9 ms·

Need for cognition

238 points by luu 4y ago

mannykannot 4y ago
Maybe this is something that academics and conspiracy theorists share?
- epgui 4y ago
  A genuine desire to learn? Really? I don’t think so.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - mannykannot 4y ago
    This article does not use the word 'genuine' (or 'real', for that matter, though I have not searched for other synonyms.) In fact, my comment was prompted by the way that the definitions given here seem to avoid implying that those exhibiting this need are sticklers for the truth. It seems likely that they all think they are getting closer to the truth, and this would seem more pertinent, in defining a personality trait, than whether they actually succeed in doing so.
- VLM 4y ago
  Unfortunately in contrast, academics are fans of yesterday's newspaper headlines, conspiracy theorists have repeatedly proven to be fans of tomorrow's newspaper headlines. However, big brother has never lied to us and only the worst people do not love big brother, so I don't officially support or believe any conspiracy theories. Also its too much work to check legacy media to see what's been admitted recently.
topherPedersen 4y ago
Some people don't have this. A lot of people aren't very curious at all. Last night in Austin I saw a full self driving car from Cruise drive by with no driver while I was at a crosswalk. No one noticed or cared that a car just drove by with no one in it! It was one of the most incredible things I've ever seen, and the people around me did not notice or care.
- Jensson 4y ago
  People get used to that sort of thing quick. People once thought seeing a car was incredible, but when you see them all the time it doesn't register.
- Cognitron 4y ago
  Reminds me of the Louis C.K. bit about flying https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b3dYS7PcAG4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b3dYS7PcAG4
  - frays 4y ago
    This is fantastic, thanks.
- mlyle 4y ago
  > and the people around me did not notice or care. This is such a transient thing. If you're not primed to notice a self driving car (already thinking about it / having read it) you may miss it. And once you've seen it a few times, the novelty decreases a lot. I try to keep wonder for things that I have experienced already (Holy crap; I'm in a metal tube that's going close to the speed of sound 7 miles high!) But pretty soon other things win (How long do I have to sit in this little seat? And I'm hungry...). Arguably the thing that is most extraordinary is that we've made these wonderful, bizarre things such a matter of routine. Look around you. Nearly every object in the civilized world is a constructed object, borne from human thought. Every street, every edifice, every artifice. Even almost all of the foods and raw ingredients have been crafted to meet our needs. Wow. But flour is a >30,000 year old technology and not something people get excited about...
- reidjs 4y ago
  I’m not that impressed by self driving cars because while the tech is cool it’s not really solving anything in my personal life. A car is basically self driving when I pay someone else to drive me where I go - end result is the same, I get where I need to go without having to drive the car.
  - 4y ago
civilized 4y ago
I clicked on "elaboration" and I feel myself about to go down the wiki rabbit hole... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elaboration_likelihood_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elaboration_likelihood_model
- lelandfe 4y ago
  These are some of the worst graphics I've seen on Wikipedia, hah: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Elaboration_Likelihood_Model2.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Elaboration_Likelihood_Mo... Looking like a high school Powerpoint presentation.
  - masswerk 4y ago
    But I found this one neat (even with that awful, as in non-existent, letter spacing): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elaboration_likelihood_model#/media/File:Elaboration_Likelihood_Model_Information_Graphic_of_Bias_and_Objective_Thinking.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elaboration_likelihood_model#/... There was a time, when infographics used to be artistic…
jawns 4y ago
I haven't looked at the research yet, but this feels like it may have some correlation with a psychological trait called dogmatism, which is a defined as exhibiting great certainty about the correctness of one's views and an unwillingness to consider new evidence, or an unwillingness to adjust one's views in light of new evidence. Obviously, they're not the same. NFC pertains more to the desire to go through the process of cognition, whereas dogmatism pertains more to defects of cognition (e.g. giving too much weight to our priors, being unwilling to update our priors). But in the cases of both low NFC and high dogmatism, it feels like there's a type of intellectual laziness or cognitive immaturity at play. Almost like "It's too overwhelming for me to actually think this through, so I'm choosing to just not." Similarly, both point to a lack of curiosity about the world or anything other that what we already know. (And, I would wager, both probably have a link to anti-intellectualism and authoritarianism, where we assume that whoever is in charge knows what they're doing better than the rest of us do.)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- abeppu 4y ago
  I wonder if we need better role models for embracing uncertainty. If you're a low NFC person, there are a bunch of high status people that take public dogmatic stances, and demonstrate that you have high confidence in a worldview of sweeping generalizations without having to think too hard if only you adopt the Dogma. But I can't really think of role models where someone says "X, Y, Z are all complex and the thing that's valuable in my life is W, so it's healthy and intentional that I neither think about X, Y, Z or have an opinion on them" and that's socially validated or even celebrated.
  - xyzzy123 4y ago
