Friday, 28 October 2016
Monday, 24 October 2016
The 21 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Money
One of your major goals in life should be financial independence. You must aim to reach the point where you have enough money so that you never have to worry about money again. The good news is that financial independence is easier to achieve today than it has ever been before. We live in the richest country at the richest time in all of human history. We are surrounded by more wealth and affluence than ever before. Your goal should be to participate fully in what many people are starting to refer to as the “Golden Age”of mankind.
Money has energy of its own and it is largely attracted to people who treat it well. Money tends to flow toward those people who can use it in the most productive ways to produce valuable goods and services, and who can invest it to create employment and opportunities that benefit others. At the same time, money flows away from those who use it poorly, or who spend it in non-productive ways. Your job is to acquire as much money as you honestly can and then to use it enhance the quality of your life and the lives of those you care about. Here now are the Twenty-one Absolutely Unbreakable Laws 0f Money:
1. The Law of Cause and Effect – Everything happens for a reason; there is a cause for every effect.
This is the “Iron Law” of human destiny. This law says that we live in a world governed by law, not chance. It says that everything happens for a -5- 5 reason, whether or not we know what it is. Every effect, success or failure, wealth or poverty, has a specific cause or causes. Every cause or action has an effect or consequence of some kind or another, whether we can see it, or whether we like it or not. This law says that all achievement, wealth, happiness, prosperity and success are the direct and indirect effects or results of specific causes or actions. What this means is that, if you can be clear about the effect or result you want, you can probably achieve it. You can study others who have accomplished the same goal, and by doing what they did, you can get the same results. The Law of Cause and Effect applies to money as much as to any other subject. This law says that financial success is an effect. As such, it proceeds from certain, specific causes. When you identify these causes and implement them in your own life and activities, you will get the same effects that hundreds of thousands, and even millions of others have gotten. You can acquire whatever amount of money you really want if you will just do what others have done before you to achieve the same results. And if you don’t, you won’t. It is as simple as that.
The most important expression of this universal law is that, “Thoughts are causes and conditions are effects.”
Put another way, “Thought is creative.” Your thoughts are the primary creative forces in your life. You create your entire world by the way you think. All the people and situations of your life have been created by your own thinking. And when you change your thinking, you change your life, sometimes in seconds! -6- 6 The most important principle of personal or business success is simply this: You become what you think about most of the time. It is not what happens to you but how you think about what happens to you that determines how you feel and react. It is not the world outside of you that dictates your circumstances or conditions. It is the world inside of you that creates the conditions of your life. Specifically, it is the way you think about money and about your financial situation that largely determines your financial conditions today. Accurate diagnosis is half the cure. Look at the most important parts of your life - your family, your health, your work, your financial situation, and observe the cause-effect relationships between what you think, say, feel and do and the results you are getting. Be honest with yourself.
2. The Law of Belief: Whatever you truly believe, with feeling, becomes your reality.
This law says that you always act in a manner consistent with your beliefs, especially your beliefs about yourself. Your beliefs act like a set of filters that screen out information that is inconsistent with them. You do not necessarily believe what you see but rather you see what you already believe. You reject information that contradicts what you have already decided to believe, whether or not your beliefs, your prejudices, are based on fact or fantasy. This is especially true with regard to money. The best belief that you can develop within yourself is that you are destined to be a big success financially. When you are absolutely convinced -7- 7 that you are a financial success in the making, you will engage in the behaviors that will make it come true. The worst beliefs you can have are “Self limiting beliefs.” These exist whenever you believe yourself to be limited in some way. The fact is that no one is better than you are and no one is smarter than you are. If someone else is doing better, it is largely because he has developed his natural talents and abilities more than you have. He has learned the laws of cause and effect that apply to his life and finances before you have. But anything anyone else has done, within reason, you can probably do as well. You just need to learn how.
What one great thing would you dare to dream if you knew you could not fail? If you had no limitations, if you had all the time, money, talent, skills and contacts you could ever want, what would you want to do or be or have in your life?
thanks for reading watch out for more laws
The Pleasure of Cognitive Ease
An article titled “Mind at Ease Puts a Smile on the Face” describes an experiment in which participants were briefly shown pictures of objects. Some of these pictures were made easier to recognize by showing the outline of the object just before the complete image was shown, so briefly that the contours were never noticed. Emotional reactions were measured by recording electrical impulses from facial muscles, registering changes of expression that are too slight and too brief to be detectable by observers. As expected, people showed a faint smile and relaxed brows when the pictures were easier to see. It appears to be a feature of System 1 that cognitive ease is associated with good feelings. As expected, easily pronounced words evoke a favorable attitude. Companies with pronounceable names dmisorrectlo better than others for the first week after the stock is issued, though the effect disappears over time. Stocks with pronounceable trading symbols (like KAR or LUNMOO) outperform those with tongue-twisting tickers like PXG or RDO—and they appear to retain a small advantage over some time. A study conducted in Switzerland found that investors believe that stocks with fluent names like Emmi, Swissfirst, and Comet will earn higher returns than those with clunky labels like Geberit and Ypsomed. As we saw in figure 5, repetition induces cognitive ease and a comforting feeling of familiarity. The famed psychologist Robert Zajonc dedicated much of his career to the study of the link between the repetition of an arbitrary stimulus and the mild affection that people eventually have for it. Zajonc called it the mere exposure effect. A demonstration conducted in the student newspapers of the University of Michigan and of Michigan State University is one of my favorite experiments. For a period of some weeks, an ad-like box appeared on the front page of the paper, which contained one of the following Turkish (or Turkish-sounding) words: kadirga, saricik, biwonjni, nansoma, and iktitaf. The frequency with which the words were repeated varied: one of the words was shown only once, the others appeared on two, five, ten, or twenty-five separate occasions. (The words that were presented most often in one of the university papers were the least frequent in the other.) No explanation was offered, and readers’ queries were answered by the statement that “the purchaser of the display wished for anonymity.” When the mysterious series of ads ended, the investigators sent questionnaires to the university communities, asking for impressions of whether each of the words “means something ‘good’ or something ‘bad.’” The results were spectacular: the words that were presented more frequently were rated much more favorably than the words that had been shown only once or twice. The finding has been confirmed in many experiments, using Chinese ideographs, faces, and randomly shaped polygons. The mere exposure effect does not depend on the conscious experience of familiarity. In fact, the effect does not depend on consciousness at all: it occurs even when the repeated words or pictures are shown so quickly that the observers never become aware of having seen them. They still end up liking the words or pictures that were presented more frequently. As should be clear by now, System 1 can respond to impressions of events of which System 2 is unaware. Indeed, the mere exposure effect is actually stronger for stimuli that the individual never consciously sees. Zajonc argued that the effect of repetition on liking is a profoundly important biological fact, and that it extends to all animals. To survive in a frequently dangerous world, an organism should react cautiously to a novel stimulus, with withdrawal and fear. Survival prospects are poor for an animal that is not suspicious of novelty. However, it is also adaptive for the initial caution to fade if the stimulus is actually safe. The mere exposure effect occurs, Zajonc claimed, because the repeated exposure of a stimulus is followed by nothing bad. Such a stimulus will eventually become a safety signal, and safety is good. Obviously, this argument is not restricted to humans. To make that point, one of Zajonc’s associates exposed two sets of fertile chicken eggs to different tones. After they hatched, the chicks consistently emitted fewer distress calls when exposed to the tone they had heard while inhabiting the shell. Zajonc offered an eloquent summary of hing icts program of research: Zajonc offered an eloquent summary of hing icts program of research: The consequences of repeated exposures benefit the organism in its relations to the immediate animate and inanimate environment. They allow the organism to distinguish objects and habitats that are safe from those that are not, and they are the most primitive basis of social attachments. Therefore, they form the basis for social organization and cohesion—the basic sources of psychological and social stability. The link between positive emotion and cognitive ease in System 1 has a long evolutionary history.
