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I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between your rational brain and your embodied brain in decision-making. You might sub “cold cognition” for rational and “hot cognition” for embodied. Or conscious and subconscious. It came to mind when reading your piece today. Our cold cognition allows us to solve problems that no other an…
I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between your rational brain and your embodied brain in decision-making. You might sub “cold cognition” for rational and “hot cognition” for embodied. Or conscious and subconscious. It came to mind when reading your piece today. Our cold cognition allows us to solve problems that no other animal can. Yet it also can serve as a barrier to good decision-making, one that the pigeons in your article today weren’t burdened with. I read recently that people who have suffered brain injuries that destroy their embodied brain but leave their rational brain completely intact are very capable or perceiving options in a given situation, but completely incapable of making a decision of any kind. I find that fascinating.
So interesting. I think the not switching is a system 1 (hot cognition) problem that has to do with bias. That being said, system 2 for most of us can't properly calculate the probabilities, which pigeons seem to easily do.
This reminds me of some work from Randy Gallistel also on pigeons. He had two people sitting on adjacent park benches throwing bread to pigeons. One of the people threw the breads at four times the rate of the other person. The pigeons very quickly formed groups in the same proportion to the rate of bread throwing. Four times as many pigeons queued up in front of the faster bread thrower and even throw individual pigeons might move between the two groups, the ratio stayed the same.
In some ways, system 1 is more biased. But System 2 is slow and can still be error-filled. And humans are just pretty bad at probabilities. Worse than pigeons in many ways!
Hmm, I was initially thinking, like you, that the failure to switch was a hot cognition problem- because of the emotional attachment to the initial guess. But then I thought it might actually be a cold cognition problem because it is essentially a sunk cost bias. It certainly seems right that our hot cognition struggles badly with probabilities- I would extend that to weighing things in general (see sunk cost bias above for an example or how bad we are at perceiving exponential change.)
And by the way these pigeons are awesome! How cool is it that they congregate in ratio to the food. I wonder if there is any connection to the sensory or thought process that allows them to fly in unison or formation.
I believe the rules that allow them to fly in formation are local rules (what is the bird in front of me doing?). I wonder if it is a local rule that allows them to do these proportions as well.
I think more in terms of System 1 and System 2. Most bias is a system 1 issue although bias is an issue that influences more deliberative thought. The pigeons are obviously in system 1. They are just being reinforced for choosing to switch over time. Humans don't seem to learn from the reinforcement in the same way.
Annie, do you think Herb Simon's notion of "bounded rationality" might explain some of the issues with switching systems? IOW, what is the: complexity of the problem space + time constraints + cognitive biases + limits of knowledge.
For sure. Satisficing allows us to go fast (which is necessary for survival) but sometimes makes us go too fast, stopping us from switching systems. 100% relevant. When we think of heurisitcs, they are really simplifiers, a way to deal with complexity and the limits of our knowledge which sometimes is good (short cuts are often good enough and speed us up) and sometimes are bad, causing errors we can't tolerate.