Week 1, chapter 1
-Turkeys only care for the offspring that makes the cheep-cheep sound. If they don’t, they don’t care
for them. If another animal makes the cheep-cheep sound, they also care for it.
-Fixed-action patterns: Blindly mechanical patterns of action. They can involve intricate sequences of
behaviour, such as entire courtship or mating rituals (click, whirr).
-Fixed-action patterns are there as a short-cut version of betting the odds (e.g., usually only
responding to cheep-cheeps sounds the turkey will have a good outcome for the offspring because
only healthy ones make this sound. Or by buying more expensive jewellery, they don’t have to master
each feature that indicates the worth of turquoise).
-Betting those shortcut odds may represent the most rational approach possible.
-A fundamental characteristic of fixed-action patterns is that the behaviours comprising them occur in
virtually the same fashion and in the same order every time (‘click’ and the appropriate tape is
activated, ‘whirr’ and out rolls the standard sequence of behaviours.
-When there is an intruder, it is not the rival as a whole that is the trigger for the behaviour, but there
is a trigger feature.
-The trigger feature is often one tiny aspect of the totality that is the approaching intruder (e.g.,
colour; it will attack everything that is red like a bird, but not the same bird with other mi colours).
-The automatic, fixed-action patterns of animals work very well most of the time.
-Humans also have our preprogrammed tapes. Although they usually work to our advantage, the
trigger features that activate them can dupe us into playing the tapes at the wrong times.
-A well-known principle of human behaviour says that when we ask someone to do us a favour, we
will be more successful if we provide a reason.
-Langer, Blank and Chanowitz: Experiment with asking people waiting in line for the printer. The word
‘because’ makes the difference.
-Although there are many situations in which human behaviour doesn’t work in a mechanical, type-
activated way, most of the time it does.
-Stereotype that guides buying: Expensive = good.
-Research shows that people who are unsure of an item’s quality often use this^ stereotype.
-An increase in the price can lead to an increase in sales among the quality-hungry buyers.
-This rule comes from: ‘you get what you pay for’ and it often working out well in their lives before
since normally the price of an item increases along with its worth.
-Automatic stereotyped behaviour is prevalent in much human action, because in many cases, it is
the most efficient form of behaving and in other cases it is simply necessary.
-To deal with the environment, we need shortcuts.
-We must very often use our stereotypes, our rules of thumb, to classify things according to a few key
features and then to respond without thinking when one or another of these trigger features is
present.
-Without these features we would stand frozen as the time for action sped by and away.
-Sometimes the behaviour that unrolls will not be appropriate for the situation, because not even the
best stereotypes and trigger features work every time. We will accept their imperfections since there
is really no other choice.
-As the stimuli saturating our lives continue to grow more intricate and variable, we will have to
depend increasingly on our shortcuts/stereotypes to handle them all.
-Judgemental heuristics: A number of mental shortcuts that we employ in making our everyday
judgements. Allowing for simplified thinking that works well most of the time but leaves us open to
occasional, costly mistakes.
,-‘If an expert said so, it must be true’: shortcut rule.
-There is an unsettling tendency in our society to accept unthinkingly the statements and directions
of individual’s who appear to be authorities on the topic; rather than thinking about an expert’s
argument, we ignore the argument and are convinced just by the expert’s status.
-Automatic responding/ click, whirr: The tendency to respond mechanically to one piece of
information in a situation.
-Controlled responding: The tendency to react on the basis of a thorough analysis of all the
information.
-People are more likely to deal with information in a controlled fashion when they have both the
desire and the ability to analyse it carefully. Otherwise, they are likely to use the easier click, whirr
(e.g., when a group of people was told that the people graduating from next year onwards would
have an extra test, the people that still had to graduate analysed the argument carefully (affects them
personally; looked primarily at the quality of what was being said) but the other people who are
going to graduate this year (so whom it didn’t affect) didn’t carefully consider it (they used the ‘if an
expert said so, it must be true’).