Mental Effort
If you wish to experience your System 2 working at full tilt, the following exercise will do; it should br"0%e ca Tting you to the limits of your cognitive abilities within 5 seconds. To start, make up several strings of 4 digits, all different, and write each string on an index card. Place a blank card on top of the deck. The task that you will perform is called Add-1. Here is how it goes: Start beating a steady rhythm (or better yet, set a metronome at 1/sec). Remove the blank card and read the four digits aloud. Wait for two beats, then report a string in which each of the original digits is incremented by 1. If the digits on the card are 5294, the correct response is 6305. Keeping the rhythm is important. Few people can cope with more than four digits in the Add-1 task, but if you want a harder challenge, please try Add-3. If you would like to know what your body is doing while your mind is hard at work, set up two piles of books on a sturdy table, place a video camera on one and lean your chin on the other, get the video going, and stare at the camera lens while you work on Add-1 or Add-3 exercises. Later, you will find in the changing size of your pupils a faithful record of how hard you worked. I have a long personal history with the Add-1 task. Early in my career I spent a year at the University of Michigan, as a visitor in a laboratory that studied hypnosis. Casting about for a useful topic of research, I found an article in Scientific American in which the psychologist Eckhard Hess described the pupil of the eye as a window to the soul. I reread it recently and again found it inspiring. It begins with Hess reporting that his wife had noticed his pupils widening as he watched beautiful nature pictures, and it ends with two striking pictures of the same good-looking woman, who somehow appears much more attractive in one than in the other. There is only one difference: the pupils of the eyes appear dilated in the attractive picture and constricted in the other. Hess also wrote of belladonna, a pupildilating substance that was used as a cosmetic, and of bazaar shoppers who wear dark glasses in order to hide their level of interest from merchants. One of Hess’s findings especially captured my attention. He had noticed that the pupils are sensitive indicators of mental effort—they dilate substantially when people multiply two-digit numbers, and they dilate more if the problems are hard than if they are easy. His observations indicated that the response to mental effort is distinct from emotional arousal. Hess’s work did not have much to do with hypnosis, but I concluded that the idea of a visible indication of mental effort had promise as a research topic. A graduate student in the lab, Jackson Beatty, shared my enthusiasm and we got to work. Beatty and I developed a setup similar to an optician’s examination room, in which the experimental participant leaned her head on a chin-andforehead rest and stared at a camera while listening to prerecorded information and answering questions on the recorded beats of a metronome. The beats triggered an infrared flash every second, causing a picture to be taken. At the end of each experimental session, we would rush to have the film developed, project the images of the pupil on a screen, and go to work with a ruler. The method was a perfect fit for young and impatient researchers: we knew our results almost immediately, and they always told a clear story. Beatty and I focused on paced tasks, such as Add-1, in which we knew precisely what was on the subject’s mind at any time. We recorded strings of digits on beats of the metronome and instructed the subject to repeat or transform the digits one indigits onby one, maintaining the same rhythm. We soon discovered that the size of the pupil varied second by second, reflecting the changing demands of the task. The shape of the response was an inverted V. As you experienced it if you tried Add-1 or Add-3, effort builds up with every added digit that you hear, reaches an almost intolerable peak as you rush to produce a transformed string during and immediately after the pause, and relaxes gradually as you “unload” your short-term memory. The pupil data corresponded precisely to subjective experience: longer strings reliably caused larger dilations, the transformation task compounded the effort, and the peak of pupil size coincided with maximum effort. Add-1 with four digits caused a larger dilation than the task of holding seven digits for immediate recall. Add-3, which is much more difficult, is the most demanding that I ever observed. In the first 5 seconds, the pupil dilates by about 50% of its original area and heart rate increases by about 7 beats per minute. This is as hard as people can work—they give up if more is asked of them. When we exposed our subjects to more digits than they could remember, their pupils stopped dilating or actually shrank. We worked for some months in a spacious basement suite in which we had set up a closed-circuit system that projected an image of the subject’s pupil on a screen in the corridor; we also could hear what was happening in the laboratory. The diameter of the projected pupil was about a foot; watching it dilate and contract when the participant was at work was a fascinating sight, quite an attraction for visitors in our lab. We amused ourselves and impressed our guests by our ability to divine when the participant gave up on a task. During a mental multiplication, the pupil normally dilated to a large size within a few seconds and stayed large as long as the individual kept working on the problem; it contracted immediately when she found a solution or gave up. As we watched from the corridor, we would sometimes surprise both the owner of the pupil and our guests by asking, “Why did you stop working just now?” The answer from inside the lab was often, “How did you know?” to which we would reply, “We have a window to your soul.” The casual observations we made from the corridor were sometimes as informative as the formal experiments. I made a significant discovery as I was idly watching a woman’s pupil during a break between two tasks. She had kept her position on the chin rest, so I could see the image of her eye while she engaged in routine conversation with the experimenter. I was surprised to see that the pupil remained small and did not noticeably dilate as she talked and listened. Unlike the tasks that we were studying, the mundane conversation apparently demanded little or no effort—no more than retaining two or three digits. This was a eureka moment: I realized that the tasks we had chosen for study were exceptionally effortful. An image came to mind: mental life—today I would speak of the life of System 2—is normally conducted at the pace of a comfortable walk, sometimes interrupted by episodes of jogging and on rare occasions by a frantic sprint. The Add-1 and Add-3 exercises are sprints, and casual chatting is a stroll. We found that people, when engaged in a mental sprint, may become effectively blind. The authors of The Invisible Gorilla had made the gorilla “invisible” by keeping the observers intensely busy counting passes. We reported a rather less dramatic example of blindness during Add-1. Our subjects were exposed to a series of rapidly flashing letters while they worked. They were told to give the task complete priority, but they were also asked to report, at the end of the digit task, whether the letter K had appeared at any rored at antime during the trial. The main finding was that the ability to detect and report the target letter changed in the course of the 10 seconds of the exercise. The observers almost never missed a K that was shown at the beginning or near the end of the Add-1 task but they missed the target almost half the time when mental effort was at its peak, although we had pictures of their wide-open eye staring straight at it. Failures of detection followed the same inverted-V pattern as the dilating pupil. The similarity was reassuring: the pupil was a good measure of the physical arousal that accompanies mental effort, and we could go ahead and use it to understand how the mind works. Much like the electricity meter outside your house or apartment, the pupils offer an index of the current rate at which mental energy is used. The analogy goes deep. Your use of electricity depends on what you choose to do, whether to light a room or toast a piece of bread. When you turn on a bulb or a toaster, it draws the energy it needs but no more. Similarly, we decide what to do, but we have limited control over the effort of doing it. Suppose you are shown four digits, say, 9462, and told that your life depends on holding them in memory for 10 seconds. However much you want to live, you cannot exert as much effort in this task as you would be forced to invest to complete an Add-3 transformation on the same digits. System 2 and the electrical circuits in your home both have limited capacity, but they respond differently to threatened overload. A breaker trips when the demand for current is excessive, causing all devices on that circuit to lose power at once. In contrast, the response to mental overload is selective and precise: System 2 protects the most important activity, so it receives the attention it needs; “spare capacity” is allocated second by second to other tasks. In our version of the gorilla experiment, we instructed the participants to assign priority to the digit task. We know that they followed that instruction, because the timing of the visual target had no effect on the main task. If the critical letter was presented at a time of high demand, the subjects simply did not see it. When the transformation task was less demanding, detection performance was better. The sophisticated allocation of attention has been honed by a long evolutionary history. Orienting and responding quickly to the gravest threats or most promising opportunities improved the chance of survival, and this capability is certainly not restricted to humans. Even in modern humans, System 1 takes over in emergencies and assigns total priority to selfprotective actions. Imagine yourself at the wheel of a car that unexpectedly skids on a large oil slick. You will find that you have responded to the threat before you became fully conscious of it. Beatty and I worked together for only a year, but our collaboration had a large effect on our subsequent careers. He eventually became the leading authority on “cognitive pupillometry,” and I wrote a book titled Attention and Effort, which was based in large part on what we learned together and on follow-up research I did at Harvard the following year. We learned a great deal about the working mind—which I now think of as System 2—from measuring pupils in a wide variety of tasks. As you become skilled in a task, its demand for energy diminishes. Studies of the brain have shown that the pattern of activity associated with an action changes as skill increases, with fewer brain regions involved. Talent has similar effects. Highly intelligent individuals need less effort to solve the same problems, as indicated by both pupil size and brain activity. A general “law of least effort” appd t” alies to cognitive as well as physical exertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature. The tasks that we studied varied considerably in their effects on the pupil. At baseline, our subjects were awake, aware, and ready to engage in a task—probably at a higher level of arousal and cognitive readiness than usual. Holding one or two digits in memory or learning to associate a word with a digit (3 = door) produced reliable effects on momentary arousal above that baseline, but the effects were minuscule, only 5% of the increase in pupil diameter associated with Add-3. A task that required discriminating between the pitch of two tones yielded significantly larger dilations. Recent research has shown that inhibiting the tendency to read distracting words (as in figure 2 of the preceding chapter) also induces moderate effort. Tests of short-term memory for six or seven digits were more effortful. As you can experience, the request to retrieve and say aloud your phone number or your spouse’s birthday also requires a brief but significant effort, because the entire string must be held in memory as a response is organized. Mental multiplication of two-digit numbers and the Add-3 task are near the limit of what most people can do. What makes some cognitive operations more demanding and effortful than others? What outcomes must we purchase in the currency of attention? What can System 2 do that System 1 cannot? We now have tentative answers to these questions. Effort is required to maintain simultaneously in memory several ideas that require separate actions, or that need to be combined according to a rule—rehearsing your shopping list as you enter the supermarket, choosing between the fish and the veal at a restaurant, or combining a surprising result from a survey with the information that the sample was small, for example. System 2 is the only one that can follow rules, compare objects on several attributes, and make deliberate choices between options. The automatic System 1 does not have these capabilities. System 1 detects simple relations (“they are all alike,” “the son is much taller than the father”) and excels at integrating information about one thing, but it does not deal with multiple distinct topics at once, nor is it adept at using purely statistical information. System 1 will detect that a person described as “a meek and tidy soul, with a need for order and structure, and a passion for detail” resembles a caricature librarian, but combining this intuition with knowledge about the small number of librarians is a task that only System 2 can perform—if System 2 knows how to do so, which is true of few people. A crucial capability of System 2 is the adoption of “task sets”: it can program memory to obey an instruction that overrides habitual responses. Consider the following: Count all occurrences of the letter f in this page. This is not a task you have ever performed before and it will not come naturally to you, but your System 2 can take it on. It will be effortful to set yourself up for this exercise, and effortful to carry it out, though you will surely improve with practice. Psychologists speak of “executive control” to describe the adoption and termination of task sets, and neuroscientists have identified the main regions of the brain that serve the executive function. One of these regions is involved whenever a conflict must be resolved. Another is the prefrontal area of the brain, a region that is substantially more developed in humans tht un humans an in other primates, and is involved in operations that we associate with intelligence. Now suppose that at the end of the page you get another instruction: count all the commas in the next page. This will be harder, because you will have to overcome the newly acquired tendency to focus attention on the letter f. One of the significant discoveries of cognitive psychologists in recent decades is that switching from one task to another is effortful, especially under time pressure. The need for rapid switching is one of the reasons that Add-3 and mental multiplication are so difficult. To perform the Add-3 task, you must hold several digits in your working memory at the same time, associating each with a particular operation: some digits are in the queue to be transformed, one is in the process of transformation, and others, already transformed, are retained for reporting. Modern tests of working memory require the individual to switch repeatedly between two demanding tasks, retaining the results of one operation while performing the other. People who do well on these tests tend to do well on tests of general intelligence. However, the ability to control attention is not simply a measure of intelligence; measures of efficiency in the control of attention predict performance of air traffic controllers and of Israeli Air Force pilots beyond the effects of intelligence. Time pressure is another driver of effort. As you carried out the Add-3 exercise, the rush was imposed in part by the metronome and in part by the load on memory. Like a juggler with several balls in the air, you cannot afford to slow down; the rate at which material decays in memory forces the pace, driving you to refresh and rehearse information before it is lost. Any task that requires you to keep several ideas in mind at the same time has the same hurried character. Unless you have the good fortune of a capacious working memory, you may be forced to work uncomfortably hard. The most effortful forms of slow thinking are those that require you to think fast. You surely observed as you performed Add-3 how unusual it is for your mind to work so hard. Even if you think for a living, few of the mental tasks in which you engage in the course of a working day are as demanding as Add-3, or even as demanding as storing six digits for immediate recall. We normally avoid mental overload by dividing our tasks into multiple easy steps, committing intermediate results to long-term memory or to paper rather than to an easily overloaded working memory. We cover long distances by taking our time and conduct our mental lives by the law of least effort. Speaking of Attention and Effort “I won’t try to solve this while driving. This is a pupil-dilating task. It requires mental effort!” “The law of least effort is operating here. He will think as little as possible.” “She did not forget about the meeting. She was completely focused on something else when the meeting was set and she just didn’t hear you.” “What came quickly to my mind was an intuition from System 1. I’ll have to start over and search my memory deliberately.”
