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.
Wednesday, 19 October 2016
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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