Cognition and Thinking - Essay Example

Cognition and Thinking Introduction Decision making is an important aspect in the area of cognitive psychology (The Psychology of Learning and Motivation 1). People in their everyday lives are constantly faced with situations, significant or small, that entail decision making. This idea sparks the area of cognitive science into understanding and analyzing how people undergo the process of solving cognitive problem. By process means there are activities that the brain performs. Although our decisions are done without noticing how our brain processes, people regulate behavior through this process (Barone, Maddux, and Snyder 296).

In technical terms, this control of human behavior is called “cognitive self-regulation” (Barone, Maddux, and Snyder 296). This paper will briefly discuss some of the principles from cognitive psychology that are important in understanding decision making process. Principles and Cognitive Strategies in Decision Making People are considered concrete thinkers (The Psychology of Learning and Motivation 8). This means that humans prefer task-specific and concrete representations rather than abstract principles.

Three general cognitive models include the cognitive heuristics approach, cognitive algebra approach, and adaptive contingent choice strategy (The Psychology of Learning and Motivation 12). Cognitive heuristics approach involves computational components such as availability, representativeness, anchor-and-adjust, and simulation heuristics (The Psychology of Learning and Motivation 12). The idea of heuristics is considered to be “natural assessments” based on the imperfections observed in the past to a particular object, situation, or person (Gilovich, Griffin, and Kahneman 10).

This is not to say that using the heuristics approach, people have already preconceived notions and biases towards a present stimulus; rather, people examine and assess a particular problem objectively and seriously based on its history (Gilovich, Griffin, and Kahneman 10). Moreover, the algebra approach takes on processes involving adding, subtracting, or averaging while the adaptive contingent choice strategy applied by noted psychologist Payne involved detailed computation routines in making decisions.

In many instances, the heuristics approach is commonly criticized for not anticipating the strategy that will be used in a new task. For instance, when purchasing a car, a buyer usually goes through a process of research by asking for family and friends’ advice or simply uses the Internet to know about mileage, price range, engine capability, company track records, among others. When the customer has been satisfied with his new car, and was dismayed when after a year it has malfunctioned, the customer becomes lost.

He then does not know how to react to the situation and create set of solutions to the problem because of the failure to generate solutions to the next problem. In addition, Barone, Maddux, and Snyder mention the work of Baumeister and Newman (1994) explaining how the brain makes decisions (297). This process involves four stages: “gathering evidence, seeing implications, reassessing evidence and implications, and integrating information” (Barone, Maddux, and Snyder 297). Psychologists often point to this process as naturally involving heuristics since the stages mention can actually be performed by merely going back and forth to the stages and not strictly following a linear approach (Barone, Maddux, and Snyder 297).

Baumeister and Newman (1994, qtd. in Barone, Maddux, and Snyder 297) add that since seeing evidence does not actually regulate behavior, the three other stages are involved in cognitive self-regulation or decision making. Two types of people can be used as examples in cognitive models, the “intuitive scientist” and the “intuitive lawyer” (Barone, Maddux, and Snyder 297). The intuitive scientist does research by reading reports, feedback, and menu when finding a good restaurant while the intuitive lawyer only seeks for evidences that will support his conclusive opinion regarding a restaurant.

In other words, the lawyer only talks to people whose opinions are similar with his while discard those who answer contrary to his beliefs. This kind of processing hampers the objectivity of decision making process and is considered to be a form of biases. Conclusion The principle of the three cognitive models only suggests that there are different concepts regarding the anticipation and identification of strategies to be used in making decisions. To sum it up, the three cognitive models only imply that the human memory has only a limited working capacity that stores an array of strategies for succeeding situations that need to be addressed in the present.

In other words, current decision making approach is based also on a limited amount of evidence stored in our memory, and this evidence is the source of people’s judgment. Lastly, it is also important to know that aside from evidences, a certain decision is made up based also on the confidence put over the judgment. It is not enough that there is evidence produced by the memory because trusting the reliability of those evidences enhances the validity of the decision. Works Cited Barone, David F., James E. Maddux, and C. R. Snyder.

Social Cognitive Psychology: History and Current Domains. New York: Plenum Press, 1997. Print. Gilovich, Thomas, Dale Griffin, and Daniel Kahneman, eds. Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Print. The Psychology of Learning and Motivation. Decision Making from a Cognitive Perspective: Advances in Research and Theory. London: Academic Press, 1995. Print.