Intelligence, Control, Rationality
Researchers have applied diverse methods to examine the connection between thinking and self-control. Some have addressed it by asking the correlation question: If people were ranked by their self-control and by their cognitive aptitude, would individuals have similar positions in the two rankings? In one of the most famous experiments in the history of psychology, Walter Mischel and his students exposed four-year-old children to a cruel dilemma. They were given a choice between a small reward (one Oreo), which they could have at any time, or a larger reward (two cookies) for which they had to wait 15 minutes under difficult conditions. They were to remain alone in a room, facing a desk with two objects: a single cookie and a bell that the child could ring at any time to call in the experimenter and receiven oand recei the one cookie. As the experiment was described: “There were no toys, books, pictures, or other potentially distracting items in the room. The experimenter left the room and did not return until 15 min had passed or the child had rung the bell, eaten the rewards, stood up, or shown any signs of distress.” The children were watched through a one-way mirror, and the film that shows their behavior during the waiting time always has the audience roaring in laughter. About half the children managed the feat of waiting for 15 minutes, mainly by keeping their attention away from the tempting reward. Ten or fifteen years later, a large gap had opened between those who had resisted temptation and those who had not. The resisters had higher measures of executive control in cognitive tasks, and especially the ability to reallocate their attention effectively. As young adults, they were less likely to take drugs. A significant difference in intellectual aptitude emerged: the children who had shown more self-control as four-year-olds had substantially higher scores on tests of intelligence. A team of researchers at the University of Oregon explored the link between cognitive control and intelligence in several ways, including an attempt to raise intelligence by improving the control of attention. During five 40-minute sessions, they exposed children aged four to six to various computer games especially designed to demand attention and control. In one of the exercises, the children used a joystick to track a cartoon cat and move it to a grassy area while avoiding a muddy area. The grassy areas gradually shrank and the muddy area expanded, requiring progressively more precise control. The testers found that training attention not only improved executive control; scores on nonverbal tests of intelligence also improved and the improvement was maintained for several months. Other research by the same group identified specific genes that are involved in the control of attention, showed that parenting techniques also affected this ability, and demonstrated a close connection between the children’s ability to control their attention and their ability to control their emotions. Shane Frederick constructed a Cognitive Reflection Test, which consists of the bat-and-ball problem and two other questions, chosen because they also invite an intuitive answer that is both compelling and wrong (the questions are shown here). He went on to study the characteristics of students who score very low on this test—the supervisory function of System 2 is weak in these people—and found that they are prone to answer questions with the first idea that comes to mind and unwilling to invest the effort needed to check their intuitions. Individuals who uncritically follow their intuitions about puzzles are also prone to accept other suggestions from System 1. In particular, they are impulsive, impatient, and keen to receive immediate gratification. For example, 63% of the intuitive respondents say they would prefer to get $3,400 this month rather than $3,800 next month. Only 37% of those who solve all three puzzles correctly have the same shortsighted preference for receiving a smaller amount immediately. When asked how much they will pay to get overnight delivery of a book they have ordered, the low scorers on the Cognitive Reflection Test are willing to pay twice as much as the high scorers. Frederick’s findings suggest that the characters of our psychodrama have different “personalities.” System 1 is impulsive and intuitive; System 2 is capable of reasoning, and it is cautious, but at least for some people it is also lazy. We recognize related differences among individuals: some people are more like their System 2; others are closer to their System 1. This simple test has emerged as one of the better predictors of laztestors of ly thinking. Keith Stanovich and his longtime collaborator Richard West originally introduced the terms System 1 and System 2 (they now prefer to speak of Type 1 and Type 2 processes). Stanovich and his colleagues have spent decades studying differences among individuals in the kinds of problems with which this book is concerned. They have asked one basic question in many different ways: What makes some people more susceptible than others to biases of judgment? Stanovich published his conclusions in a book titled Rationality and the Reflective Mind, which offers a bold and distinctive approach to the topic of this chapter. He draws a sharp distinction between two parts of System 2—indeed, the distinction is so sharp that he calls them separate “minds.” One of these minds (he calls it algorithmic) deals with slow thinking and demanding computation. Some people are better than others in these tasks of brain power—they are the individuals who excel in intelligence tests and are able to switch from one task to another quickly and efficiently. However, Stanovich argues that high intelligence does not make people immune to biases. Another ability is involved, which he labels rationality. Stanovich’s concept of a rational person is similar to what I earlier labeled “engaged.” The core of his argument is that rationality should be distinguished from intelligence. In his view, superficial or “lazy” thinking is a flaw in the reflective mind, a failure of rationality. This is an attractive and thought-provoking idea. In support of it, Stanovich and his colleagues have found that the bat-and-ball question and others like it are somewhat better indicators of our susceptibility to cognitive errors than are conventional measures of intelligence, such as IQ tests. Time will tell whether the distinction between intelligence and rationality can lead to new discoveries. Speaking of Control “She did not have to struggle to stay on task for hours. She was in a state of flow.” “His ego was depleted after a long day of meetings. So he just turned to standard operating procedures instead of thinking through the problem.” “He didn’t bother to check whether what he said made sense. Does he usually have a lazy System 2 or was he unusually tired?” “Unfortunately, she tends to say the first thing that comes into her mind. She probably also has trouble delaying gratification. Weak System 2.”
How to Write a Persuasive Message
Suppose you must write a message that you want the recipients to believe. Of course, your message will be true, but that is not necessarily enough for people to believe that it is true. It is entirely legitimate for you to enlist cognitive ease to work in your favor, and studies of truth illusions provide specific suggestions that may help you achieve this goal. The general principle is that anything you can do to reduce cognitive strain will help, so you should first maximize legibility. Compare these two statements: Adolf Hitler was born in 1892. Adolf Hitler was born in 1887. Both are false (Hitler was born in 1889), but experiments have shown that the first is more likely to be believed. More advice: if your message is to be printed, use high-quality paper to maximize the contrast between characters and their background. If you use color, you are more likely to be believed if your text is printed in bright blue or red than in middling shades of green, yellow, or pale blue. If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do. My Princeton ton colleague Danny Oppenheimer refuted a myth prevalent a wo ton colmong undergraduates about the vocabulary that professors find most impressive. In an article titled “Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly,” he showed that couching familiar ideas in pretentious language is taken as a sign of poor intelligence and low credibility. In addition to making your message simple, try to make it memorable. Put your ideas in verse if you can; they will be more likely to be taken as truth. Participants in a much cited experiment read dozens of unfamiliar aphorisms, such as: Woes unite foes. Little strokes will tumble great oaks. A fault confessed is half redressed. Other students read some of the same proverbs transformed into nonrhyming versions: Woes unite enemies. Little strokes will tumble great trees. A fault admitted is half redressed. The aphorisms were judged more insightful when they rhymed than when they did not. Finally, if you quote a source, choose one with a name that is easy to pronounce. Participants in an experiment were asked to evaluate the prospects of fictitious Turkish companies on the basis of reports from two brokerage firms. For each stock, one of the reports came from an easily pronounced name (e.g., Artan) and the other report came from a firm with an unfortunate name (e.g., Taahhut). The reports sometimes disagreed. The best procedure for the observers would have been to average the two reports, but this is not what they did. They gave much more weight to the report from Artan than to the report from Taahhut. Remember that System 2 is lazy and that mental effort is aversive. If possible, the recipients of your message want to stay away from anything that reminds them of effort, including a source with a complicated name. All this is very good advice, but we should not get carried away. Highquality paper, bright colors, and rhyming or simple language will not be much help if your message is obviously nonsensical, or if it contradicts facts that your audience knows to be true. The psychologists who do these experiments do not believe that people are stupid or infinitely gullible. What psychologists do believe is that all of us live much of our life guided by the impressions of System 1—and we often do not know the source of these impressions. How do you know that a statement is true? If it is strongly linked by logic or association to other beliefs or preferences you hold, or comes from a source you trust and like, you will feel a sense of cognitive ease. The trouble is that there may be other causes for your feeling of ease —including the quality of the font and the appealing rhythm of the prose— and you have no simple way of tracing your feelings to their source. This is the message of figure 5: the sense of ease or strain has multiple causes, and it is difficult to tease them apart. Difficult, but not impossible. People can overcome some of the superficial factors that produce illusions of truth when strongly motivated to do so. On most occasions, however, the lazy System 2 will adopt the suggestions of System 1 and march on.Strain and Effort
The symmetry of many associative connections was a dominant theme in the discussion of associative coherence. As we saw earlier, people who are made to “smile” or “frown” by sticking a pencil in their mouth or holding a ball between their furrowed brows are prone to experience the emotions that frowning and smiling normally express. The same self-reinforcing reciprocity is found in studies of cognitive ease. On the one hand, cognitive strain is experienced when the effortful operations of System 2 are engaged. On the other hand, the experience of cognitive strain, whatever its source, tends to mobilize System 2, shifting people’s approach to problems from a casual intuitive mode to a more engaged and analytic mode. The bat-and-ball problem was mentioned earlier as a test of people’s tendency to answer questions with the first idea that comes to their mind, without checking it. Shane Frederick’s Cognitive Reflection Test consists of the bat-and-ball problem and two others, all chosen because they evoke an immediate intuitive answer that is incorrect. The other two items in the CRT are: If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets? 100 minutes OR 5 minutes In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake? 24 days OR 47 days The correct answers to both problems are in a footnote at the bottom of the page.* The experimenters recruited 40 Princeton students to take the CRT. Half of them saw the puzzles in a small font in washed-out gray print. The puzzles were legible, but the font induced cognitive strain. The results tell a clear story: 90% of the students who saw the CRT in normal font made at least one mistake in the test, but the proportion dropped to 35% when the font was barely legible. You read this correctly: performance was better with the bad font. Cognitive strain, whatever its source, mobilizes System 2, which is more likely to reject the intuitive answer suggested by System 1.
