distress calls when exposed to the tone they had heard while inhabiting the shell.
Zajonc offered an eloquent summary of hing icts program of research:
The consequences of repeated exposures benefit the organism in its relations to the immediate animate and inanimate environment. They allow the organism to distinguish objects and habitats that are safe from those that are not, and they are the most primitive basis of social attachments. Therefore, they form the basis for social organization and cohesion—the basic sources of psychological and social stability.
The link between positive emotion and cognitive ease in System 1 has a long evolutionary history.
Ease, Mood, and Intuition
Around 1960, a young psychologist named Sarnoff Mednick thought he had identified the essence of creativity. His idea was as simple as it was powerful: creativity is associative memory that works exceptionally well. He made up a test, called the Remote Association Test (RAT), which is still often used in studies of creativity.
For an easy example, consider the following three words:
cottage Swiss cake
Can you think of a word that is associated with all three? You probably worked out that the answer is cheese . Now try this:
dive light rocket
This problem is much harder, but it has a unique correct answer, which every speaker of English recognizes, although less than 20% of a sample of students found it within 15 seconds. The answer is sky . Of course, not every triad of words has a solution. For example, the words dream , ball , book do not have a shared association that everyone will recognize as valid.
Several teams of German psychologists that have studied the RAT in recent years have come up with remarkable discoveries about cognitive ease. One of the teams raised two questions: Can people feel that a triad of words has a solution before they know what the solution is? How does mood influence performance in this task? To find out, they first made some of their subjects happy and others sad, by asking them to think for several minutes about happy or sad episodes in their lives. Then they presented these subjects with a series of triads, half of them linked (such as dive , light , rocket ) and half unlinked (such as dream , ball , book ), and instructed them to press one of two keys very quickly to indicate their guess about whether the triad was linked. The time allowed for this guess, 2 seconds, was much too short for the actual solution to come to anyone’s mind.
The first surprise is that people’s guesses are much more accurate than they would be by chance. I find this astonishing. A sense of cognitive ease is apparently generated by a very faint signal from the associative machine, which “knows” that the three words are coherent (share an association) long before the association is retrieved. The role of cognitive ease in the judgment was confirmed experimentally by another German team: manipulations that increase cognitive ease (priming, a clear font, pre-exposing words) all increase the tendency to see the words as linked.
Another remarkable discovery is the powerful effect of mood on this intuitive performance. The experimentershape tende computed an “intuition index” to measure accuracy. They found that putting the participants in a good mood before the test by having them think happy thoughts more than doubled accuracy. An even more striking result is that unhappy subjects were completely incapable of performing the intuitive task accurately; their guesses were no better than random. Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.
These findings add to the growing evidence that good mood, intuition, creativity, gullibility, and increased reliance on System 1 form a cluster. At the other pole, sadness, vigilance, suspicion, an analytic approach, and increased effort also go together. A happy mood loosens the control of System 2
Zajonc offered an eloquent summary of hing icts program of research:
The consequences of repeated exposures benefit the organism in its relations to the immediate animate and inanimate environment. They allow the organism to distinguish objects and habitats that are safe from those that are not, and they are the most primitive basis of social attachments. Therefore, they form the basis for social organization and cohesion—the basic sources of psychological and social stability.
The link between positive emotion and cognitive ease in System 1 has a long evolutionary history.
Ease, Mood, and Intuition
Around 1960, a young psychologist named Sarnoff Mednick thought he had identified the essence of creativity. His idea was as simple as it was powerful: creativity is associative memory that works exceptionally well. He made up a test, called the Remote Association Test (RAT), which is still often used in studies of creativity.
For an easy example, consider the following three words:
cottage Swiss cake
Can you think of a word that is associated with all three? You probably worked out that the answer is cheese . Now try this:
dive light rocket
This problem is much harder, but it has a unique correct answer, which every speaker of English recognizes, although less than 20% of a sample of students found it within 15 seconds. The answer is sky . Of course, not every triad of words has a solution. For example, the words dream , ball , book do not have a shared association that everyone will recognize as valid.
Several teams of German psychologists that have studied the RAT in recent years have come up with remarkable discoveries about cognitive ease. One of the teams raised two questions: Can people feel that a triad of words has a solution before they know what the solution is? How does mood influence performance in this task? To find out, they first made some of their subjects happy and others sad, by asking them to think for several minutes about happy or sad episodes in their lives. Then they presented these subjects with a series of triads, half of them linked (such as dive , light , rocket ) and half unlinked (such as dream , ball , book ), and instructed them to press one of two keys very quickly to indicate their guess about whether the triad was linked. The time allowed for this guess, 2 seconds, was much too short for the actual solution to come to anyone’s mind.
The first surprise is that people’s guesses are much more accurate than they would be by chance. I find this astonishing. A sense of cognitive ease is apparently generated by a very faint signal from the associative machine, which “knows” that the three words are coherent (share an association) long before the association is retrieved. The role of cognitive ease in the judgment was confirmed experimentally by another German team: manipulations that increase cognitive ease (priming, a clear font, pre-exposing words) all increase the tendency to see the words as linked.
Another remarkable discovery is the powerful effect of mood on this intuitive performance. The experimentershape tende computed an “intuition index” to measure accuracy. They found that putting the participants in a good mood before the test by having them think happy thoughts more than doubled accuracy. An even more striking result is that unhappy subjects were completely incapable of performing the intuitive task accurately; their guesses were no better than random. Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.
These findings add to the growing evidence that good mood, intuition, creativity, gullibility, and increased reliance on System 1 form a cluster. At the other pole, sadness, vigilance, suspicion, an analytic approach, and increased effort also go together. A happy mood loosens the control of System 2
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