-When it comes to click, whirr responding, we give ourselves a safety net: We resist the seductive
luxury of registering and reacting to just a single (trigger) feature of the available information when
an issue is important to us.
-Modern life is not allowing us to make fully thoughtful decisions, even on many personally relevant
topics; Sometimes the issues may be so complicated, the time so tight, the distractions so intrusive,
the emotional arousal so strong, or the mental fatigue so deep that we are in no cognitive condition
to operate mindfully. Important topic or not, we do have to take the shortcuts.
-Captainitis: Frequently an obvious error made by a flight captain was not corrected by other crew
members and resulted in a crash. So, despite the clear and string personal importance of the issues,
the crew members were using the shortcut ‘if an expert says so, it must be true’.
-Automatic behaviour patterns make us vulnerable to anyone who does know how they work.
-One group of organisms, often termed mimics, copy the trigger features of other animals in an
attempt to trick these animals into mistakenly playing the right behaviour tapes at the wrong times.
The mimics then exploit this for their own benefit.
-Unlike the mostly instinctive response sequences of nonhumans, human their automatic tapes
usually develop from psychological principles or stereotypes we have learned to accept.
-There are some people who know very well where the weapons of automatic influence lie and who
employ them regularly and expertly to get what they want: They go from social encounter to social
encounter, requesting others to comply with their wishes. To do this may take no more than 1
correctly chosen word what engages a strong psychological principle and sets rolling one of our
automatic behaviour tapes.
-What also helps is making the price higher, if this doesn’t work reduce the price, so that bargain
hunters will buy it for the original price -> good reaction to the inflated figure.
-A woman employing the martial art (jujitsu) would use her own strength only minimally against an
opponent. Instead, she would exploit the power inherent in such naturally present principles as
gravity, leverage, momentum, and inertia (manipulating without the appearance of manipulation).
-Contrast principle: Affects the way we see the difference between 2 things that are presented one
after another; if the second item is fairly different from the first, we will tend to see it as more
different than it actually is (e.g., if we lift a light object first and then lift a heavy object, we will
estimate the second object to be heavier than if we had lifted it without first lifting the light one or if
we are talking to a very attractive individual at a party and are then joined by an unattractive
,individual, the second will strike us as less attractive than he or she actually is).
-The point of the contrast principle is that the same thing can be made to seem very different
depending on the nature of the event that precedes it.
-The contrast principle is virtually undetectable; those who employ it can cash in on its influence
without any appearance of having structured the situation in their favour (e.g., in stores where they
first try to sell the expensive thing and then the less expensive thing because that looks cheaper
now).
-It is much more profitable for salespeople to present the expensive item first; to fail to do so will lose
the influence of the contrast principle and will also cause the principle to work actively against them
(presenting the inexpensive item first will make the expensive item seem more expensive).
Chapter 7
-Very often when we make a decision about someone or something we don’t use all the relevant
available information. We instead use only a single, highly representative piece of the total.
-An isolated piece of information even though it normally counsels us correctly, can lead us to clearly
stupid mistakes.
-Despite the susceptibility to stupid decisions that accompanies a reliance on a single feature of the
available data, the pace of modern life demands that we frequently use this shortcut.
-The reason lower animals must often rely on solitary stimulus (like the cheep-cheep sound) features
of their environments is their restricted mental capacity. Because those selected aspects of
information are normally enough to cue a correct response, the system is usually very efficient.
-It is the human’s information-processing advantage over other species that has helped make us the
dominant form of life on the planet.
-Humans have capacity limitations too; and, for the sake of efficiency, we must sometimes retreat
from the time-consuming, sophisticated, fully informed brand of decision making to a more
automatic, primitive, single-feature type of responding (e.g., in deciding whether to say yes or no to a
requester, we frequently pay attention to a single piece of the relevant information in the situation).
-We employ the factors of reciprocation, consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity so
often and so automatically in making our compliance decisions because they are the more reliable
(and popular) prompts.
-We are likely to use lone cues when we don’t have the inclination, time, energy, or cognitive
resources to undertake a complete analysis of the situation.