Thursday, 20 October 2016
Intelligence, Control, Rationality
Researchers have applied diverse methods to examine the connection
between thinking and self-control. Some have addressed it by asking the
correlation question: If people were ranked by their self-control and by their
cognitive aptitude, would individuals have similar positions in the two
rankings?
In one of the most famous experiments in the history of psychology,
Walter Mischel and his students exposed four-year-old children to a cruel
dilemma. They were given a choice between a small reward (one Oreo),
which they could have at any time, or a larger reward (two cookies) for
which they had to wait 15 minutes under difficult conditions. They were to
remain alone in a room, facing a desk with two objects: a single cookie
and a bell that the child could ring at any time to call in the experimenter
and receiven oand recei the one cookie. As the experiment was
described: “There were no toys, books, pictures, or other potentially
distracting items in the room. The experimenter left the room and did not
return until 15 min had passed or the child had rung the bell, eaten the
rewards, stood up, or shown any signs of distress.”
The children were watched through a one-way mirror, and the film that
shows their behavior during the waiting time always has the audience
roaring in laughter. About half the children managed the feat of waiting for
15 minutes, mainly by keeping their attention away from the tempting
reward. Ten or fifteen years later, a large gap had opened between those
who had resisted temptation and those who had not. The resisters had
higher measures of executive control in cognitive tasks, and especially the
ability to reallocate their attention effectively. As young adults, they were
less likely to take drugs. A significant difference in intellectual aptitude
emerged: the children who had shown more self-control as four-year-olds
had substantially higher scores on tests of intelligence.
A team of researchers at the University of Oregon explored the link
between cognitive control and intelligence in several ways, including an
attempt to raise intelligence by improving the control of attention. During
five 40-minute sessions, they exposed children aged four to six to various
computer games especially designed to demand attention and control. In
one of the exercises, the children used a joystick to track a cartoon cat and
move it to a grassy area while avoiding a muddy area. The grassy areas
gradually shrank and the muddy area expanded, requiring progressively
more precise control. The testers found that training attention not only
improved executive control; scores on nonverbal tests of intelligence also
improved and the improvement was maintained for several months. Other
research by the same group identified specific genes that are involved in
the control of attention, showed that parenting techniques also affected this
ability, and demonstrated a close connection between the children’s ability
to control their attention and their ability to control their emotions.
Shane Frederick constructed a Cognitive Reflection Test, which
consists of the bat-and-ball problem and two other questions, chosen
because they also invite an intuitive answer that is both compelling and
wrong (the questions are shown here). He went on to study the
characteristics of students who score very low on this test—the supervisory
function of System 2 is weak in these people—and found that they are
prone to answer questions with the first idea that comes to mind and
unwilling to invest the effort needed to check their intuitions. Individuals who
uncritically follow their intuitions about puzzles are also prone to accept
other suggestions from System 1. In particular, they are impulsive,
impatient, and keen to receive immediate gratification. For example, 63%
of the intuitive respondents say they would prefer to get $3,400 this month
rather than $3,800 next month. Only 37% of those who solve all three
puzzles correctly have the same shortsighted preference for receiving a
smaller amount immediately. When asked how much they will pay to get
overnight delivery of a book they have ordered, the low scorers on the
Cognitive Reflection Test are willing to pay twice as much as the high
scorers. Frederick’s findings suggest that the characters of our
psychodrama have different “personalities.” System 1 is impulsive and
intuitive; System 2 is capable of reasoning, and it is cautious, but at least
for some people it is also lazy. We recognize related differences among
individuals: some people are more like their System 2; others are closer to
their System 1. This simple test has emerged as one of the better
predictors of laztestors of ly thinking.
Keith Stanovich and his longtime collaborator Richard West originally
introduced the terms System 1 and System 2 (they now prefer to speak of
Type 1 and Type 2 processes). Stanovich and his colleagues have spent
decades studying differences among individuals in the kinds of problems
with which this book is concerned. They have asked one basic question in
many different ways: What makes some people more susceptible than
others to biases of judgment? Stanovich published his conclusions in a
book titled Rationality and the Reflective Mind, which offers a bold and
distinctive approach to the topic of this chapter. He draws a sharp
distinction between two parts of System 2—indeed, the distinction is so
sharp that he calls them separate “minds.” One of these minds (he calls it
algorithmic) deals with slow thinking and demanding computation. Some
people are better than others in these tasks of brain power—they are the
individuals who excel in intelligence tests and are able to switch from one
task to another quickly and efficiently. However, Stanovich argues that high
intelligence does not make people immune to biases. Another ability is
involved, which he labels rationality. Stanovich’s concept of a rational
person is similar to what I earlier labeled “engaged.” The core of his
argument is that rationality should be distinguished from intelligence. In
his view, superficial or “lazy” thinking is a flaw in the reflective mind, a
failure of rationality. This is an attractive and thought-provoking idea. In
support of it, Stanovich and his colleagues have found that the bat-and-ball
question and others like it are somewhat better indicators of our
susceptibility to cognitive errors than are conventional measures of
intelligence, such as IQ tests. Time will tell whether the distinction between
intelligence and rationality can lead to new discoveries.
Speaking of Control
“She did not have to struggle to stay on task for hours. She was in
a state of flow.”
“His ego was depleted after a long day of meetings. So he just
turned to standard operating procedures instead of thinking
through the problem.”
“He didn’t bother to check whether what he said made sense.
Does he usually have a lazy System 2 or was he unusually tired?”
“Unfortunately, she tends to say the first thing that comes into her
mind. She probably also has trouble delaying gratification. Weak
System 2.”
Researchers have applied diverse methods to examine the connection
between thinking and self-control. Some have addressed it by asking the
correlation question: If people were ranked by their self-control and by their
cognitive aptitude, would individuals have similar positions in the two
rankings?
In one of the most famous experiments in the history of psychology,
Walter Mischel and his students exposed four-year-old children to a cruel
dilemma. They were given a choice between a small reward (one Oreo),
which they could have at any time, or a larger reward (two cookies) for
which they had to wait 15 minutes under difficult conditions. They were to
remain alone in a room, facing a desk with two objects: a single cookie
and a bell that the child could ring at any time to call in the experimenter
and receiven oand recei the one cookie. As the experiment was
described: “There were no toys, books, pictures, or other potentially
distracting items in the room. The experimenter left the room and did not
return until 15 min had passed or the child had rung the bell, eaten the
rewards, stood up, or shown any signs of distress.”
The children were watched through a one-way mirror, and the film that
shows their behavior during the waiting time always has the audience
roaring in laughter. About half the children managed the feat of waiting for
15 minutes, mainly by keeping their attention away from the tempting
reward. Ten or fifteen years later, a large gap had opened between those
who had resisted temptation and those who had not. The resisters had
higher measures of executive control in cognitive tasks, and especially the
ability to reallocate their attention effectively. As young adults, they were
less likely to take drugs. A significant difference in intellectual aptitude
emerged: the children who had shown more self-control as four-year-olds
had substantially higher scores on tests of intelligence.
A team of researchers at the University of Oregon explored the link
between cognitive control and intelligence in several ways, including an
attempt to raise intelligence by improving the control of attention. During
five 40-minute sessions, they exposed children aged four to six to various
computer games especially designed to demand attention and control. In
one of the exercises, the children used a joystick to track a cartoon cat and
move it to a grassy area while avoiding a muddy area. The grassy areas
gradually shrank and the muddy area expanded, requiring progressively
more precise control. The testers found that training attention not only
improved executive control; scores on nonverbal tests of intelligence also
improved and the improvement was maintained for several months. Other
research by the same group identified specific genes that are involved in
the control of attention, showed that parenting techniques also affected this
ability, and demonstrated a close connection between the children’s ability
to control their attention and their ability to control their emotions.
