John Vervaeke - Thinking & Reasoning - Lecture 10 (jdxl-Vh63iY)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=jdxl-Vh63iY

So we got into talking about creativity and we were coming upon the idea that there might be something above and beyond creativity, sorry, there might be something beyond insight problem solving. And the first proposal we looked at was that creativity is the ability to use analogy to trigger or provoke insight. And we took a look at that argument and we took a look at the fact that it didn’t seem to work as an argument. We looked at the best theory of analogy out there, the structural mapping theory, and the problem with the structural mapping theory is that at its core it seems to rely on the very machinery that insight problem solving requires. So instead of analogy being something that causes insight, they seem to be sibling phenomena of the deeper process of relevance realization. So in that case, we didn’t make much progress towards getting a sufficiently independent notion of creativity, independent from insight. So then, many of you have been suggesting this along the way, and I think very astutely, I hope I praised you enough all last time, that what seems to distinguish creativity from insight is something like its motivational structure, the kind of goals it takes, how people are motivated, etc. So we started to take that very plausible idea and develop it. We took a look at Amabeo’s idea of the intrinsic motivation hypothesis, and we noted that she had proposed, and was able to get evidence that intrinsically motivated people are more creative. We then noted that there were some difficulties with this, there wasn’t always a clean distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and also that there was the real possibility of what Amabeo came to call synergistic extrinsic motivation, which is motivation that actually helps provide effective and important feedback for the creative process, and therefore, instead of dividing attention in a deleterious manner, the way standard extrinsic motivation does, synergistic motivation takes that division and feeds the useful feedback into the task. So the idea is that there’s also synergistic extrinsic motivation. So all of this started to take root, and along the way, the idea that there might be something more to motivation, and in fact that motivation might have a dynamic to it, the way we’ve seen that attention has a dynamic to it, started to surface. So this is where we’ll now get into the work we ended the last class on, Michael Apter’s work on a reversal theory, which has had a lot of underground influence, but isn’t as centrally textbook famous as it should be. And I don’t quite know why, given that it was prescient in a lot of ways. Okay, so let’s follow Apter’s argument, because what he wants to do is get a clear account of the structural processing that’s going on with the motivation, and we can then use this to help and understand motivation’s role in creativity. We’ll be able to make links between Apter’s work and Shikshatmaha’s work on flow, and then the connections between creativity and flow, and get into the cognitive process that they’re in, and doing all of that might give us a way of talking about the machinery that is involved, the cognitive machinery that’s involved in creativity, above and beyond insight. Okay, so Apter, what he calls reversal theory, is actually a metamotivational theory. He understands motivation basically as a process in which you have framed, in the language of this course, and he uses a very explicit lookup, by the way, the way you frame, the way you’re interpreting your state of arousal. And he points out that most of the motivation theories have, in fact, tried to find and understand motivation in terms of relationship to arousal. So one of the oldest of these, of course, because he’s always at the beginning of everything in psychology, is Freud, and as many of you know, Freud had a drive reduction theory, right? So this is often in terms of the notion of cataxis and other things like this, that the primary motivation is simply the imperative to reduce arousal. So for Freud, what motivation is is a drive to reduce arousal, and then many of you know that he thought that that meant that we also had a death wish, as well as erotic impulses, and the whole Freudian mythology then spins out. Which, by the way, is an important point. If Freud is fundamentally wrong about motivation, and I think he is fundamentally wrong about motivation, a lot of his theory is thereby threatened. It’s just bang, like that. Okay? So drive reduction theory was challenged later on by Heff. Because Heff was able to point to lots of instances where people are clearly seeking to increase arousal for its own sake. They’re not increasing arousal so they can later defect it away and even more decrease their level of arousal, as Freud would want to say. So what Heff came up with, which is what is known as the optimal arousal theory, the optimal arousal theory. This theory is still pretty standard textbook stuff, in fact. So