-When we are rushed, stressed, uncertain, indifferent, distracted, or fatigued, we tend to focus on
less of the information available to us. When making decisions under these circumstances, we often
revert to the rather primitive but necessary single-piece-of-good-evidence approach.
-With the sophisticated mental apparatus we have used to build world eminence as a species, we
have created an environment so complex, fast-paced, and information-laden that we must
increasingly deal with it in the fashion of the animals we long ago transcended.
-John Stuart Mill is reputed to have been the last man to know everything there was to know in the
world.
-Today, the notion that one of us could be aware of all known facts is laughable; Human knowledge
has snowballed into an era of momentum-fed, multiplicative, monstrous expansion (rapid growth of
information).
-This rapid growth is likely to continue.
-Besides the growth of information, there is a lot of change and we travel more and faster (e.g.,
shorter relationships, buildings being built quickly and being broken down quicker, in stores an array
of choices among styles and products that were unheard of last year and might be forgotten next
, year).
-Novelty, transience, diversity, and acceleration are acknowledged as prime descriptions of civilized
existence.
-This avalanche of information and choices is made possible by burgeoning technological progress.
Leading the way are developments in our ability to collect, store, retrieve, and communicate
information (e.g., with computers).
-Norman Macrae, 1972: ‘The prospect if, after all, that we are going to enter an age when any duffer
sitting at a computer terminal in his laboratory or office or public library or home can delve through
unimaginable increased mountains of information in mass-assembly data banks with mechanical
powers of concentration and calculation that will be greater by a factor of tens of thousands than was
ever available to the human brain of even an Einstein.’
-A decade later, Time magazine signalled that Macrae’s future age had arrived by naming a machine,
the personal computer, as its Man of the Year (the entire world would never be the same because of
the computer).
-Macrae’s vision is presently being realized: Millions of ordinary ‘duffers’ are sitting in front of
computers with the potential to present an analyse enough data to bury an Einstein.
-Modern day visionaries (e.g., Bill Gates) agree with Macrae, asserting that we are creating an array
of devices capable of delivering a universe of information ‘to anyone, anywhere, anytime’.
-Our modern era, often termed The Information Age, has never been called The Knowledge Age.
Information doesn’t translate directly into knowledge. It must first be processed (accessed, absorbed,
comprehended, integrated, and retained).
-Because technology can evolve much faster than we can, our natural capacity to process information
is likely to be increasingly inadequate to handle the abundance of change, choice and challenge that
is characteristic of modern life.
-More and more frequently, we will find ourselves in the position of lower animals with a mental
apparatus that is equipped to deal thoroughly with the intricacy and richness of the outside
environment. Because of this, when making a decision, we will less frequently engage in a fully
considered analysis of the total situation.
-In response to this ‘paralysis of analysis’, we will revert increasingly to a focus on a single, usually
reliable feature of the situation.
-When those single features are truly reliable, there is nothing inherently wrong with the shortcut
approach of narrowed attention and automatic responding to a particular piece of information. The
problem comes when something causes the normally trustworthy cues to counsel us poorly, to lead
us to erroneous actions and wrongheaded decisions (e.g., trickery of certain compliance
practitioners).
-If the frequency of shortcut responding is increasing with the pace and form of modern life, we can
be sure that the frequency of this trickery is destined to increase as well.
-Compliance professionals who play fairly by the rules of shortcut responding are our allies in an
efficient and adaptive process of exchange (e.g., an adviser who, without using deceptive statistics,
provides information that a brand of toothpaste is the largest selling. So the evidence of popularity
isn’t real).
-The proper targets for counterassault/aggression are individuals who falsify, counterfeit, or
misrepresent the evidence that naturally cues our shortcut responses. So they try to simulate a
shortcut response by giving a fraudulent signal for it (e.g., an advisor who seeks to create an image of
popularity for a brand of toothpaste by constructing a series of staged ‘unrehearsed interviews’
commercials in which an array of actors posing as ordinary citizens praises the product).
