Surviving the world of Academia

As I was looking over the posts, I saw here I and thinking about the book I thought a lot about fast and low thinking and its role in academia.

I spent the past week at AERA in Toronto and sat in on may sessions, from round tables to symposia and paper sessions. I chose topics I was interested in, and as such had a certain level of intrinsic motivation to listen and understand what people were saying (it was a place for slow thinking). I was consciously trying to understand what people were saying and piece it into my understandings and my research interest. Yet I also found that quite often system one stepped up. I would instinctively, judge a paper a low quality, boring, or uninteresting, without really processing why, sometimes I knew right away what was wrong, what I didn't like. But other times, I had to wait for system two to kick in before really parsing out what I viewed as problematic. It was those initial judgments, system one, that allowed me to survive the conference. I could not have mentally managed five days of session after session with system two working on overdrive. I had to cut some things out, mentally ignore some stuff so that I could focus on others. 

This made me think a lot about academia as a whole, we are surrounded by new papers, new ideas, presentations of new work, and yet, we cannot mentally, or at least I cannot mentally process and use all of that information. It is my system one that instinctively tells me to ignore something, that work isn't worth reading because they made questionable methods choices, etc. that allows me to survive in this world. However, in academia, it is also system one that boxes us in, allows us to stay in our worlds, and trust our work and understanding sometimes more than we should. It seems to me that the thing that allows us to survive intense mental stimulation is also our downfall.

More Fast and Slow Thinking...

I am enjoying Kahneman’s book, “Thinking Fast and Slow.” The Tom W question and the Linda Problem are two intriguing experiments. I learned about how people are quick to ignore base rates, personal doubts and the validity of the description and instead, make assumptions and rely on stereotypes. It is interesting how lazySystem 2 can be.  It often decides that applying knowledge takes too much effort!  System 1 thinking makes quick judgments, applies stereotypes and succumbs to fallacies. System 1 convinces System 2 that its information is not valuable and will take too much effort to confirm or apply further knowledge. System 2 is not impressively alert. It may “know” but does not always “apply.”  Knowing this about the two systems, how can educators encourage students to be aware of their own “lazy thinking?”  What are good activities to implement in a curriculum that encourages thinking slow?

“System 2 is therefore susceptible to the biasing influence of anchors that make some information easier to retrieve. System 2 has no control over the effect and no knowledge of it.”  My question is: WHY doesn’t System 2 have control over the effect?  I think that anchoring and priming effects are interestingly powerful. Priming effect influences thoughts and behavior through stimuli which we pay no attention to at all. Our thoughts and behaviors are influenced by our thoughts and behaviors of the moment. Interesting: We might be aware of the anchor, but often not aware of how it guides and constrains your thinking because you cannot imagine how you would have thought if the anchor had been different or absent.  It can be draining to use System 2 to maintain vigilance against anchoring, priming, and biases, but it is completely worth the effort to avoid System 1 thinking coming in and making a poor, rash judgment.  We should remind ourselves of times where we did exercises control over external influences and to ultimately trust in our own intuition.  

Problems with each system: System 1 will generate overconfident judgments because confidence is determined by the logic of the best story you can determine from the given evidence. Regression to the mean is difficult for System 2 to comprehend and requires intentionality to avoid error.  As an educator, how do we apply “taming the intuitive predictions” when we must rely on background information about students while working with them. How do we properly operate in System 2 to evaluate student needs? Persistent intentionality? Constant self-reflection?

Kahneman researched the perceived happiness of students who live in California compared to those who live in Michigan and Ohio. Although he showed that Californians enjoyed their climate while Midwesterners despised theirs, he concluded that climate was not an important determinant of well-being.  He found that there was no difference whatsoever between the life satisfaction of students in California and those in the Midwest. Simultaneously, he discovered that students in both regions shared the same mistaken view. These views were based on an error to an exaggerated belief that climate largely influenced happiness. This error, known as a focusing illusion, provides a sense of comfort. Focusing illusion can cause people to be incorrect about their present state of well-being as well as incorrectly judging the happiness of others. I am curious how focusing illusion occurs in the classroom. Which type of students does it most often effect?  Do teachers suffer from focusing on illusion?  

One last quote from Kahneman which I shall ponder this coming week: “The test of learning psychology is whether your understanding of situations you encounter has changed, not whether you have learned a new fact. You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general.” As an educator this next week, I will attempt to be more intentional to engage System 2 thinking and seek to find something which surprises me about my own behavior. 

Decoding Kahneman, academia and belongingness

We were discussing fast and slow thinking today in class based on our readings of Kahneman's book, and I think that what was highlighted in our discussions made me think about what we're doing in this class and how we formed evaluations of even the very environment we are sitting in. Michael raised the argument about what we perceive about this class being a function of fast thinking. I think that this was extremely pertinent, because it really helped me understand how the internet-infused framework used in this class is built towards generating self-efficacy that is intrinsically based. When we talked about students skipping blog posts and asked why some of us skip posts sometimes, it became evident to all of us in class that day that the reasons that one would take the liberty to be flexible in this class could be based on  'System 1' evaluations of Michael's instructional demeanor, the fact that we're assuming that everyone will get an 'A', and that there are other things to do that are more 'high stakes'. Again, this is all speculation, but it is pretty sound.

