or a human. Whatever we have in the fridge might dictate what we have for dinner. The money we have dictates what kind of car we can afford. We are also surrounded by buildings, machines and technological gadgets that often try to ensure that their use is ‘obvious’. The term affordances has been used to refer to the perceived use or action that one can perform when presented with an object (Norman, 1988). For example, the handle on a teapot ‘affords’ picking it up from there. A flat plate at one side of a door ‘affords’ pushing the door. A bar on a door can be either for pulling or pushing. A light switch affords pressing. In these cases, the objects themselves make clear what action is required without our having to think about it. A door with a bar that has a sign saying ‘PUSH’ is a badly designed door. I have found myself in a lecture theatre with a bank of light switches that had a set of instructions above it (one of which was incorrect). That is wrong in so many ways. There is also a social and cultural environment that prescribes certain behaviours and proscribes others. Together these influences can determine, at least to some extent, how we think about actions, objects and the behaviour of others. In short, the environment provides a great deal of information that can guide our thinking. Hence, the behaviour of the woodlouse and the human is imposed or strongly influenced by the environment.

Fast vs slow thinking

Much of our behaviour is based on past experience, beliefs or intuitions that constitute rules of thumb known as heuristics. We may not be aware of where these have come from, but they will generally produce quick decisions that are normally correct and useful, otherwise this kind of behaviour would not have evolved. Such ‘fast and frugal" thinking generally governs much of our daily behaviour. However, we are also capable of careful sequential analysis of decisions or problems we are faced with. This kind of analytical thinking is effortful and can be time consuming. These two types or systems of thinking have given rise to dual-processing theories of reasoning. This has a long history. For example, William James in the 19th century discussed ‘associative" and ‘true" reasoning, the first being an emotional, intuitive or gut-feeling and the second analytical, explicit and conscious. Here is an example from his book Principles of Psychology from 1890:

'Suppose I say, when offered a piece of cloth, “I won’t buy that; it looks as if it would fade," meaning merely that something about it suggests the idea of fading to my mind, - my judgment, though possibly correct, is not reasoned, but purely empirical; but, if I can say that into the color there enters a certain dye which I know to be chemically unstable, and that therefore the color will fade, my judgment is reasoned' flames, 1890/1950, p. 341).

More recently these two modes of reasoning have been referred to as System 1 and System 2 (Stanovich & West, 2000) or alternatively Type 1 and Type 2, (Evans, 2010; Evans and Stanovich, 2013). Evans and Stanovich have argued that referring to two systems gives the impression that they are cognitively or neurologically based. They are rather qualitatively distinct types of processing that may be underpinned by several cognitive or neurological systems. For that reason, I will be referring to Type 1 and Type 2 but many authors continue to refer to System 1 and System 2.

According to Daniel Kahneman: ‘System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration' (Kahneman, 2011, pp. 20-21). In William James' example, the first response to the cloth is an intuitive response generated by Type 1. Decisions made via Type 1 are often heuristic. Such decisions, as James suggests, may well be correct and are very useful in that they allow fast decisions based on what might appear superficial evidence. There are times, though, when such heuristics can bias our reasoning and hence it is useful to have a second system that can override it using a more careful analysis of the situation to reach a more reasoned judgement.

Since Type 1 thinking is fast, frugal, and relatively effortless, we have a tendency to rely on it most of the time. Too much effortful thinking can sometimes be counterproductive if you are trying to get things done. This idea of avoiding the hassle of thinking too much has led to people being referred to, particularly in social psychology, as ‘cognitive misers’ (Fiske & Taylor, 1991), referring to our tendency to actively avoid using the brain's resources when we can get away with it. Many of the types of thinking discussed in the remainder of this book can be categorized as Type 1 or Type 2.

Summary

Thinking allows us to interact with our environment in ways that allow us to achieve our goals (see Chapter 3). It involves a mental representation of what the outside world is like - a virtual reality model. These representations are the result of mental processes some of which are fast, automatic and unconscious and some of which are slow, deliberative and conscious. They are generated by the nature of our immediate environment as well as our previously learned knowledge in LTM. Some of this knowledge is semantic - we know about things, concrete or abstract, and their relationship to other things - and some is episodic - we have memories of events. Together, these form declarative knowledge which may be correct or incorrect. We also know how to do things - procedural knowledge.

As well as LTM we have a short-term WM which includes a form of executive control over the information from the environment and from LTM. It is limited in its capacity such that we can store and manipulate only so much information at a time.

There have been several metaphors concerning the nature of mental processes. The current one is a computer one - an information processing system. Information coming into the system goes through a sequence of processing stages in a 'bottom-up" direction. Information already in LTM allows us to make sense of the incoming information in a ‘top-down" direction.

One effect of the environment and the way we process information is to cause us to frequently make relative judgements rather than absolute ones. We also make use of aspects of the environment that appear salient and act as ‘affordances'.

Modern cognitive psychology has developed from a number of sources in the 20th century including behaviourism and the newer sciences of computer science and neuroscience (amongst others).

It is a long held view that there are two types of thinking and reasoning giving rise to dual-processing theories. Type 1 involves a type of reasoning and decision-making that is quick, intuitive and heuristic-based. Type 2 is slow, effortful and analytical. While both make use of WM resources, Type 2 is more demanding.

The role of the environment

Fast vs slow thinking

Summary

Suggested Further Reading