While I agree with much of the article “Easy = True”, there are several ideas mentioned that strike me as false, or at least much too narrow. It makes logical sense that people prefer things that are easy to process as opposed to those that are challenging – in some aspects of life. When Bennett talks about how people perceive things as truth when they are repeatedly presented to them, well, that makes sense to me, too. Not because someone sat in front of you and repeated the same few words consecutively, but because, generally, if we hear an idea once, and then happen to hear it again from somewhere or someone else, it seems more true because other people being aware of it somehow means it is more valid. As we discussed aphorisms a few weeks ago, many of the most popular and most famous of them involve some sort of rhyming. I think its true that when something rhymes we are more likely to remember it, and therefore, unconsciously more likely to except the idea as true in place of something that may say the same thing, just with different words.
What I disagree with about this article is Bennett’s idea of what it means to us when something is familiar. He uses familiarity as a synonym of simple. And although I think it is obvious that familiarity with a person, place, image or idea makes it much easier to decipher, in other words, makes it so we can more fluently assimilate to whatever situation we are in, I do not believe (and science may prove me wrong but I still feel this way) that human beings, as a whole, prefer the familiar, or even the easy. Everyone knows the saying “the challenege is half the fun”, and that holds true for so many aspects of our lives, whether it be in regards to relationships, academics, athletics, art, writing, reading, traveling – and the list goes on. While I can thoroughly enjoy sitting down with some mindless romance novel, I also thoroughly enjoy sitting down with a book like Anna Karenina or anything by Maugham and having to read each page carefully just to make sure I don’t miss all the themes that are presented on them. While I mostly enjoy professors that use language I can understand, my favorite classes are the ones where the professors have an abundance of knowledge that I am not yet familiar with and they present it in such a way that inspires you to want to learn more, know more, discover more. While great professors may not provide their students with dry, boring texts, they also don’t stimulate their students by giving them easily deciphered, seen before material. We don’t travel because we crave familiarity, we have an urge to travel because we crave newness and adventure. When I buy something, many times its because it is unlike anything I already own or have ever seen.
I especially find this notion of preferring the familiar, or the average, to be false when it comes to what we find as beautiful. When I find a particular piece of clothing, or jewelry, that strikes be as beautiful it is because it stands out from the crowd, it looks different from all the other pieces surrounding it. Many consumers are moved to buy things from newness – in packaging, production, appearance, etc—not from our level of comfort with a particular product. I feel that many people find what is to them exotic, not prototypical, to be the most beautiful things of all, whether it be people, places, animals. Of course, maybe I am wrong and this is only my particular opinion on this topic. Yes, I think cognitive fluency is powerfully at play in many areas of our lives, but I truly hope that people look beyond names and fonts– of stocks, of candidates, or ideas – and at the content of what is being presented to them before they accept or reject anything as believable or true.
This article poses many interesting ideas about the inner workings of the human mind, and while I think you grasped an understanding of the article, you missed the major point. Drake Bennett, the author talked not about how humans prefer the familiar and simple, but rather how the subconscious mind does. Humans, according to the article often find new things, or disfluency, “Intriguing and novel,” whereas fluent, familiar things are “Boring and comfortable.” So when you said “The challenge is half the fun,” you were absolutely right, but the conscious mind receives a sense of thrill from the subconscious experiencing this disfluency. The human mind simply finds familiar situations easier to comprehend. Dividing it into two categories, the subconscious mind prefers the simple and familiar, while the conscious mind prefers the thrill of the new and exciting. Another way to describe it would be to imagine someone’s comfort zone. In their comfort zone they feel safe and secure, but also bored and unexcited. The excitement comes from experiencing disfluent situations outside of the comfort zone. The disfluent situations trigger a more complex response from the subconscious, sparking the conscious mind into excitement. Fluency tells the mind when something is safe and most likely good, not exciting and fun.
ReplyDeleteGenerally, Drake Bennett’s article argues that people tend to use the mental short cut to assess information and that being “cognitive fluency” equals being familiar. To support his idea, Bennett refers to a couple of psychological evidences, including the correlation between the companies with names easier to pronounce and their performance, the “mere exposure ”effect, the font that shapes people’s perception and the “beauty- in- averageness” effect.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree with you that in many cases, Bennett’s argument is quiet true especially he mentioned the “quick and dirty “ way is evolutionarily adaptive and saves a lot of time and effort in most life aspects, but I think you oversimplified Bennett’s definition for familiarity. Although he does include simplicity as part of familiarity, he also emphasizes on the degree to which the information has been exposed to people. He said,” familiar objects were those we’d passes judge on, so it made sense not to waste time and energy scrutinizing them.” When discussing the “mere exposure” effect, Bennett introduced Zajonc’s study, which concludes that people prefer the things that were presented more frequently. In other words, the ease and simplicity of the information is quiet subjective for each individual, all depending on the extent and frequency of the information processed by the individual before and therefore what is easy for a person may be difficult for many others. While “some mindless romance novels” are easy to read for most people, “Anna Karenina” may be very challenging for them but not for you because you have received a much better education in UW Madison. I am not saying that most of others are not well educated, but compared with a college student who is used to working hard and who is constantly faced with challenging coursework like you, their brains may not be comfortable with the complexity and effort of processing each page carefully because they are not often trained to do that before. In brief, my point is that Bennett’s definition of familiarity is not the synonym of simple, which is a very subjective word.
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ReplyDeleteThe saying you mentioned, “the challenge is half the fun”, is very interesting. I think I will complete the saying in this way: the challenge is half the fun, the other half is hope that sustains you to go through it. If the challenge is beyond one’s ability to handle, such as reading an academic astronomical paper if you have little knowledge about astronomy, it is struggle instead of fun; if the task is just tediously repetitive simple job, such as reading “mindless romance novels” day by day, it bores you instead of giving you hope and confidence. It is the balanced combination of challenge and confidence that makes fun and the confidence you have is definitely related to the familiarity of the problem. If you have a solid background in astronomy, which means you have processed such information before, reading an academic astronomical paper should be a fun challenge for you. Also, although your favorite professor teaches the knowledge you are not familiar with, he is so good at his field so that he can present it clearly and concisely enough rather than confusingly, and therefore you feel good about it. The new knowledge is challenge and the way he teaches gives you confidence, so the optimum combination of the two makes the lecture so interesting.
When talking about the “beauty-in-averageness” versus “beauty –in-uniqueness”, the same logic can apply here. The difference between uniqueness and oddness is so subtle that it is often hotly debated. Is Lady Gaga a fashion genius or disaster? Van Gogh’s work is highly valued now but in his days, it was despised. But why now people change their views? According to Bennett, I think it is because people are getting familiar with impressionists’ work. Maybe a few years later, Lady Gaga will be praises as a fashion genius. In other words, what people perceived as unique has been exposed to them before, and those they regard as odd have not. Although people cannot tell when they have processed the information or they don’t even know they have, according to the psychologist, their implicit memory does shape their perception. Therefore what strikes you may not be the uniqueness of the clothes; rather, it is the implicit familiarity that drives you to like it. These surprising theories sound weird, but they make psychological science so interesting.