Shane Frederick constructed a Cognitive Reflection Test, which
consists of the bat-and-ball problem and two other questions, chosen
because they also invite an intuitive answer that is both compelling and
wrong (the questions are shown here). He went on to study the
characteristics of students who score very low on this test—the supervisory
function of System 2 is weak in these people—and found that they are
prone to answer questions with the first idea that comes to mind and
unwilling to invest the effort needed to check their intuitions. Individuals who
uncritically follow their intuitions about puzzles are also prone to accept
other suggestions from System 1. In particular, they are impulsive,
impatient, and keen to receive immediate gratification. For example, 63%
of the intuitive respondents say they would prefer to get $3,400 this month
rather than $3,800 next month. Only 37% of those who solve all three
puzzles correctly have the same shortsighted preference for receiving a
smaller amount immediately. When asked how much they will pay to get
overnight delivery of a book they have ordered, the low scorers on the
Cognitive Reflection Test are willing to pay twice as much as the high
scorers. Frederick’s findings suggest that the characters of our
psychodrama have different “personalities.” System 1 is impulsive and
intuitive; System 2 is capable of reasoning, and it is cautious, but at least
for some people it is also lazy. We recognize related differences among
individuals: some people are more like their System 2; others are closer to
their System 1. This simple test has emerged as one of the better
predictors of laztestors of ly thinking.
Keith Stanovich and his longtime collaborator Richard West originally
introduced the terms System 1 and System 2 (they now prefer to speak of
Type 1 and Type 2 processes). Stanovich and his colleagues have spent
decades studying differences among individuals in the kinds of problems
with which this book is concerned. They have asked one basic question in
many different ways: What makes some people more susceptible than
others to biases of judgment? Stanovich published his conclusions in a
book titled Rationality and the Reflective Mind, which offers a bold and
distinctive approach to the topic of this chapter. He draws a sharp
distinction between two parts of System 2—indeed, the distinction is so
sharp that he calls them separate “minds.” One of these minds (he calls it
algorithmic) deals with slow thinking and demanding computation. Some
people are better than others in these tasks of brain power—they are the
individuals who excel in intelligence tests and are able to switch from one
task to another quickly and efficiently. However, Stanovich argues that high
intelligence does not make people immune to biases. Another ability is
involved, which he labels rationality. Stanovich’s concept of a rational
person is similar to what I earlier labeled “engaged.” The core of his
argument is that rationality should be distinguished from intelligence. In
his view, superficial or “lazy” thinking is a flaw in the reflective mind, a
failure of rationality. This is an attractive and thought-provoking idea. In
support of it, Stanovich and his colleagues have found that the bat-and-ball
question and others like it are somewhat better indicators of our
susceptibility to cognitive errors than are conventional measures of
intelligence, such as IQ tests. Time will tell whether the distinction between
intelligence and rationality can lead to new discoveries.
Speaking of Control
“She did not have to struggle to stay on task for hours. She was in
a state of flow.”
“His ego was depleted after a long day of meetings. So he just
turned to standard operating procedures instead of thinking
through the problem.”
“He didn’t bother to check whether what he said made sense.
Does he usually have a lazy System 2 or was he unusually tired?”
“Unfortunately, she tends to say the first thing that comes into her
mind. She probably also has trouble delaying gratification. Weak
System 2.”
Wednesday, 19 October 2016
The Lazy System 2
The Lazy System 2
One of the main functions of System 2 is to monitor and control thoughts
and actions “suggested” by System 1, allowing some to be expressed
directly in behavior and suppressing or modifying others.
For an example, here is a simple puzzle. Do not try to solve it but listen
to your intuition:
A bat and ball cost $1.10.
The bat costs one dollar more than the ball.
How much does the ball cost?
A number came to your mind. The number, of course, is 10: 10¢. The
distinctive mark of this easy puzzle is that it evokes an answer that is
intuitive, appealing, and wrong. Do the math, and you will see. If the ball
costs 10¢, then the total cost will be $1.20 (10¢ for the ball and $1.10 for
the bat), not $1.10. The correct answer is 5¢. It%">5¢. is safe to assume
that the intuitive answer also came to the mind of those who ended up with
the correct number—they somehow managed to resist the intuition.
Shane Frederick and I worked together on a theory of judgment based
on two systems, and he used the bat-and-ball puzzle to study a central
question: How closely does System 2 monitor the suggestions of System
1? His reasoning was that we know a significant fact about anyone who
says that the ball costs 10¢: that person did not actively check whether the
answer was correct, and her System 2 endorsed an intuitive answer that it
could have rejected with a small investment of effort. Furthermore, we also
know that the people who give the intuitive answer have missed an obvious
social cue; they should have wondered why anyone would include in a
questionnaire a puzzle with such an obvious answer. A failure to check is
remarkable because the cost of checking is so low: a few seconds of
mental work (the problem is moderately difficult), with slightly tensed
muscles and dilated pupils, could avoid an embarrassing mistake. People
who say 10¢ appear to be ardent followers of the law of least effort. People
who avoid that answer appear to have more active minds.
Many thousands of university students have answered the bat-and-ball
puzzle, and the results are shocking. More than 50% of students at
Harvard, MIT, and Princeton ton gave the intuitive—incorrect—answer. At
less selective universities, the rate of demonstrable failure to check was in
excess of 80%. The bat-and-ball problem is our first encounter with an
observation that will be a recurrent theme of this book: many people are
overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions. They
apparently find cognitive effort at least mildly unpleasant and avoid it as
much as possible.
Now I will show you a logical argument—two premises and a conclusion.
Try to determine, as quickly as you can, if the argument is logically valid.
Does the conclusion follow from the premises?
All roses are flowers.
Some flowers fade quickly.
Therefore some roses fade quickly.
A large majority of college students endorse this syllogism as valid. In fact
the argument is flawed, because it is possible that there are no roses
among the flowers that fade quickly. Just as in the bat-and-ball problem, a
plausible answer comes to mind immediately. Overriding it requires hard
work—the insistent idea that “it’s true, it’s true!” makes it difficult to check
the logic, and most people do not take the trouble to think through the
problem.
This experiment has discouraging implications for reasoning in everyday
life. It suggests that when people believe a conclusion is true, they are also
very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it, even when these
arguments are unsound. If System 1 is involved, the conclusion comes first
and the arguments follow.
Next, consider the following question and answer it quickly before
reading on:
How many murders occur in the state of Michigan in one year?
The question, which was also devised by Shane Frederick, is again a
challenge to System 2. The “trick” is whether the respondent will remember
that Detroit, a high-crime c thigh-crimeity, is in Michigan. College students
in the United States know this fact and will correctly identify Detroit as the
largest city in Michigan. But knowledge of a fact is not all-or-none. Facts
that we know do not always come to mind when we need them. People
who remember that Detroit is in Michigan give higher estimates of the
murder rate in the state than people who do not, but a majority of
Frederick’s respondents did not think of the city when questioned about
the state. Indeed, the average guess by people who were asked about
Michigan is lower than the guesses of a similar group who were asked
about the murder rate in Detroit.
Blame for a failure to think of Detroit can be laid on both System 1 and
System 2. Whether the city comes to mind when the state is mentioned
depends in part on the automatic function of memory. People differ in this
respect. The representation of the state of Michigan is very detailed in
some people’s minds: residents of the state are more likely to retrieve
many facts about it than people who live elsewhere; geography buffs will
retrieve more than others who specialize in baseball statistics; more
intelligent individuals are more likely than others to have rich
representations of most things. Intelligence is not only the ability to reason;
it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy
attention when needed. Memory function is an attribute of System 1.
However, everyone has the option of slowing down to conduct an active
search of memory for all possibly relevant facts—just as they could slow
down to check the intuitive answer in the bat-and-ball problem. The extent
of deliberate checking and search is a characteristic of System 2, which
varies among individuals.
The bat-and-ball problem, the flowers syllogism, and the
Michigan/Detroit problem have something in common. Failing these
minitests appears to be, at least to some extent, a matter of insufficient
motivation, not trying hard enough. Anyone who can be admitted to a good
university is certainly able to reason through the first two questions and to
reflect about Michigan long enough to remember the major city in that state
and its crime problem. These students can solve much more difficult
problems when they are not tempted to accept a superficially plausible
answer that comes readily to mind. The ease with which they are satisfied
enough to stop thinking is rather troubling. “Lazy” is a harsh judgment about
the self-monitoring of these young people and their System 2, but it does
not seem to be unfair. Those who avoid the sin of intellectual sloth could be
called “engaged.” They are more alert, more intellectually active, less
willing to be satisfied with superficially attractive answers, more skeptical
about their intuitions. The psychologist Keith Stanovich would call them
more rational.
One of the main functions of System 2 is to monitor and control thoughts
and actions “suggested” by System 1, allowing some to be expressed
directly in behavior and suppressing or modifying others.
For an example, here is a simple puzzle. Do not try to solve it but listen
to your intuition:
A bat and ball cost $1.10.
The bat costs one dollar more than the ball.
How much does the ball cost?
A number came to your mind. The number, of course, is 10: 10¢. The
distinctive mark of this easy puzzle is that it evokes an answer that is
intuitive, appealing, and wrong. Do the math, and you will see. If the ball
costs 10¢, then the total cost will be $1.20 (10¢ for the ball and $1.10 for
the bat), not $1.10. The correct answer is 5¢. It%">5¢. is safe to assume
that the intuitive answer also came to the mind of those who ended up with
the correct number—they somehow managed to resist the intuition.