But, if you're someone that is researching this, and is using 'System 2' to analyze why we have these liberties in this class, it points to an extremely pertinent notion of building intrinsically guided self-efficacy and actually posting something that is personally pertinent to us, in order to embark on a journey towards creating a collective efficacy. Now let's go a bit further and ask, did we think about this class in this manner? Or was it just something we 'required' and 'had to do', based on our immediate evaluations of our program sheets and fleeting perceptions of Michael as a 'chilled out teacher'? Kahneman makes the point that we use fast thinking not as a function of intuition. This is a term that we sugar-coat our own thinking with to make ourselves feel better. The fact is that we are making decisions when we may not have the adequate funds of knowledge about something, because it's easier to do that and move on, being as ignorant as we were at the outset. Is ignorance really bliss though?

Another facet of our behavior that we discussed pertained to the notion of social belongingness. While Kahneman mainly talks about cognition, we decided to take this to the social dimension in order to evaluate the decisions that we make using fast thinking. When people talk about popular culture that they don't know of just to belong, they use fast thinking, and whether this works or not entirely depends on the group. You have to step back, gain more information, and see what you can do to feel a sense of belongingness. It's pretty evident that fast thinking can get you into a really embarrassing social situation.

Let's take this to the realm of academia to look at how we often just disagree with others simply because we 'abide by another school of thought'. Do we have adequate information about things outside our realm, or do we raise circular arguments just to 'belong' to a school of thought that we've had success with over the years? I think I have a tendency to do this myself, as do all of us. While belonging to a school of thought and doing anything to defend it is associated with collective efficacy, which some of us think is beneficial, using fast thinking to defend it is a risky game that can make one seem difficult and obstinate. Accruing adequate funds of knowledge and adopting a 'system 2' configuration about things we don't know as much might be the best way to deal with such situations by being the bigger person, and accepting that learning is lifelong. Such an approach might let us be less judgmental about the people around us. We discussed how today, sticking by a single school of thought makes you a 'go-getter'. If you favor many things by actually evaluating things, you're often considered a 'flip-flopper' in Michael's words. To be honest, I'd rather be a flip-flopper for the sake of being more knowledgable.

We often think that people that don't agree with us are 'wrong' and 'no good at what they do', based on fast thinking. Is this really the best way to figure out our social interactions, or are we throwing ourselves under the bus?

Is intrinsic motivation always a good thing?

Intrinsic motivation occurs when we act without any obvious external rewards. Individual simply enjoys an activity or see it as an opportunity to explore, learn, and actualize one’s potentials. People who are intrinsically motivated would pursue the activity for the pure enjoyment of it and engage in the behavior entirely from within rather than out of a desire to obtain external rewards such as money, prizes, praise, or reclame. Thus intrinsic motivation is usually considered as the best condition when people are doing things.

I wonder whether extrinsic motivation could lead to desired outcome which is beneficial to individual development. For example, a middle school student might be very intrinsically motivated to do exercise books and answer questions. The student won’t not gain any extrinsic rewards like desired high score or teacher’s praise. Suppose that what if the student just enjoys the process of figuring out questions and feeling safe when all answers aligns with the standard criteria. To some extent, it is just a tendency of mechanical operating and repeating in a learning context, which is more likely to lead to shallow processing thinking process. Life is complicated without an certain answers for any conundrum. The thinking habit of always seeking for the right answer could be benign to a sustainable thinking development, for individuals would confront struggling time with uncertainty and crisis. 

However, I wondered whether this learning style is indeed intrinsically motivated. For I experienced the above process during my middle school life, which could be very common at that certain age under that educational system (testing and enrolling). The ends in view were getting good grades and getting into a ideal educational institution. Nevertheless, I just realized that the process of answer questions correctly could authentically bring satisfying internal sense of achievement which drives me to move forward, which a fixed pattern (do exercises and check the correct answer). Admittedly, this might be a byproduct of the behavior (i.e. doing exercises), which was aiming at external rewards, getting good grades and then get enrolled. But take that single mode of “practicing” (it is could be learning but I would prefer to define it operational practicing), it could be intrinsically motivated thing, but it could rigidify individual’s mindset. I wonder it if the drawback of doing something which is intrinsically motivated when it is pondered on a cognitive perspective.

How personal and environmental factors interact with each other to form System 1 and System 2?

To describe the differences between System 1 and System 2, Kahneman (2011) put forward the cognitive illusion through examining impressions and beliefs. By the Muller-Lyer illusion example, he mentioned that even though people could view the lines as equal in length by measuring or previous experiences with this experiment, they still feel hard to resist the first illusion formed by visual signals. In this process, the System 1(automatic thinking) seems to be programmed by biological functioning; however, the System 2(logical thinking) needs human's effort to change attention or prior beliefs formed through non-examined observations. In this experiment, I am thinking how many illusions we may encounter in our life without careful re-examination and how people could develop more sophisticated thinking System 2 to better resolve problems and enhance lifelong well-being.

