Cognitive miser
In psychology, the human mind is considered to be a cognitive miser due to the tendency of humans to think and solve problems in simpler and less effortful ways rather than in more sophisticated and effortful ways, regardless of intelligence. Just as a miser seeks to avoid spending money, the human mind often seeks to avoid spending cognitive effort. The cognitive miser theory is an umbrella theory of cognition that brings together previous research on heuristics and attributional biases to explain when and why people are cognitive misers.
Psychologists Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor introduced the term in 1984, writing that "People are limited in their capacity to process information, so they take shortcuts whenever they can." It is an important concept in social cognition theory and has been influential in other social sciences such as economics and political science.
Assumption
The metaphor of the cognitive miser assumes that the human mind is limited in time, knowledge, attention, and cognitive resources. Usually people do not think rationally or cautiously, but use cognitive shortcuts to make inferences and form judgments. These shortcuts include the use of schemas, scripts, stereotypes, and other simplified perceptual strategies instead of careful thinking. For example, people tend to make correspondent reasoning and are likely to believe that behaviors should be correlated to or representative of stable characteristics.Background
The naïve scientist and attribution theory
Before Fiske and Taylor's cognitive miser theory, the predominant model of social cognition was the naïve scientist. First proposed in 1958 by Fritz Heider in The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, this theory holds that humans think and act with dispassionate rationality whilst engaging in detailed and nuanced thought processes for both complex and routine actions. In this way, humans were thought to think like scientists, albeit naïve ones, measuring and analyzing the world around them. Applying this framework to human thought processes, naïve scientists seek the consistency and stability that comes from a coherent view of the world and need for environmental control.In order to meet these needs, naïve scientists make attributions. Thus, attribution theory emerged from the study of the ways in which individuals assess causal relationships and mechanisms. Through the study of causal attributions, led by Harold Kelley and Bernard Weiner amongst others, social psychologists began to observe that subjects regularly demonstrate several attributional biases including but not limited to the fundamental attribution error.
The study of attributions had two effects: it created further interest in testing the naive scientist and opened up a new wave of social psychology research that questioned its explanatory power. This second effect helped to lay the foundation for Fiske and Taylor's cognitive miser.
Stereotypes
According to Walter Lippmann's arguments in his classic book Public Opinion, people are not equipped to deal with complexity. Attempting to observe things freshly and in detail is mentally exhausting, especially among busy affairs. The term stereotype is thus introduced: people have to reconstruct the complex situation on a simpler model before they can cope with it, and the simpler model can be regarded as a stereotype. Stereotypes are formed from outside sources which identified with people's interests and can be reinforced since people could be impressed by those facts that fit their philosophy.On the other hand, in Lippmann's view, people are told about the world before they see it. People's behavior is not based on direct and certain knowledge, but pictures made or given to them. Hence, influence from external factors are unneglectable in shaping people’s stereotypes. "The subtlest and most pervasive of all influences are those which create and maintain the repertory of stereotypes." That is to say, people live in a second-handed world with mediated reality, where the simplified model for thinking could be created and maintained by external forces. Lippmann suggested that the public "cannot be wise", since they can be easily misled by overly simplified reality which is consistent with their pre-existing pictures in mind, and any disturbance of the existing stereotypes will seem like "an attack upon the foundation of the universe".
Although Lippmann did not directly define the term cognitive miser, stereotypes have important functions in simplifying people's thinking process. As cognitive simplification, it is useful for realistic economic management, otherwise people will be overwhelmed by the complexity of the real rationales. Stereotype, as a phenomenon, has become a standard topic in sociology and social psychology.
Heuristics
Much of the cognitive miser theory is built upon work done on heuristics in judgment and decision-making, most notably Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman results published in a series of influential articles. Heuristics can be defined as the "judgmental shortcuts that generally get us where we need to go—and quickly—but at the cost of occasionally sending us off course." In their work, Kahneman and Tversky demonstrated that people rely upon different types of heuristics or mental short cuts in order to save time and mental energy. However, in relying upon heuristics instead of detailed analysis, like the information processing employed by Heider's naïve scientist, biased information processing is more likely to occur. Some of these heuristics include:The frequency with which Kahneman and Tversky and other attribution researchers found the individuals employed mental shortcuts to make decisions and assessments laid important groundwork for the overarching idea that individuals and their minds act efficiently instead of analytically.
Cognitive miser theory
The wave of research on attributional biases done by Kahneman, Tversky and others effectively ended the dominance of Heider's naïve scientist within social psychology. Fiske and Taylor, building upon the prevalence of heuristics in human cognition, offered their theory of the cognitive miser. It is, in many ways, a unifying theory of ad-hoc decision-making which suggests that humans engage in economically prudent thought processes instead of acting like scientists who rationally weigh cost and benefit data, test hypotheses, and update expectations based upon the results of the discrete experiments that are our everyday actions. In other words, humans are more inclined to act as cognitive misers using mental short cuts to make assessments and decisions regarding issues and ideas about which they know very little, including issues of great salience. Fiske and Taylor argue that it is rational to act as a cognitive miser due to the sheer volume and intensity of information and stimuli humans intake. Given the limited information processing capabilities of individuals, people try to adopt strategies that economise complex problems. Cognitive misers usually act in two ways: by disregarding part of the information to reduce their own cognitive load, or by overusing some kind of information to avoid the burden of finding and processing more information.Other psychologists also argue that the cognitively miserly tendency of humans is a primary reason why "humans are often less than rational". The basic principle is to save mental energy as much as possible, even when it is required to "use your head". Unless the cognitive environment meets certain criteria, we will, by default, try to avoid thinking as much as possible.
Implications
The implications of this theory raise important questions about both cognition and human behavior. In addition to streamlining cognition in complicated, analytical tasks, the cognitive miser approach is also used when dealing with unfamiliar issues and issues of great importance.Politics
Voting behavior in democracies are an arena in which the cognitive miser is at work. Acting as a cognitive miser should lead those with expertise in an area to more efficient information processing and streamlined decision making. However, as Lau and Redlawsk note, acting as cognitive miser who employs heuristics can have very different results for high-information and low-information voters. They write, "...cognitive heuristics are at times employed by almost all voters, and that they are particularly likely to be used when the choice situation facing voters is complex... heuristic use generally increases the probability of a correct vote by political experts but decreases the probability of a correct vote by novices." In democracies, where no vote is weighted more or less because of the expertise behind its casting, low-information voters, acting as cognitive misers, can have broad and potentially deleterious choices for a society.Samuel Popkin argues that voters make rational choices by using information shortcuts that they receive during campaigns, usually using something akin to a drunkard's search. Voters use small amounts of personal information to construct a narrative about candidates. Essentially, they ask themselves this: "Based on what I know about the candidate personally, what is the probability that this presidential candidate was a good governor? What is the probability that he will be a good president?" Popkin's analysis is based on one main premise: voters use low information rationality gained in their daily lives, through the media and through personal interactions, to evaluate candidates and facilitate electoral choices.