Shane Frederick and I worked together on a theory of judgment based
on two systems, and he used the bat-and-ball puzzle to study a central
question: How closely does System 2 monitor the suggestions of System
1? His reasoning was that we know a significant fact about anyone who
says that the ball costs 10¢: that person did not actively check whether the
answer was correct, and her System 2 endorsed an intuitive answer that it
could have rejected with a small investment of effort. Furthermore, we also
know that the people who give the intuitive answer have missed an obvious
social cue; they should have wondered why anyone would include in a
questionnaire a puzzle with such an obvious answer. A failure to check is
remarkable because the cost of checking is so low: a few seconds of
mental work (the problem is moderately difficult), with slightly tensed
muscles and dilated pupils, could avoid an embarrassing mistake. People
who say 10¢ appear to be ardent followers of the law of least effort. People
who avoid that answer appear to have more active minds.
Many thousands of university students have answered the bat-and-ball
puzzle, and the results are shocking. More than 50% of students at
Harvard, MIT, and Princeton ton gave the intuitive—incorrect—answer. At
less selective universities, the rate of demonstrable failure to check was in
excess of 80%. The bat-and-ball problem is our first encounter with an
observation that will be a recurrent theme of this book: many people are
overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions. They
apparently find cognitive effort at least mildly unpleasant and avoid it as
much as possible.
Now I will show you a logical argument—two premises and a conclusion.
Try to determine, as quickly as you can, if the argument is logically valid.
Does the conclusion follow from the premises?
All roses are flowers.
Some flowers fade quickly.
Therefore some roses fade quickly.
A large majority of college students endorse this syllogism as valid. In fact
the argument is flawed, because it is possible that there are no roses
among the flowers that fade quickly. Just as in the bat-and-ball problem, a
plausible answer comes to mind immediately. Overriding it requires hard
work—the insistent idea that “it’s true, it’s true!” makes it difficult to check
the logic, and most people do not take the trouble to think through the
problem.
This experiment has discouraging implications for reasoning in everyday
life. It suggests that when people believe a conclusion is true, they are also
very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it, even when these
arguments are unsound. If System 1 is involved, the conclusion comes first
and the arguments follow.
Next, consider the following question and answer it quickly before
reading on:
How many murders occur in the state of Michigan in one year?
The question, which was also devised by Shane Frederick, is again a
challenge to System 2. The “trick” is whether the respondent will remember
that Detroit, a high-crime c thigh-crimeity, is in Michigan. College students
in the United States know this fact and will correctly identify Detroit as the
largest city in Michigan. But knowledge of a fact is not all-or-none. Facts
that we know do not always come to mind when we need them. People
who remember that Detroit is in Michigan give higher estimates of the
murder rate in the state than people who do not, but a majority of
Frederick’s respondents did not think of the city when questioned about
the state. Indeed, the average guess by people who were asked about
Michigan is lower than the guesses of a similar group who were asked
about the murder rate in Detroit.
Blame for a failure to think of Detroit can be laid on both System 1 and
System 2. Whether the city comes to mind when the state is mentioned
depends in part on the automatic function of memory. People differ in this
respect. The representation of the state of Michigan is very detailed in
some people’s minds: residents of the state are more likely to retrieve
many facts about it than people who live elsewhere; geography buffs will
retrieve more than others who specialize in baseball statistics; more
intelligent individuals are more likely than others to have rich
representations of most things. Intelligence is not only the ability to reason;
it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy
attention when needed. Memory function is an attribute of System 1.
However, everyone has the option of slowing down to conduct an active
search of memory for all possibly relevant facts—just as they could slow
down to check the intuitive answer in the bat-and-ball problem. The extent
of deliberate checking and search is a characteristic of System 2, which
varies among individuals.
The bat-and-ball problem, the flowers syllogism, and the
Michigan/Detroit problem have something in common. Failing these
minitests appears to be, at least to some extent, a matter of insufficient
motivation, not trying hard enough. Anyone who can be admitted to a good
university is certainly able to reason through the first two questions and to
reflect about Michigan long enough to remember the major city in that state
and its crime problem. These students can solve much more difficult
problems when they are not tempted to accept a superficially plausible
answer that comes readily to mind. The ease with which they are satisfied
enough to stop thinking is rather troubling. “Lazy” is a harsh judgment about
the self-monitoring of these young people and their System 2, but it does
not seem to be unfair. Those who avoid the sin of intellectual sloth could be
called “engaged.” They are more alert, more intellectually active, less
willing to be satisfied with superficially attractive answers, more skeptical
about their intuitions. The psychologist Keith Stanovich would call them
more rational.
The Busy and Depleted System 2
The Busy and Depleted System 2
It is now a well-established proposition that both self-control and cognitive
effort are forms of mental work. Several psychological studies have shown
that people who are simultaneously challenged by a demanding cognitive
task and by a temptation are more likely to yield to the temptation. Imagine
that you are asked to retain a list of seven digits for a minute or two. You
are told that remembering the digits is your top priority. While your
attention is focused on the digits, you are offered a choice between two
desserts: a sinful chocolate cake and a virtuous fruit salad. The evidence
suggests that you would be more likely to select the tempting chocolate
cake when your mind is loaded with digits. System 1 has more influence
on behavior when System 2 is busy, and it has a sweet tooth.
People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish
choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social
situations. Memorizing and repeating digits loosens the hold of System 2
on behavior, but of course cognitive load is not the only cause of
weakened self-control. A few drinks have the same effect, as does a
sleepless night. The self-control of morning people is impaired at night; the
reverse is true of night people. Too much concern about how well one is
doing in a task sometimes disrupts performance by loading short-term
memory with pointless anxious thoughts. The conclusion is straightforward:
self-control requires attention and effort. Another way of saying this is that
controlling thoughts and behaviors is one of the tasks that System 2
performs.
A series of surprising experiments by the psychologist Roy Baumeister
and his colleagues has shown conclusively that all variants of voluntary
effort—cognitive, emotional, or physical—draw at least partly on a shared
pool of mental energy. Their experiments involve successive rather than
simultaneous tasks.
Baumeister’s group has repeatedly found that an effort of will or selfcontrol
is tiring; if you have had to force yourself to do something, you are
less willing or less able to exert self-control when the next challenge comes
around. The phenomenon has been named ego depletion. In a typical
demo thypical denstration, participants who are instructed to stifle their
emotional reaction to an emotionally charged film will later perform poorly
on a test of physical stamina—how long they can maintain a strong grip on
a dynamometer in spite of increasing discomfort. The emotional effort in
the first phase of the experiment reduces the ability to withstand the pain of
sustained muscle contraction, and ego-depleted people therefore
succumb more quickly to the urge to quit. In another experiment, people
are first depleted by a task in which they eat virtuous foods such as
radishes and celery while resisting the temptation to indulge in chocolate
and rich cookies. Later, these people will give up earlier than normal when
faced with a difficult cognitive task.
The list of situations and tasks that are now known to deplete self-control
is long and varied. All involve conflict and the need to suppress a natural
tendency. They include:
avoiding the thought of white bears
inhibiting the emotional response to a stirring film
making a series of choices that involve conflict
trying to impress others
responding kindly to a partner’s bad behavior
interacting with a person of a different race (for prejudiced
individuals)
The list of indications of depletion is also highly diverse:
deviating from one’s diet
overspending on impulsive purchases
reacting aggressively to provocation
persisting less time in a handgrip task
performing poorly in cognitive tasks and logical decision making
The evidence is persuasive: activities that impose high demands on
System 2 require self-control, and the exertion of self-control is depleting
and unpleasant. Unlike cognitive load, ego depletion is at least in part a
loss of motivation. After exerting self-control in one task, you do not feel
like making an effort in another, although you could do it if you really had to.
In several experiments, people were able to resist the effects of ego
depletion when given a strong incentive to do so. In contrast, increasing
effort is not an option when you must keep six digits in short-term memory
while performing a task. Ego depletion is not the same mental state as
cognitive busyness.
The most surprising discovery made by Baumeister’s group shows, as
he puts it, that the idea of mental energy is more than a mere metaphor.
The nervous system consumes more glucose than most other parts of the
body, and effortful mental activity appears to be especially expensive in the
currency of glucose. When you are actively involved in difficult cognitive
reasoning or engaged in a task that requires self-control, your blood
glucose level drops. The effect is analogous to a runner who draws down
glucose stored in her muscles during a sprint. The bold implication of this
idea is that the effects of ego depletion could be undone by ingesting
glucose, and Baumeister and his colleagues have confirmed this
hypothesis n ohypothesiin several experiments.
Volunteers in one of their studies watched a short silent film of a woman
being interviewed and were asked to interpret her body language. While
they were performing the task, a series of words crossed the screen in
slow succession. The participants were specifically instructed to ignore the
words, and if they found their attention drawn away they had to refocus their
concentration on the woman’s behavior. This act of self-control was known
to cause ego depletion. All the volunteers drank some lemonade before
participating in a second task. The lemonade was sweetened with glucose
for half of them and with Splenda for the others. Then all participants were
given a task in which they needed to overcome an intuitive response to get
the correct answer. Intuitive errors are normally much more frequent among
ego-depleted people, and the drinkers of Splenda showed the expected
depletion effect. On the other hand, the glucose drinkers were not
depleted. Restoring the level of available sugar in the brain had prevented
the deterioration of performance. It will take some time and much further
research to establish whether the tasks that cause glucose-depletion also
cause the momentary arousal that is reflected in increases of pupil size
and heart rate.