    The Dogma usually includes statements like "people who don't care about X are part of the problem" and considerable social effort is spent on recruiting more "soldiers" and influencing group norms. The unaligned are considered "fodder" by the ideologically committed. Not everyone needs to be recruited. Most people can be kept in line by ensuring everyone knows what the "safe" view is within a specific group and occasionally punishing defectors.
Silverback_VII 4y ago
Too much thinking is like a heavy dish, it makes you sluggish and sleepy. Remember that everything that moves quickly and elegantly through the world does so without too much thought.
- gowld 4y ago
  And everything that withstands assault does so with thought.
  - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    I don’t agree. You can assault an experience as much as you like. Nevertheless the experience still stands, thought or no thought.
  - mlyle 4y ago
    “It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.” -Whitehead
- SamPatt 4y ago
  Not sure everyone has a choice in this. My default is deeper thought, occasionally to my detriment. I can only operate quickly if I have extensive experience doing that thing. Learning new sports or new mental tasks is slow and requires a lot of discomfort, intentionally pushing my body and mind to just do something they don't feel ready for. I sometimes do wish I could act more quickly but thus far the only method which works is to do the thing a lot.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  Reminds me of the fiction of Peter Watts, which basically suggests that consciousness is an evolutionary glitch, and pointless. https://reasonedeclecticism.substack.com/p/peter-watts-and-consciousness https://reasonedeclecticism.substack.com/p/peter-watts-and-c...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
andersentobias 4y ago
Are there any good books on this topic?
- randcraw 4y ago
  "Thinking Fast and Slow" seems to cover some of the same ground, especially Kahneman's and Tverski's Type II or slow thinking, though I think they approach thinking more as a means to solve problems (i.e. decision making/economics) rather than personality and how one sees the world (i.e. perception, attitude, and cognition). But Kahneman does discuss one's personal willingness to employ Type II, which should intersect with NFC.
- jboynyc 4y ago
  Perhaps Rationality and the Reflective Mind by Keith Stanovich (OUP, 2010). https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195341140.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195341140.001.0001 There are some other interesting references in this blog post: https://culturecog.blog/2021/06/15/a-sociology-of-thinking-dispositions/ https://culturecog.blog/2021/06/15/a-sociology-of-thinking-d...
rossdavidh 4y ago
" People low in need for cognition are also more likely to rely on stereotypes alone in judging other people than those high in need for cognition." You know, I could believe that, but I can't help wondering if the people who do research in psychology (or most people in academia really) are not more likely to be high-NFC types, and thus not exactly objective in deciding what potential advantages/disadvantages to research. For example, who is less likely to be swayed by empirical evidence?
- MisterPea 4y ago
  Agree. Something in the past few years that's changed for me is to be less of the "Trust the science" type person. Ultimately research is conducted by humans and we are all prone to any normal human biases
asow92 4y ago
I need for cognition on Need For Cognition.
vmoore 4y ago
Some people are just natural philosophers. I was always one, and an un-analyzed life gets drab very quickly, for me at least. I like to entertain various ideas without taking them too seriously. I like Stoicism which I find very useful, and eastern philosophies like Buddhism. Too easy to become over-zealous about both of those philosophies. A test of your own personal philosophy is when you encounter adversity. Do you apply what you've learned, or make up something on-the-fly?
- aradox66 4y ago
  That's funny, I understand Buddhism to be about the pain caused by conceptualizing life and the importance of dropping an analytical frame.
  - auxi 4y ago
    I interpreted it as the pain being caused by experiencing one's own perceptions and the importance is put on conceptualizing life (the experiencing) and dropping the self :)
  - macrolocal 4y ago
    That sounds like Bergson more than Buddhism.
Qwertysjsjs 4y ago
I didn't not understood my world very well and started in school to question everything. I later learned that my world view has a logical layer. In contrast others around me have a world view learned by their surroundings. That made it for me so much clearer why people can life with logical conflicts. Like the gay people still want to be part of the church. Or acting different in similar situations. Or stealing.
optimalsolver 4y ago
>Need for cognition has been variously defined as "a need to structure relevant situations in meaningful, integrated ways" and "a need to understand and make reasonable the experiential world" - So basically your average conspiracy theorist.
- uoaei 4y ago
  Conspiracy theorists demote things like "parsimony" in favor of "holism" and "explanatory power". There's a reason the text says "reasonable" and not merely "comprehensible".
  - optimalsolver 4y ago
    "Reasonable" is pretty subjective.
    - uoaei 4y ago
      "Being reasonable" is more or less universally defined as "balancing between parsimony and explainability in a good-faith analysis". Take it from the entire field of philosophy of science if you won't take it from me.
      - uoaei 4y ago
        One could make the argument that "good-faith" is subjective, except that would imply that things like logical fallacies cannot exist. However it is true that values frameworks shape how we investigate questions and what we feel comfortable proposing as solutions. Many proposals can be "reasonable" and simultaneously mutually exclusive or even destructive.
- benrawk 4y ago
  It is not a crazy idea to conceptualize some conspiracy theorists as people who (1) have a high need for cognition (brain wheels are always turning), and (2) direct that at developing wrong/misguided/motivated frameworks for the world.
