Page 140 - The Social Animal

122 The Social Animal

missing and misleading information, imagine the difficulty when it
comes to making more unusual decisions such as when to go to war,
whom to marry, or how to spend tax money.
Moreover, even if the data were available, I simply do not have
the leisure time or the motivation to devote to a full-scale analysis of
every problem I encounter. Suppose I go ahead and make a felicific
calculation on which car to purchase, and it takes about 5 hours of
research and weighing of alternatives. In the meantime, a dozen
other decisions need to be made: What shall I do for lunch? How
should I revise my lecture notes? Which job candidate is best to hire?
Does my daughter really need those expensive braces on her teeth
(what’s wrong with an overbite, anyway)?
Am I to spend several precious hours listing the pros and cons
on each of these decisions while dozens of upcoming decisions are
postponed? We live in a message-dense, decision-rich environment.
The average American will see more than 7 million advertisements
in his or her lifetime and will need to make countless decisions every
day—some important, some trivial, some seemingly trivial but with
important consequences. It is impossible to think deeply about each
and every piece of information that comes our way and about each
and every decision that must be made.
What do we do? As you might guess, we try to use shortcuts
whenever we can. According to Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor, we
human beings are cognitive misers—that is, we are forever trying to
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conserve our cognitive energy. Given our limited capacity to process
information, we attempt to adopt strategies that simplify complex
problems. We accomplish this by ignoring some information to re-
duce our cognitive load; or we “overuse” other information to keep
from having to search for more; or we may be willing to accept a less-
than-perfect alternative because it is almost good enough.The strate-
gies of the cognitive miser may be efficient—making fairly good use
of our limited cognitive capacity to process a nearly infinite world of
information— but these strategies can also lead to serious errors and
biases, especially when we select an inappropriate shortcut or, in our
rush to move on, we ignore a vital piece of information. 9
Some readers may be disheartened to find that they are not as ra-
tional or as thorough in their thinking as they might have supposed.
It is exciting to believe that the human mind has unlimited power or
that we have a personal pipeline to absolute, objective truth. But, dis-