-Their^ motive for profit is not the cause for hostilities, the real problem is their attempts to make
-Turkeys only care for the offspring that makes the cheep-cheep sound. If they don’t, they don’t care
for them. If another animal makes the cheep-cheep sound, they also care for it.
-Fixed-action patterns: Blindly mechanical patterns of action. They can involve intricate sequences of
behaviour, such as entire courtship or mating rituals (click, whirr).
-Fixed-action patterns are there as a short-cut version of betting the odds (e.g., usually only
responding to cheep-cheeps sounds the turkey will have a good outcome for the offspring because
only healthy ones make this sound. Or by buying more expensive jewellery, they don’t have to master
each feature that indicates the worth of turquoise).
-Betting those shortcut odds may represent the most rational approach possible.
-A fundamental characteristic of fixed-action patterns is that the behaviours comprising them occur in
virtually the same fashion and in the same order every time (‘click’ and the appropriate tape is
activated, ‘whirr’ and out rolls the standard sequence of behaviours.
-When there is an intruder, it is not the rival as a whole that is the trigger for the behaviour, but there
is a trigger feature.
-The trigger feature is often one tiny aspect of the totality that is the approaching intruder (e.g.,
colour; it will attack everything that is red like a bird, but not the same bird with other mi colours).
-The automatic, fixed-action patterns of animals work very well most of the time.
-Humans also have our preprogrammed tapes. Although they usually work to our advantage, the
trigger features that activate them can dupe us into playing the tapes at the wrong times.
-A well-known principle of human behaviour says that when we ask someone to do us a favour, we
will be more successful if we provide a reason.
-Langer, Blank and Chanowitz: Experiment with asking people waiting in line for the printer. The word
‘because’ makes the difference.
-Although there are many situations in which human behaviour doesn’t work in a mechanical, type-
activated way, most of the time it does.
-Stereotype that guides buying: Expensive = good.
-Research shows that people who are unsure of an item’s quality often use this^ stereotype.
-An increase in the price can lead to an increase in sales among the quality-hungry buyers.
-This rule comes from: ‘you get what you pay for’ and it often working out well in their lives before
since normally the price of an item increases along with its worth.
-Automatic stereotyped behaviour is prevalent in much human action, because in many cases, it is
the most efficient form of behaving and in other cases it is simply necessary.
-To deal with the environment, we need shortcuts.
-We must very often use our stereotypes, our rules of thumb, to classify things according to a few key
features and then to respond without thinking when one or another of these trigger features is
present.
-Without these features we would stand frozen as the time for action sped by and away.
-Sometimes the behaviour that unrolls will not be appropriate for the situation, because not even the
best stereotypes and trigger features work every time. We will accept their imperfections since there
is really no other choice.
-As the stimuli saturating our lives continue to grow more intricate and variable, we will have to
depend increasingly on our shortcuts/stereotypes to handle them all.
-Judgemental heuristics: A number of mental shortcuts that we employ in making our everyday
judgements. Allowing for simplified thinking that works well most of the time but leaves us open to
occasional, costly mistakes.
,-‘If an expert said so, it must be true’: shortcut rule.
-There is an unsettling tendency in our society to accept unthinkingly the statements and directions
of individual’s who appear to be authorities on the topic; rather than thinking about an expert’s
argument, we ignore the argument and are convinced just by the expert’s status.
-Automatic responding/ click, whirr: The tendency to respond mechanically to one piece of
information in a situation.
-Controlled responding: The tendency to react on the basis of a thorough analysis of all the
information.
-People are more likely to deal with information in a controlled fashion when they have both the
desire and the ability to analyse it carefully. Otherwise, they are likely to use the easier click, whirr
(e.g., when a group of people was told that the people graduating from next year onwards would
have an extra test, the people that still had to graduate analysed the argument carefully (affects them
personally; looked primarily at the quality of what was being said) but the other people who are
going to graduate this year (so whom it didn’t affect) didn’t carefully consider it (they used the ‘if an
expert said so, it must be true’).
-When it comes to click, whirr responding, we give ourselves a safety net: We resist the seductive
luxury of registering and reacting to just a single (trigger) feature of the available information when
an issue is important to us.