VLM 4y ago
An interesting meta observation is that google searches and machine learning can find a lot of stuff, but I couldn't find a path between the drive to rationalize and the drive toward cognition although the two are obviously in some way closely linked.
renlo 4y ago
> Psychological research on the need for cognition has been conducted using self-report tests, where research participants answered a series of statements such as "I prefer my life to be filled with puzzles that I must solve" and were scored on how much they felt the statements represented them. This seems counter intuitive to me; I would consider myself someone that has a "need for cognition", but I am good at puzzles precisely because _I do not like being puzzled_. When I encounter something that doesn't make sense to me (a puzzle), it disturbs me so that I need to solve the puzzle and figure out why my assumptions were incorrect. I therefore dislike puzzles and I do not want them in my life. Puzzles are a contradiction of my assumptions. Maybe this is all "intolerance of ambiguity"
- jdthedisciple 4y ago
  But then again isn't there a desirable thrill in solving those puzzles? I'm sure it gives you the same dopamine boost it gives me everytime that apparent conflict between my assumptions and reality gets resolved.
- ShamelessC 4y ago
  Your last assertion is correct. You’re (deliberately?) conflating puzzles (challenging but ultimately solvable games) with the emotion of being puzzled (confusion/dissonance from an experience which doesn’t align with your priors).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
xyzelement 4y ago
This maps to something I've noticed. There's a pattern where human beings are wired to enjoy things that are important for their survival and thriving, but that these instincts are easily hijacked for aimless gratification. Eating junk food (vs stuff that gives you health and energy) or whacking off to porn (instead of healthy relationships and procreation) are examples of this. Anyway "the need for cognition"... I noticed that there's a class of people who are objectively "smart" in the sense that they can solve hard puzzles, crush it at trivia, etc. But at the same time these folks haven't been able to / bothered to get into lucrative professions that leverage these smarts and actually have a sort of not great lives (eg: unhealthy weight, no partner, etc.) So they are sort of scratching their itch for cognition, but not in a way that makes their life better in an objective way (which is most likely the reason we have this drive)
- mahathu 4y ago
  > This maps to something I've noticed. > There's a pattern where human beings are wired to enjoy things that are important for their survival and thriving, but that these instincts are easily hijacked for aimless gratification. It's late and I'm tired so most likely I'm not understanding your point properly. Aren't those literally the most fundamental and nearly universally known (i.e. preached by popular science) results from (a) evolution and (b) neuroscience research, respectively?
  - preordained 4y ago
    Not OP...but no, I think you way overstating how fundamental and well-known all this supposedly is, despite trending awareness
- fasterik 4y ago
  Lucrative professions have their own ways of hijacking the need for cognition. For example, programming can be an extremely rewarding activity when pursued for its own sake, but in the corporate world it is often reduced to tedium and drudgery. Financial reward isn't the only way to make someone's life objectively better. A sense of autonomy, freedom to explore and create, and high satisfaction with one's output are just as important, if not more so. Sometimes pursuing a lucrative career is at odds with these other goals.
Waterluvian 4y ago
This might be the problem I have with my in-laws. They’re good and mostly happy people but they’re incredibly… simple? Visiting with them is one of the most excruciating things in my life. All they want to do is talk about complete drivel. Gossip about the neighbour’s garbage cans or their visit to Costco. I’m not judging. It makes them happy. Great. But spending hours there I just feel my brain dying. It’s not for me. But the opposite happens at my family’s dinner table. My poor wife once commented, “my brain began dying about 30 mins into you and your brothers discussing the philosophy of his Supreme Court brief.” Furthermore: my incessant “need for cognition” is kind of screwing me up. I can’t sleep without medication anymore. My brain will not go to sleep on its own. I think and think and think. My wife puts on a stupid firefighter show where nobody ever wears helmets and passes out in ten minutes.
- Xcelerate 4y ago
  > My poor wife once commented, “my brain began dying about 30 mins into you and your brothers discussing the philosophy of his Supreme Court brief.” Haha, my wife is similar—"If you and your dad start another four hour conversation about AI, I'm going to bed". My response: "You're more than welcome to discuss Solomonoff induction along with us." Somehow we do manage to find topics that we both enjoy though.
- 65 4y ago
  > my incessant “need for cognition” is kind of screwing me up. Hah. Same. I have to pace around for hours and hours a day, thinking about random shit. I do an unhealthy amount of pacing. I'm not anxiously pacing. Just thinking about stuff. At least I get my steps in.
- thekiptxt 4y ago
  I understand what you’re saying and I can relate to some degree, but it’s hard to read comments like this and not think I’m browsing r/IAmVerySmart. I have some friends with whom I might try to poke at the nuances of the philosophy of a Supreme Court decision, but I have other friends who would be bored out of their mind. They also have a need for cognition and love to tear topics apart, but _different_ topics.
- 4y ago
Diapason 4y ago
Funny how https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01519-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01519-7 was on the first page at the same time !)
pgayed 4y ago
The commentary on this phenomenon is an example of itself.

