I am fascinated with the many ways our brains fool themselves into doing much, much more work than is necessary. Is the following a fallacy in thinking? If so, how could a rhetor take advantage of the fallacy to better influence an audience?
Steve
How Difficult Decisions Trick Your Brain Into Thinking They're Important [Mind Hacks]: "
Have you ever stood in the supermarket, deciding between two different types of toothpaste, when suddenly you realize you've been there for ten minutes? Here's how you're being tricked into thinking small decisions are actually important.
Jonah Lehrer over at Wired describes this exact experience and seeks out an explanation. It turns out, when we have a lot of options put in front of us, decisions become more difficult—and we associate that difficulty with the importance of the decision. Scientists Aner Sela and Jonah Berger explain:
Our central premise is that people use subjective experiences of difficulty while making a decision as a cue to how much further time and effort to spend. People generally associate important decisions with difficulty. Consequently, if a decision feels unexpectedly difficult, due to even incidental reasons, people may draw the reverse inference that it is also important, and consequently increase the amount of time and effort they expend. Ironically, this process is particularly likely for decisions that initially seemed unimportant because people expect them to be easier.
Ed. note: This idea is very similar to the kind of
cognitive dissonance you read about in your Intro to Psychology course: E.g., people rushing a fraternity or sorority often have to endure a miserable hazing process in order to join; if you willfully subjected yourself to pain or humiliation in order to join a group,
you must love it. (Or that's how the logic goes.)
The two researchers demonstrated this idea through a study that showed harder-to-read fonts actually made people think a decision was more important—simply because it required more brainpower to make.
There's not much you can do to fix this, but it's something to keep in mind next time your'e at the supermarket. When you realize you've been standing there for over 30 seconds, think to yourself: 'is the decision between these two brands of deodorant really important?' The answer's probably no. Photo by {Guerrilla Futures | Jason Tester}.
You can contact Whitson Gordon, the author of this post, at
whitson@lifehacker.com. You can also follow him on
Twitter and
Facebook.
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Obviously we're all aware that being well-prepared is a virtue. Author Karl Fogel explains, however, that when it comes to preparing for meetings, coming more prepared than everyone else is the thing that will get your ideas heard.
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