-Modern life is not allowing us to make fully thoughtful decisions, even on many personally relevant
topics; Sometimes the issues may be so complicated, the time so tight, the distractions so intrusive,
the emotional arousal so strong, or the mental fatigue so deep that we are in no cognitive condition
to operate mindfully. Important topic or not, we do have to take the shortcuts.
-Captainitis: Frequently an obvious error made by a flight captain was not corrected by other crew
members and resulted in a crash. So, despite the clear and string personal importance of the issues,
the crew members were using the shortcut ‘if an expert says so, it must be true’.
-Automatic behaviour patterns make us vulnerable to anyone who does know how they work.
-One group of organisms, often termed mimics, copy the trigger features of other animals in an
attempt to trick these animals into mistakenly playing the right behaviour tapes at the wrong times.
The mimics then exploit this for their own benefit.
-Unlike the mostly instinctive response sequences of nonhumans, human their automatic tapes
usually develop from psychological principles or stereotypes we have learned to accept.
-There are some people who know very well where the weapons of automatic influence lie and who
employ them regularly and expertly to get what they want: They go from social encounter to social
encounter, requesting others to comply with their wishes. To do this may take no more than 1
correctly chosen word what engages a strong psychological principle and sets rolling one of our
automatic behaviour tapes.
-What also helps is making the price higher, if this doesn’t work reduce the price, so that bargain
hunters will buy it for the original price -> good reaction to the inflated figure.
-A woman employing the martial art (jujitsu) would use her own strength only minimally against an
opponent. Instead, she would exploit the power inherent in such naturally present principles as
gravity, leverage, momentum, and inertia (manipulating without the appearance of manipulation).
-Contrast principle: Affects the way we see the difference between 2 things that are presented one
after another; if the second item is fairly different from the first, we will tend to see it as more
different than it actually is (e.g., if we lift a light object first and then lift a heavy object, we will
estimate the second object to be heavier than if we had lifted it without first lifting the light one or if
we are talking to a very attractive individual at a party and are then joined by an unattractive
,individual, the second will strike us as less attractive than he or she actually is).
-The point of the contrast principle is that the same thing can be made to seem very different
depending on the nature of the event that precedes it.
-The contrast principle is virtually undetectable; those who employ it can cash in on its influence
without any appearance of having structured the situation in their favour (e.g., in stores where they
first try to sell the expensive thing and then the less expensive thing because that looks cheaper
now).
-It is much more profitable for salespeople to present the expensive item first; to fail to do so will lose
the influence of the contrast principle and will also cause the principle to work actively against them
(presenting the inexpensive item first will make the expensive item seem more expensive).
Chapter 7
-Very often when we make a decision about someone or something we don’t use all the relevant
available information. We instead use only a single, highly representative piece of the total.
-An isolated piece of information even though it normally counsels us correctly, can lead us to clearly
stupid mistakes.
-Despite the susceptibility to stupid decisions that accompanies a reliance on a single feature of the
available data, the pace of modern life demands that we frequently use this shortcut.
-The reason lower animals must often rely on solitary stimulus (like the cheep-cheep sound) features
of their environments is their restricted mental capacity. Because those selected aspects of
information are normally enough to cue a correct response, the system is usually very efficient.
-It is the human’s information-processing advantage over other species that has helped make us the
dominant form of life on the planet.
-Humans have capacity limitations too; and, for the sake of efficiency, we must sometimes retreat
from the time-consuming, sophisticated, fully informed brand of decision making to a more
automatic, primitive, single-feature type of responding (e.g., in deciding whether to say yes or no to a
requester, we frequently pay attention to a single piece of the relevant information in the situation).
-We employ the factors of reciprocation, consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity so
often and so automatically in making our compliance decisions because they are the more reliable
(and popular) prompts.
-We are likely to use lone cues when we don’t have the inclination, time, energy, or cognitive
resources to undertake a complete analysis of the situation.