Need for cognition

238 points by luu 4y ago

mannykannot 4y ago

Maybe this is something that academics and conspiracy theorists share?

epgui 4y ago
A genuine desire to learn? Really? I don’t think so.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mannykannot 4y ago
  This article does not use the word 'genuine' (or 'real', for that matter, though I have not searched for other synonyms.) In fact, my comment was prompted by the way that the definitions given here seem to avoid implying that those exhibiting this need are sticklers for the truth. It seems likely that they all think they are getting closer to the truth, and this would seem more pertinent, in defining a personality trait, than whether they actually succeed in doing so.
VLM 4y ago
Unfortunately in contrast, academics are fans of yesterday's newspaper headlines, conspiracy theorists have repeatedly proven to be fans of tomorrow's newspaper headlines. However, big brother has never lied to us and only the worst people do not love big brother, so I don't officially support or believe any conspiracy theories. Also its too much work to check legacy media to see what's been admitted recently.

topherPedersen 4y ago

Some people don't have this. A lot of people aren't very curious at all. Last night in Austin I saw a full self driving car from Cruise drive by with no driver while I was at a crosswalk. No one noticed or cared that a car just drove by with no one in it! It was one of the most incredible things I've ever seen, and the people around me did not notice or care.

Jensson 4y ago
People get used to that sort of thing quick. People once thought seeing a car was incredible, but when you see them all the time it doesn't register.
Cognitron 4y ago
Reminds me of the Louis C.K. bit about flying https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b3dYS7PcAG4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b3dYS7PcAG4
- frays 4y ago
  This is fantastic, thanks.
mlyle 4y ago
> and the people around me did not notice or care. This is such a transient thing. If you're not primed to notice a self driving car (already thinking about it / having read it) you may miss it. And once you've seen it a few times, the novelty decreases a lot. I try to keep wonder for things that I have experienced already (Holy crap; I'm in a metal tube that's going close to the speed of sound 7 miles high!) But pretty soon other things win (How long do I have to sit in this little seat? And I'm hungry...). Arguably the thing that is most extraordinary is that we've made these wonderful, bizarre things such a matter of routine. Look around you. Nearly every object in the civilized world is a constructed object, borne from human thought. Every street, every edifice, every artifice. Even almost all of the foods and raw ingredients have been crafted to meet our needs. Wow. But flour is a >30,000 year old technology and not something people get excited about...
reidjs 4y ago
I’m not that impressed by self driving cars because while the tech is cool it’s not really solving anything in my personal life. A car is basically self driving when I pay someone else to drive me where I go - end result is the same, I get where I need to go without having to drive the car.
- 4y ago