A disturbing demonstration of depletion effects in judgment was recently
reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The
unwitting participants in the study were eight parole judges in Israel. They
spend entire days reviewing applications for parole. The cases are
presented in random order, and the judges spend little time on each one,
an average of 6 minutes. (The default decision is denial of parole; only
35% of requests are approved. The exact time of each decision is
recorded, and the times of the judges’ three food breaks—morning break,
lunch, and afternoon break—during the day are recorded as well.) The
authors of the study plotted the proportion of approved requests against
the time since the last food break. The proportion spikes after each meal,
when about 65% of requests are granted. During the two hours or so until
the judges’ next feeding, the approval rate drops steadily, to about zero just
before the meal. As you might expect, this is an unwelcome result and the
authors carefully checked many alternative explanations. The best possible
account of the data provides bad news: tired and hungry judges tend to fall
back on the easier default position of denying requests for parole. Both
fatigue and hunger probably play a role.
It is now a well-established proposition that both self-control and cognitive
effort are forms of mental work. Several psychological studies have shown
that people who are simultaneously challenged by a demanding cognitive
task and by a temptation are more likely to yield to the temptation. Imagine
that you are asked to retain a list of seven digits for a minute or two. You
are told that remembering the digits is your top priority. While your
attention is focused on the digits, you are offered a choice between two
desserts: a sinful chocolate cake and a virtuous fruit salad. The evidence
suggests that you would be more likely to select the tempting chocolate
cake when your mind is loaded with digits. System 1 has more influence
on behavior when System 2 is busy, and it has a sweet tooth.
People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish
choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social
situations. Memorizing and repeating digits loosens the hold of System 2
on behavior, but of course cognitive load is not the only cause of
weakened self-control. A few drinks have the same effect, as does a
sleepless night. The self-control of morning people is impaired at night; the
reverse is true of night people. Too much concern about how well one is
doing in a task sometimes disrupts performance by loading short-term
memory with pointless anxious thoughts. The conclusion is straightforward:
self-control requires attention and effort. Another way of saying this is that
controlling thoughts and behaviors is one of the tasks that System 2
performs.
A series of surprising experiments by the psychologist Roy Baumeister
and his colleagues has shown conclusively that all variants of voluntary
effort—cognitive, emotional, or physical—draw at least partly on a shared
pool of mental energy. Their experiments involve successive rather than
simultaneous tasks.
Baumeister’s group has repeatedly found that an effort of will or selfcontrol
is tiring; if you have had to force yourself to do something, you are
less willing or less able to exert self-control when the next challenge comes
around. The phenomenon has been named ego depletion. In a typical
demo thypical denstration, participants who are instructed to stifle their
emotional reaction to an emotionally charged film will later perform poorly
on a test of physical stamina—how long they can maintain a strong grip on
a dynamometer in spite of increasing discomfort. The emotional effort in
the first phase of the experiment reduces the ability to withstand the pain of
sustained muscle contraction, and ego-depleted people therefore
succumb more quickly to the urge to quit. In another experiment, people
are first depleted by a task in which they eat virtuous foods such as
radishes and celery while resisting the temptation to indulge in chocolate
and rich cookies. Later, these people will give up earlier than normal when
faced with a difficult cognitive task.
The list of situations and tasks that are now known to deplete self-control
is long and varied. All involve conflict and the need to suppress a natural
tendency. They include:
avoiding the thought of white bears
inhibiting the emotional response to a stirring film
making a series of choices that involve conflict
trying to impress others
responding kindly to a partner’s bad behavior
interacting with a person of a different race (for prejudiced
individuals)
The list of indications of depletion is also highly diverse:
deviating from one’s diet
overspending on impulsive purchases
reacting aggressively to provocation
persisting less time in a handgrip task
performing poorly in cognitive tasks and logical decision making
The evidence is persuasive: activities that impose high demands on
System 2 require self-control, and the exertion of self-control is depleting
and unpleasant. Unlike cognitive load, ego depletion is at least in part a
loss of motivation. After exerting self-control in one task, you do not feel
like making an effort in another, although you could do it if you really had to.
In several experiments, people were able to resist the effects of ego
depletion when given a strong incentive to do so. In contrast, increasing
effort is not an option when you must keep six digits in short-term memory
while performing a task. Ego depletion is not the same mental state as
cognitive busyness.
The most surprising discovery made by Baumeister’s group shows, as
he puts it, that the idea of mental energy is more than a mere metaphor.
The nervous system consumes more glucose than most other parts of the
body, and effortful mental activity appears to be especially expensive in the
currency of glucose. When you are actively involved in difficult cognitive
reasoning or engaged in a task that requires self-control, your blood
glucose level drops. The effect is analogous to a runner who draws down
glucose stored in her muscles during a sprint. The bold implication of this
idea is that the effects of ego depletion could be undone by ingesting
glucose, and Baumeister and his colleagues have confirmed this
hypothesis n ohypothesiin several experiments.
Volunteers in one of their studies watched a short silent film of a woman
being interviewed and were asked to interpret her body language. While
they were performing the task, a series of words crossed the screen in
slow succession. The participants were specifically instructed to ignore the
words, and if they found their attention drawn away they had to refocus their
concentration on the woman’s behavior. This act of self-control was known
to cause ego depletion. All the volunteers drank some lemonade before
participating in a second task. The lemonade was sweetened with glucose
for half of them and with Splenda for the others. Then all participants were
given a task in which they needed to overcome an intuitive response to get
the correct answer. Intuitive errors are normally much more frequent among
ego-depleted people, and the drinkers of Splenda showed the expected
depletion effect. On the other hand, the glucose drinkers were not
depleted. Restoring the level of available sugar in the brain had prevented
the deterioration of performance. It will take some time and much further
research to establish whether the tasks that cause glucose-depletion also
cause the momentary arousal that is reflected in increases of pupil size
and heart rate.
A disturbing demonstration of depletion effects in judgment was recently
reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The
unwitting participants in the study were eight parole judges in Israel. They
spend entire days reviewing applications for parole. The cases are
presented in random order, and the judges spend little time on each one,
an average of 6 minutes. (The default decision is denial of parole; only
35% of requests are approved. The exact time of each decision is
recorded, and the times of the judges’ three food breaks—morning break,
lunch, and afternoon break—during the day are recorded as well.) The
authors of the study plotted the proportion of approved requests against
the time since the last food break. The proportion spikes after each meal,
when about 65% of requests are granted. During the two hours or so until
the judges’ next feeding, the approval rate drops steadily, to about zero just
before the meal. As you might expect, this is an unwelcome result and the
authors carefully checked many alternative explanations. The best possible
account of the data provides bad news: tired and hungry judges tend to fall
back on the easier default position of denying requests for parole. Both
fatigue and hunger probably play a role.
The Lazy Controller
The Lazy Controller
I spend a few months each year in Berkeley, and one of my great
pleasures there is a daily four-mile walk on a marked path in the hills, with
a fine view of San Francisco Bay. I usually keep track of my time and have
learned a fair amount about effort from doing so. I have found a speed,
about 17 minutes for a mile, which I experience as a stroll. I certainly exert
physical effort and burn more calories at that speed than if I sat in a
recliner, but I experience no strain, no conflict, and no need to push myself.
I am also able to think and work while walking at that rate. Indeed, I suspect
that the mild physical arousal of the walk may spill over into greater mental
alertness.
System 2 also has a natural speed. You expend some mental energy in
random thoughts and in monitoring what goes on around you even when
your mind does nothing in particular, but there is little strain. Unless you are
in a situation that makes you unusually wary or self-conscious, monitoring
what happens in the environment or inside your head demands little effort.
You make many small decisions as you drive your car, absorb some
information as you read the newspaper, and conduct routine exchanges of
pleasantries with a spouse or a colleague, all with little effort and no strain.
Just like a stroll.
It is normally easy and actually quite pleasant to walk and think at the
same time, but at the extremes these activities appear to compete for the
limited resources of System 2. You can confirm this claim by a simple
experiment. While walking comfortably with a friend, ask him to compute
23 × 78 in his head, and to do so immediately. He will almost certainly stop
in his tracks. My experience is that I can think while strolling but cannot
engage in mental work that imposes a heavy load on short-term memory. If
I must construct an intricate argument under time pressure, I would rather
be still, and I would prefer sitting to standing. Of course, not all slow
thinking requires that form of intense concentration and effortful
computation—I did the best thinking of my life on leisurely walks with
Amos.
Accelerating beyond my strolling speed completely changes the
experience of walking, because the transition to a faster walk brings about
a sharp deterioration in my ability to think coherently. As I speed up, my
attention is drawn with increasing frequency to the experience of walking
and to the deliberate maintenance of the faster pace. My ability to bring a
train of thought to a conclusion is impaired accordingly. At the highest
speed I can sustain on the hills, about 14 minutes for a mile, I do not even
try to think of anything else. In addition to the physical effort of moving my
body rapidly along the path, a mental effort of self-control is needed to
resist the urge to slow down. Self-control and deliberate thought apparently
draw on the same limited budget of effort.
For most of us, most of the time, the maintenance of a coherent train of
thought and the occasional engagement in effortful thinking also require
self-control. Although I have not conducted a systematic survey, I suspect
that frequent switching of tasks and speeded-up mental work are not
intrinsically pleasurable, and that people avoid them when possible. This is
how the law of least effort comes to be a law. Even in the absence of time
pressure, maintaining a coherent train of thought requires discipline. An
observer of the number of times I look at e-mail or investigate the
refrigerator during an hour of writing could wahene dd reasonably infer an
urge to escape and conclude that keeping at it requires more self-control
than I can readily muster.
Fortunately, cognitive work is not always aversive, and people
sometimes expend considerable effort for long periods of time without
having to exert willpower. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
(pronounced six-cent-mihaly) has done more than anyone else to study this
state of effortless attending, and the name he proposed for it, flow, has
become part of the language. People who experience flow describe it as
“a state of effortless concentration so deep that they lose their sense of
time, of themselves, of their problems,” and their descriptions of the joy of
that state are so compelling that Csikszentmihalyi has called it an “optimal
experience.” Many activities can induce a sense of flow, from painting to
racing motorcycles—and for some fortunate authors I know, even writing a
book is often an optimal experience. Flow neatly separates the two forms
of effort: concentration on the task and the deliberate control of attention.