-When we are rushed, stressed, uncertain, indifferent, distracted, or fatigued, we tend to focus on
less of the information available to us. When making decisions under these circumstances, we often
revert to the rather primitive but necessary single-piece-of-good-evidence approach.
-With the sophisticated mental apparatus we have used to build world eminence as a species, we
have created an environment so complex, fast-paced, and information-laden that we must
increasingly deal with it in the fashion of the animals we long ago transcended.
-John Stuart Mill is reputed to have been the last man to know everything there was to know in the
world.
-Today, the notion that one of us could be aware of all known facts is laughable; Human knowledge
has snowballed into an era of momentum-fed, multiplicative, monstrous expansion (rapid growth of
information).
-This rapid growth is likely to continue.
-Besides the growth of information, there is a lot of change and we travel more and faster (e.g.,
shorter relationships, buildings being built quickly and being broken down quicker, in stores an array
of choices among styles and products that were unheard of last year and might be forgotten next
, year).
-Novelty, transience, diversity, and acceleration are acknowledged as prime descriptions of civilized
existence.
-This avalanche of information and choices is made possible by burgeoning technological progress.
Leading the way are developments in our ability to collect, store, retrieve, and communicate
information (e.g., with computers).
-Norman Macrae, 1972: ‘The prospect if, after all, that we are going to enter an age when any duffer
sitting at a computer terminal in his laboratory or office or public library or home can delve through
unimaginable increased mountains of information in mass-assembly data banks with mechanical
powers of concentration and calculation that will be greater by a factor of tens of thousands than was
ever available to the human brain of even an Einstein.’
-A decade later, Time magazine signalled that Macrae’s future age had arrived by naming a machine,
the personal computer, as its Man of the Year (the entire world would never be the same because of
the computer).
-Macrae’s vision is presently being realized: Millions of ordinary ‘duffers’ are sitting in front of
computers with the potential to present an analyse enough data to bury an Einstein.
-Modern day visionaries (e.g., Bill Gates) agree with Macrae, asserting that we are creating an array
of devices capable of delivering a universe of information ‘to anyone, anywhere, anytime’.
-Our modern era, often termed The Information Age, has never been called The Knowledge Age.
Information doesn’t translate directly into knowledge. It must first be processed (accessed, absorbed,
comprehended, integrated, and retained).
-Because technology can evolve much faster than we can, our natural capacity to process information
is likely to be increasingly inadequate to handle the abundance of change, choice and challenge that
is characteristic of modern life.
-More and more frequently, we will find ourselves in the position of lower animals with a mental
apparatus that is equipped to deal thoroughly with the intricacy and richness of the outside
environment. Because of this, when making a decision, we will less frequently engage in a fully
considered analysis of the total situation.
-In response to this ‘paralysis of analysis’, we will revert increasingly to a focus on a single, usually
reliable feature of the situation.
-When those single features are truly reliable, there is nothing inherently wrong with the shortcut
approach of narrowed attention and automatic responding to a particular piece of information. The
problem comes when something causes the normally trustworthy cues to counsel us poorly, to lead
us to erroneous actions and wrongheaded decisions (e.g., trickery of certain compliance
practitioners).
-If the frequency of shortcut responding is increasing with the pace and form of modern life, we can
be sure that the frequency of this trickery is destined to increase as well.
-Compliance professionals who play fairly by the rules of shortcut responding are our allies in an
efficient and adaptive process of exchange (e.g., an adviser who, without using deceptive statistics,
provides information that a brand of toothpaste is the largest selling. So the evidence of popularity
isn’t real).
-The proper targets for counterassault/aggression are individuals who falsify, counterfeit, or
misrepresent the evidence that naturally cues our shortcut responses. So they try to simulate a
shortcut response by giving a fraudulent signal for it (e.g., an advisor who seeks to create an image of
popularity for a brand of toothpaste by constructing a series of staged ‘unrehearsed interviews’
commercials in which an array of actors posing as ordinary citizens praises the product).
-Their^ motive for profit is not the cause for hostilities, the real problem is their attempts to make