civilized 4y ago

I clicked on "elaboration" and I feel myself about to go down the wiki rabbit hole... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elaboration_likelihood_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elaboration_likelihood_model

lelandfe 4y ago
These are some of the worst graphics I've seen on Wikipedia, hah: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Elaboration_Likelihood_Model2.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Elaboration_Likelihood_Mo... Looking like a high school Powerpoint presentation.
- masswerk 4y ago
  But I found this one neat (even with that awful, as in non-existent, letter spacing): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elaboration_likelihood_model#/media/File:Elaboration_Likelihood_Model_Information_Graphic_of_Bias_and_Objective_Thinking.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elaboration_likelihood_model#/... There was a time, when infographics used to be artistic…

jawns 4y ago

I haven't looked at the research yet, but this feels like it may have some correlation with a psychological trait called dogmatism, which is a defined as exhibiting great certainty about the correctness of one's views and an unwillingness to consider new evidence, or an unwillingness to adjust one's views in light of new evidence. Obviously, they're not the same. NFC pertains more to the desire to go through the process of cognition, whereas dogmatism pertains more to defects of cognition (e.g. giving too much weight to our priors, being unwilling to update our priors). But in the cases of both low NFC and high dogmatism, it feels like there's a type of intellectual laziness or cognitive immaturity at play. Almost like "It's too overwhelming for me to actually think this through, so I'm choosing to just not." Similarly, both point to a lack of curiosity about the world or anything other that what we already know. (And, I would wager, both probably have a link to anti-intellectualism and authoritarianism, where we assume that whoever is in charge knows what they're doing better than the rest of us do.)

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
abeppu 4y ago
I wonder if we need better role models for embracing uncertainty. If you're a low NFC person, there are a bunch of high status people that take public dogmatic stances, and demonstrate that you have high confidence in a worldview of sweeping generalizations without having to think too hard if only you adopt the Dogma. But I can't really think of role models where someone says "X, Y, Z are all complex and the thing that's valuable in my life is W, so it's healthy and intentional that I neither think about X, Y, Z or have an opinion on them" and that's socially validated or even celebrated.
- xyzzy123 4y ago
  The Dogma usually includes statements like "people who don't care about X are part of the problem" and considerable social effort is spent on recruiting more "soldiers" and influencing group norms. The unaligned are considered "fodder" by the ideologically committed. Not everyone needs to be recruited. Most people can be kept in line by ensuring everyone knows what the "safe" view is within a specific group and occasionally punishing defectors.

Silverback_VII 4y ago

Too much thinking is like a heavy dish, it makes you sluggish and sleepy. Remember that everything that moves quickly and elegantly through the world does so without too much thought.

gowld 4y ago
And everything that withstands assault does so with thought.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  I don’t agree. You can assault an experience as much as you like. Nevertheless the experience still stands, thought or no thought.
- mlyle 4y ago
  “It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.” -Whitehead
SamPatt 4y ago
Not sure everyone has a choice in this. My default is deeper thought, occasionally to my detriment. I can only operate quickly if I have extensive experience doing that thing. Learning new sports or new mental tasks is slow and requires a lot of discomfort, intentionally pushing my body and mind to just do something they don't feel ready for. I sometimes do wish I could act more quickly but thus far the only method which works is to do the thing a lot.
Apocryphon 4y ago
Reminds me of the fiction of Peter Watts, which basically suggests that consciousness is an evolutionary glitch, and pointless. https://reasonedeclecticism.substack.com/p/peter-watts-and-consciousness https://reasonedeclecticism.substack.com/p/peter-watts-and-c...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

andersentobias 4y ago

Are there any good books on this topic?