Through what Kahneman (2011) stated, experiencing cognitive dilemmas (cognitive illusions and beliefs through examination?) seems to be a facilitator in transformation from System1 to System2. However, what factors could promote people to avoid the trap of cognitive laziness and utilize diverse tools, such as language, to seek truth (examined beliefs) behind superficial phenomenon (cognitive illusion)? From social cognitive theory, I'm thinking that what kinds of interaction between personal (cognitive, affective and biological events) and environmental factors would generate System 1 and which may contain facilitators for System 2?  From Loretta and Johana's posts, I'm thinking how System 1 and System 2 would be developed differently in child-driven play and structured learning system due to different environmental factors (e.g., tasks, goals, communications). For example, without outside judgement, it tends to be more easy for kids to achieve success based on their self-set goals which might enhance their self-efficacy. In this sense, I would consider this positive belief would fall into System1. While for kids learning in structured educational system, they still have the opportunity to achieve success, but it relies upon external assessment and requirement.  Would this success still form System 1 and how does it exert influence on later functioning of System 2?

My thoughts on relating “Thinking Fast and Slow” to Self-Efficacy

I was reflecting on Loretta’s post about Thinking Fast and Slow and I am confused as to how to link the two systems of thinking to self-efficacy, as I can think of multiple examples for each that don’t necessarily fit with one another.
For example, I would initially argue that the use of fast thinking such as fight or flight responses demonstrates high efficacy in those actions. It reflects the idea that your “gut reaction” to stimuli is the action that you would best accomplish. If I’m being chased by a tiger, I have higher self-efficacy in running away from the tiger than I do in fighting it, so I’m more likely to run (even though both actions might ultimately be futile). I also relate the concept of fast thinking to actions of proficiency or familiarity in certain tasks, i.e. the idea that someone knows a place or an action “like the back of their hand” and doesn’t have to ponder what to do for long. Such fast thinking may also demonstrate a sense of false self-efficacy; as Loretta’s 9-year old child demonstrates, it may be possible to dedicate so much energy to slow thinking that, with a false sense of high self-efficacy in one’s spatial awareness, one can inappropriately use fast thinking to move impulsively and accidentally knock things over.
I’m not sure, however, of the relationship self-efficacy has to slow thinking, as I can see it going in both directions. Taking the time to deliberately think through a situation and “problem solve” could be due to an individual’s lack of confidence/low self-efficacy in their ability to make snap judgements, but it could also be due to a desire to find true understanding of the situation and a high self-efficacy to do so. I’m excited to explore these connections further in class.

Kahneman in the kitchen

Last week I mentioned that my boyfriend, Jed, is in vet school. One of the great perks about this is care for my dog, Honey, without having to set foot in another animal hospital again or pay another vet bill. In March 2018, I took her to our vet and was pretty determined that would be the last vet bill I’d pay. This week, the vet school offered free heartworm medication for a year if you had proof from your pet’s annual check up or a blood test that it was heartworm free. Unfortunately, Honey’s last heartworm test was too old to use but we decided Jed could probably draw her blood and do the test himself (urged by me, who didn’t want to find a vet in Ohio or pay for this). So, Tuesday night we found ourselves on the kitchen floor with the dog, ready to draw a little blood for the heartworm test. It is worth noting that the vet school doesn’t have first year students practice any skills on live animals, so until Tuesday night the only blood draw Jed had ever done was taking saline solution from a stuffed animal’s plastic vein. I felt confident in his skills though and restrained the dog while he located her vein. He was feeling less than efficacious about the task of drawing real blood from my real (and squirmy) dog, but his System 2 was focused and in control. He knew what the task demanded: find the vein, insert the needle, draw the blood, retract the needle, apply pressure to the vein. He had practiced countless times, albeit on a fake patient, and I’m happy to report that he executed all those steps perfectly. Except one thing, the actual last step which comes after applying pressure to the vein… transferring the blood from the syringe into a vile. And this is where System 1 barged in. Unfortunately, drawing saline solution from a stuffed animal never required that next step of doing anything with it, so the students usually emptied their syringes on the floor, at each other, or into the trash. And so, as soon as the blood was drawn and the needle was out of the dog, Jed automatically did just that. Drops of blood spattered us and the kitchen floor and we just kind of stared at each other for a few seconds before he responded to look on my face and said, “oh, oops… that’s what we always do.”

After we laughed for a minute and cleaned up the blood, we talked about how crucial it is to learn and practice skills authentically. Although I’m fairly sure he will never make that mistake again and it was a great learning experience, it made me think a lot about instances in the classroom where we teach skills out of context. We might think we have taught something fully when in reality we have not provided students with the “big picture” or given them the ability to apply what is taught to their own lives. I find myself pondering how we can replicate or at the very least relate real-world contexts in the classroom so that learning experiences transfer appropriately to real-world experiences.