Chapter 10: THINKING AND LANGUAGE

  • Cognition refers to the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating.
  • To think about the countless events, objects, and people in our world, we organize them into mental groupings called concepts.

Obstacles to Problem Solving.

  • An obstacle to problem solving is our eagerness to search for information that confirms our ideas, a phenomenon known as confirmation bias. This can mean that once people form a wrong idea, they will not budge from their illogic.
  • Another obstacle to problem solving is fixation—the inability to see a problem from a fresh perspective.

Heuristics

  • The representativeness heuristic involves judging the likelihood of things in terms of how well they seem to represent particular prototypes.
  • The availability heuristic operates when we base our judgments on the availability of information in our memories.
  • Both heuristics enable us to make snap judgments. However, these quick decisions sometimes lead us to ignore important information or to underestimate the chances of something happening.

Belief Bias

  • We show a belief bias in our reasoning, accepting as more logical those conclusions that agree with our beliefs. Similarly, we more easily see the illogic of conclusions that run counter to our beliefs.

Belief Perseverance Phenomenon

  • We exhibit belief perseverance, clinging to our ideas in the face of contrary evidence, because the explanation we believe is valid lingers in our minds.
  • Once beliefs are formed and justified, it takes more compelling evidence to change them than it did to create them.

The Perils and Powers of Intuition

  • Although human intuition is sometimes perilous, it can be remarkably efficient and adaptive. Moreover, it feeds our creativity, our love, and our spirituality. Smart intuition is born of experience.
  • As we gain expertise in a field, we become better at making quick, adept judgments.
  • Smart thinkers will welcome their intuitions but also check them against available evidence to avoid overconfidence and illogical thinking.

Language Structure

  • Language is our way of combining words to communicate meaning. Spoken language is built of basic speech sounds, called phonemes; elementary units of meaning, called morphemes; and words.
  • Semantics refers to the rules we use to derive meaning from the morphemes, and syntax refers to the rules we use to order words into sentences.

Learning Language

  • Children’s language development mirrors language structure, by moving from simplicity to complexity.
  • At about 4 months, infants enter a babbling stage in which they spontaneously utter various sounds.
  • By about age 10 months, a trained ear can identify the language of the household by listening to an infant’s babbling.
  • Around the first birthday, most children enter the one-word stage, and by their second birthday, they are uttering two-word sentences. This soon leads to longer phrases.

Language Influences Thinking

  • Although Whorf’s linguistic determinism hypothesis suggests that language determines thought, it is more accurate to say that language influences thought.
  • Language expresses our thoughts and different languages can embody different ways of thinking.

Do Animals Think?

  • Animals, especially the great apes, show remarkable capacities for thinking. Both great apes and humans:

(1)form concepts,

(2)display insight,

(3)use and create tools,

(4)transmit cultural innovations, and

(5)have capacity for reasoning, self-recognition, empathy, intuition, and understanding another’s mind.

Do Animals Exhibit Language?

  • Animals obviously communicate.
  • Several teams of psychologists have taught various species of apes, including a number of chimpanzees, to communicate with humans by signing or by pushing buttons wired to a computer.
  • Apes have developed considerable vocabularies. They string words together to express meaning and have taught their skills to younger animals.