randcraw 4y ago
"Thinking Fast and Slow" seems to cover some of the same ground, especially Kahneman's and Tverski's Type II or slow thinking, though I think they approach thinking more as a means to solve problems (i.e. decision making/economics) rather than personality and how one sees the world (i.e. perception, attitude, and cognition). But Kahneman does discuss one's personal willingness to employ Type II, which should intersect with NFC.
jboynyc 4y ago
Perhaps Rationality and the Reflective Mind by Keith Stanovich (OUP, 2010). https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195341140.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195341140.001.0001 There are some other interesting references in this blog post: https://culturecog.blog/2021/06/15/a-sociology-of-thinking-dispositions/ https://culturecog.blog/2021/06/15/a-sociology-of-thinking-d...

rossdavidh 4y ago

" People low in need for cognition are also more likely to rely on stereotypes alone in judging other people than those high in need for cognition." You know, I could believe that, but I can't help wondering if the people who do research in psychology (or most people in academia really) are not more likely to be high-NFC types, and thus not exactly objective in deciding what potential advantages/disadvantages to research. For example, who is less likely to be swayed by empirical evidence?

MisterPea 4y ago
Agree. Something in the past few years that's changed for me is to be less of the "Trust the science" type person. Ultimately research is conducted by humans and we are all prone to any normal human biases

asow92 4y ago

I need for cognition on Need For Cognition.

vmoore 4y ago

Some people are just natural philosophers. I was always one, and an un-analyzed life gets drab very quickly, for me at least. I like to entertain various ideas without taking them too seriously. I like Stoicism which I find very useful, and eastern philosophies like Buddhism. Too easy to become over-zealous about both of those philosophies. A test of your own personal philosophy is when you encounter adversity. Do you apply what you've learned, or make up something on-the-fly?

aradox66 4y ago
That's funny, I understand Buddhism to be about the pain caused by conceptualizing life and the importance of dropping an analytical frame.
- auxi 4y ago
  I interpreted it as the pain being caused by experiencing one's own perceptions and the importance is put on conceptualizing life (the experiencing) and dropping the self :)
- macrolocal 4y ago
  That sounds like Bergson more than Buddhism.

Qwertysjsjs 4y ago

I didn't not understood my world very well and started in school to question everything. I later learned that my world view has a logical layer. In contrast others around me have a world view learned by their surroundings. That made it for me so much clearer why people can life with logical conflicts. Like the gay people still want to be part of the church. Or acting different in similar situations. Or stealing.

optimalsolver 4y ago

>Need for cognition has been variously defined as "a need to structure relevant situations in meaningful, integrated ways" and "a need to understand and make reasonable the experiential world" - So basically your average conspiracy theorist.

uoaei 4y ago
Conspiracy theorists demote things like "parsimony" in favor of "holism" and "explanatory power". There's a reason the text says "reasonable" and not merely "comprehensible".
- optimalsolver 4y ago
  "Reasonable" is pretty subjective.
  - uoaei 4y ago
    "Being reasonable" is more or less universally defined as "balancing between parsimony and explainability in a good-faith analysis". Take it from the entire field of philosophy of science if you won't take it from me.
    - uoaei 4y ago
      One could make the argument that "good-faith" is subjective, except that would imply that things like logical fallacies cannot exist. However it is true that values frameworks shape how we investigate questions and what we feel comfortable proposing as solutions. Many proposals can be "reasonable" and simultaneously mutually exclusive or even destructive.
benrawk 4y ago
It is not a crazy idea to conceptualize some conspiracy theorists as people who (1) have a high need for cognition (brain wheels are always turning), and (2) direct that at developing wrong/misguided/motivated frameworks for the world.

VLM 4y ago

An interesting meta observation is that google searches and machine learning can find a lot of stuff, but I couldn't find a path between the drive to rationalize and the drive toward cognition although the two are obviously in some way closely linked.

renlo 4y ago

> Psychological research on the need for cognition has been conducted using self-report tests, where research participants answered a series of statements such as "I prefer my life to be filled with puzzles that I must solve" and were scored on how much they felt the statements represented them. This seems counter intuitive to me; I would consider myself someone that has a "need for cognition", but I am good at puzzles precisely because _I do not like being puzzled_. When I encounter something that doesn't make sense to me (a puzzle), it disturbs me so that I need to solve the puzzle and figure out why my assumptions were incorrect. I therefore dislike puzzles and I do not want them in my life. Puzzles are a contradiction of my assumptions. Maybe this is all "intolerance of ambiguity"

jdthedisciple 4y ago
But then again isn't there a desirable thrill in solving those puzzles? I'm sure it gives you the same dopamine boost it gives me everytime that apparent conflict between my assumptions and reality gets resolved.
ShamelessC 4y ago
Your last assertion is correct. You’re (deliberately?) conflating puzzles (challenging but ultimately solvable games) with the emotion of being puzzled (confusion/dissonance from an experience which doesn’t align with your priors).