Riding a motorcycle at 150 miles an hour and playing a competitive game
of chess are certainly very effortful. In a state of flow, however, maintaining
focused attention on these absorbing activities requires no exertion of selfcontrol,
thereby freeing resources to be directed to the task at hand.
I spend a few months each year in Berkeley, and one of my great
pleasures there is a daily four-mile walk on a marked path in the hills, with
a fine view of San Francisco Bay. I usually keep track of my time and have
learned a fair amount about effort from doing so. I have found a speed,
about 17 minutes for a mile, which I experience as a stroll. I certainly exert
physical effort and burn more calories at that speed than if I sat in a
recliner, but I experience no strain, no conflict, and no need to push myself.
I am also able to think and work while walking at that rate. Indeed, I suspect
that the mild physical arousal of the walk may spill over into greater mental
alertness.
System 2 also has a natural speed. You expend some mental energy in
random thoughts and in monitoring what goes on around you even when
your mind does nothing in particular, but there is little strain. Unless you are
in a situation that makes you unusually wary or self-conscious, monitoring
what happens in the environment or inside your head demands little effort.
You make many small decisions as you drive your car, absorb some
information as you read the newspaper, and conduct routine exchanges of
pleasantries with a spouse or a colleague, all with little effort and no strain.
Just like a stroll.
It is normally easy and actually quite pleasant to walk and think at the
same time, but at the extremes these activities appear to compete for the
limited resources of System 2. You can confirm this claim by a simple
experiment. While walking comfortably with a friend, ask him to compute
23 × 78 in his head, and to do so immediately. He will almost certainly stop
in his tracks. My experience is that I can think while strolling but cannot
engage in mental work that imposes a heavy load on short-term memory. If
I must construct an intricate argument under time pressure, I would rather
be still, and I would prefer sitting to standing. Of course, not all slow
thinking requires that form of intense concentration and effortful
computation—I did the best thinking of my life on leisurely walks with
Amos.
Accelerating beyond my strolling speed completely changes the
experience of walking, because the transition to a faster walk brings about
a sharp deterioration in my ability to think coherently. As I speed up, my
attention is drawn with increasing frequency to the experience of walking
and to the deliberate maintenance of the faster pace. My ability to bring a
train of thought to a conclusion is impaired accordingly. At the highest
speed I can sustain on the hills, about 14 minutes for a mile, I do not even
try to think of anything else. In addition to the physical effort of moving my
body rapidly along the path, a mental effort of self-control is needed to
resist the urge to slow down. Self-control and deliberate thought apparently
draw on the same limited budget of effort.
For most of us, most of the time, the maintenance of a coherent train of
thought and the occasional engagement in effortful thinking also require
self-control. Although I have not conducted a systematic survey, I suspect
that frequent switching of tasks and speeded-up mental work are not
intrinsically pleasurable, and that people avoid them when possible. This is
how the law of least effort comes to be a law. Even in the absence of time
pressure, maintaining a coherent train of thought requires discipline. An
observer of the number of times I look at e-mail or investigate the
refrigerator during an hour of writing could wahene dd reasonably infer an
urge to escape and conclude that keeping at it requires more self-control
than I can readily muster.
Fortunately, cognitive work is not always aversive, and people
sometimes expend considerable effort for long periods of time without
having to exert willpower. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
(pronounced six-cent-mihaly) has done more than anyone else to study this
state of effortless attending, and the name he proposed for it, flow, has
become part of the language. People who experience flow describe it as
“a state of effortless concentration so deep that they lose their sense of
time, of themselves, of their problems,” and their descriptions of the joy of
that state are so compelling that Csikszentmihalyi has called it an “optimal
experience.” Many activities can induce a sense of flow, from painting to
racing motorcycles—and for some fortunate authors I know, even writing a
book is often an optimal experience. Flow neatly separates the two forms
of effort: concentration on the task and the deliberate control of attention.
Riding a motorcycle at 150 miles an hour and playing a competitive game
of chess are certainly very effortful. In a state of flow, however, maintaining
focused attention on these absorbing activities requires no exertion of selfcontrol,
thereby freeing resources to be directed to the task at hand.
Monday, 3 October 2016
Photos: Man burns 8-year-old stepson's hand on hot stove for allegedly stealing N200 in Rivers State.
According to Nwogu Davina who shared the post on a Facebook page, forced by hunger, the young boy identified as Sofeme, 8, stole N200 from his mother. The step father, one Victor George punished him by placing his hand on a hot stove. The incident reportedly happened last week at Rumuigbo, Port Harcourt. Read what he shared below:
"The victim is the First Son of Mrs Juliet which she got out of wedlock Before she got married to One Mr Victor George who resides at No 26 Owhor Street, Rumudolo, New Layout Rumuigbo in Rivers State, the boy said he is from Degema in Rivers state, and he is just 8yrs old.
The Boy confessed that he is going through hell in the hand of his mother and step father, that they hardly feed him well and he is not in school either Last week as hunger wired the little boy, he took his supposed biological mother's 200 naira to buy GALA, the step father burn his hand on a hot stove as punishment for this. This little boy need justice, good people of Nigeria let save this little boy from this inhuman torture, wickedness and suffering."
Man insists he is the biological son of former President Bill Clinton
Rumors that Bill Clinton once fathered a child with a prostitute have reemerged, as the now 30-year-old man is trying to have the former president recognize him as his son. The man, Danney Williams started a Facebook page in December, under the new name Danney Williams-Clinton, with the intention of getting the Clintons' attention.
The claim was initially made in the late 1990s by Williams' mother and in 1999, a DNA test reportedly conducted by Star magazine said that Danney couldn't be Clinton's son but the result of the test wasn't really clear.
Danney's story first garnered international attention in 1992, as then-Arkansas Gov Clinton was getting ready to run for presidency.
She said when she was 24 years old in 1984, Bill Clinton went out for a run one day in Little Rock, Arkansas when he jogged by her housing project and introduced himself to her. She was 24 years old at the time.
A few days later, Clinton allegedly jogged by the housing project again and paid Bobbie $200 for sex with him behind some bushes.
She said when she told Clinton who was a Governor at the time that she had had his child, he allegedly laughed in her face.
'He rubbed my big belly and said, "Girl, that can’t be my baby." But I knew it was. I just had this kind of woman’s feeling that this was his child."In 2013, Danney gave an interview with The Globe, explaining why he wanted to meet Clinton.
He said:
'I read he doesn’t have long to live and I want to meet him face to face before he dies,' Williams said. 'I just want to shake his hand and say "Hi Dad," before he dies. I’d like to have a relationship with Chelsea, too. She’s my half-sister.'
Bride is thrown off horse and into river as bridal shoot goes hilariously wrong
Sue Allegretta, from Oakland, New Jersey, decided to make her bridal shoot a really special one and enlisted the help of horses for the project. One horse had other ideas. Pictures show her seated on a horse standing in a river while hi-fiving her bridesmaid seated on a different horse. It all looks nice and pretty but her horse soon had enough of it all and made its wishes known loud and clear. It threw her into the water.
“Sue’s horse loves the water and was playing in it. “Next thing you know she’s rolled off the horse and landed in the water!
“It was hysterical - I will never forget it.” The look on poor Sue's face says it all.
Turkey Failed Coup: "We were treated like criminals" Deported Nigerian student, Rukkaya Usman
At least 50 Nigerian students studying in Turkey were arrested in Istanbul and detained for 11 hours on alleged order of the Turkish government following the July 15th failed military coup in the country. Most of the detained Nigerians, mainly students of Fathi University and Meliksah University were made to sign deportation documents. Narrating her ordeal in a telephone call from THISDAY, one of the Nigerian students deported, Rukkaya Usman, said they were treated like criminals before the Turkish authorities repatriated them back to Nigeria. Usman is a final year student of Political Science and International Relations at Meliksah University, one of the schools shut down in the wake of the failed coup. The Turkish authorities had said the affected schools were terrorist schools because they have links with Islamic scholar Fethullah Gulen, whom the Turkish government had accused of being the mastermind of the coup. "I got to Turkey on the 26 of September at about 8am and the Immigration didn’t allow me to pass; they were asking, ‘where are you from?, where are you schooling?, and then, they took me to a room and asked me to wait. My passport and resident permit were with them," said Usman. "They came back after few minutes with a paper and were asking me if I had money with me, they checked saw money and counted it, we were about eight of us. Before then, they said they are sending me back to my country and I asked they why, and they said when I go back to my country that I should visit the Turkish Embassy that they will answer all my questions. "They gave me a paper to sign, I refused to sign because I don’t know what they wrote on the paper, they locked us inside a room, we were not allowed to go out, we were not allowed to see anyone, and we were just inside the room, just like criminals. The place is just like a prison "They came and gave me back my residence permit and I said I should wait that they will call me and I asked them what about my passport, they said they are not giving me my passport until I get to Nigeria. After 11 hours they came back and gave me things they took from my bag and took me to the plane and when we got to Nigeria, they called someone from the immigration and gave him my passport and they now gave me back my passport." "They deported me for no reason. They treated me like a criminal. I am supposed to be in my final year and my resident permit is valid and is supposed to expire next year September that is after I have graduated. So, honestly, I am offended because whatever business the Turkish government has with the proprietor of our school shouldn’t be affecting me as a student of his school, Usman narrated. Usman called on the Nigerian government to do something about the situation, saying as her transcript is still there and there is no way she can collect her transcript except she go there and she is supposed to graduate next year.
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