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

xyzelement 4y ago

This maps to something I've noticed. There's a pattern where human beings are wired to enjoy things that are important for their survival and thriving, but that these instincts are easily hijacked for aimless gratification. Eating junk food (vs stuff that gives you health and energy) or whacking off to porn (instead of healthy relationships and procreation) are examples of this. Anyway "the need for cognition"... I noticed that there's a class of people who are objectively "smart" in the sense that they can solve hard puzzles, crush it at trivia, etc. But at the same time these folks haven't been able to / bothered to get into lucrative professions that leverage these smarts and actually have a sort of not great lives (eg: unhealthy weight, no partner, etc.) So they are sort of scratching their itch for cognition, but not in a way that makes their life better in an objective way (which is most likely the reason we have this drive)

mahathu 4y ago
> This maps to something I've noticed. > There's a pattern where human beings are wired to enjoy things that are important for their survival and thriving, but that these instincts are easily hijacked for aimless gratification. It's late and I'm tired so most likely I'm not understanding your point properly. Aren't those literally the most fundamental and nearly universally known (i.e. preached by popular science) results from (a) evolution and (b) neuroscience research, respectively?
- preordained 4y ago
  Not OP...but no, I think you way overstating how fundamental and well-known all this supposedly is, despite trending awareness
fasterik 4y ago
Lucrative professions have their own ways of hijacking the need for cognition. For example, programming can be an extremely rewarding activity when pursued for its own sake, but in the corporate world it is often reduced to tedium and drudgery. Financial reward isn't the only way to make someone's life objectively better. A sense of autonomy, freedom to explore and create, and high satisfaction with one's output are just as important, if not more so. Sometimes pursuing a lucrative career is at odds with these other goals.

Waterluvian 4y ago

This might be the problem I have with my in-laws. They’re good and mostly happy people but they’re incredibly… simple? Visiting with them is one of the most excruciating things in my life. All they want to do is talk about complete drivel. Gossip about the neighbour’s garbage cans or their visit to Costco. I’m not judging. It makes them happy. Great. But spending hours there I just feel my brain dying. It’s not for me. But the opposite happens at my family’s dinner table. My poor wife once commented, “my brain began dying about 30 mins into you and your brothers discussing the philosophy of his Supreme Court brief.” Furthermore: my incessant “need for cognition” is kind of screwing me up. I can’t sleep without medication anymore. My brain will not go to sleep on its own. I think and think and think. My wife puts on a stupid firefighter show where nobody ever wears helmets and passes out in ten minutes.

Xcelerate 4y ago
> My poor wife once commented, “my brain began dying about 30 mins into you and your brothers discussing the philosophy of his Supreme Court brief.” Haha, my wife is similar—"If you and your dad start another four hour conversation about AI, I'm going to bed". My response: "You're more than welcome to discuss Solomonoff induction along with us." Somehow we do manage to find topics that we both enjoy though.
65 4y ago
> my incessant “need for cognition” is kind of screwing me up. Hah. Same. I have to pace around for hours and hours a day, thinking about random shit. I do an unhealthy amount of pacing. I'm not anxiously pacing. Just thinking about stuff. At least I get my steps in.
thekiptxt 4y ago
I understand what you’re saying and I can relate to some degree, but it’s hard to read comments like this and not think I’m browsing r/IAmVerySmart. I have some friends with whom I might try to poke at the nuances of the philosophy of a Supreme Court decision, but I have other friends who would be bored out of their mind. They also have a need for cognition and love to tear topics apart, but _different_ topics.
4y ago

Diapason 4y ago

Funny how https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01519-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01519-7 was on the first page at the same time !)

pgayed 4y ago

The commentary on this phenomenon is an example of itself.