the Heffian graph looks like this. I love the names on these axes. So this is called hedonic tone, which sounds like a 1977 synth rock group or something like that. And this goes from unpleasant to pleasant. And then this, of course, is arousal. And then, of course, this is familiar because these kinds of Gertz and Dodson curves are very prevalent throughout psychology. So the idea here is this is boredom. This is anxiety. So this is excitement as you’re cresting this way. And this is relaxation as you’re going this way. Because what you’re ultimately after is to be here. That’s the sweet spot. This ultimate level of arousal. Now, in one sense, Heff has to be right in a biologic homeostatic sense. You can’t sort of infinitely arouse yourself or infinitely reduce your arousal because then you’re dead, by the way. So let’s not talk about that. Let’s talk about the phenomenological cognitive level. Because that’s where it’s fair to ask about this. Because, truthfully, that bounded notion of arousal is what we’re talking about with respect to creativity. Given that context, after argues that there are significant difficulties with this interview. So let’s go through these as quickly as we can. Oh, yes, Thomas. I’m sorry. I was just looking for clarification. So boredom and anxiety are points on the graph, but excitement and relaxation are directions of the graph? No, they’re ranges. So they’re basically the range around the optimal point. And excitement is moving up to the optimal point. And relaxation is moving back. So these arrows are not extensive. They don’t mean the whole movement. They mean close to the apex. So proximity to the apex, and what distinguishes them, is the direction of movement towards the apex. Is that okay? Thank you for that one arrow. It was in fact too long. Thank you for pointing that out. That actually bears on after’s criticism. Excitement and relaxation share approximately the same space on the graph. So after a bunch of tests, and found that people do not judge excitement and relaxation to have very similar levels of arousal. This is not in fact the case. People do not judge excitement and relaxation to have very similar levels of arousal. Even more bizarre is that, although this sort of makes sense initially, there’s kind of a bizarre consequence here, is that excitement is lower in arousal than relaxation. Which seems kind of weird. So first of all, this makes predictions about these people judging their level of arousal in these two states to be highly similar. Which was quite easy to disconfirm. And this also makes predictions that when people are in a state of relaxation, they actually are more arousal than in a state of excitement. Which is also quite easy to disconfirm. So, after one-on. So, he noted that excitement only arises with sort of middling stimulation in this graph. Again, we’re talking about inbound phenomenological arousal. But surely it’s possible to feel very strong excitement. Very high levels of arousal. And be very excited. And so he gave the prototypical example of sexual excitement. Sexual excitement has a very high level of arousal. And yet it has also a very high hedonic tone. And then he also argued, isn’t it also the case that you can have extreme relaxation? Where you’re not sort of still mildly stimulated, but you’re actually close to unconsciousness. And yet you’re very relaxed and it’s a very pleasant state. What this is all suggesting, and there’s two more criticisms, is there’s two simplistic relationships between arousal and hedonic tone going on here. And then he also argued, well, not only can excitement and relaxation appear, this is the third point, at the extremes of arousal. Surely you can also have anxiety and boredom found in the center. Can’t you be sort of mildly aroused and anxious? Do you always have to be anxious? Doesn’t seem that that’s right. And you can also be sort of mildly stimulated, mildly aroused and still bored. This usually happens to me when I’m watching baseball. I’m mildly aroused, it’s like, yeah, but I’m going to, yeah, I’m not, like I can’t fall asleep, but I’m kind of bored, quite bored. Finally, he noted that Hebb’s theory claims that the four emotions have unique ranges on the graph. And that has problems in terms of the way you pass between one state and another. Because you must pass through one of the emotions in an invariant order in order to get to the other one. As you move along, changes, increases and decreases in arousal. So for example, excitement is always experienced before anxiety. As arousal starts to increase. So you’re bored and you get excited and then you get anxious. Is that the case? Like is there always sort of a happy time right before you slip into anxiety? That doesn’t seem to be, sometimes, of course, but is it invariant? Because this says it’s invariant. In fact, you should take it, I’m really excited on that. I’m like, this is really good. I better watch out because I’m going to be anxious soon. Is that right? That doesn’t seem to be a very good prediction. So what Aptard did, and he tested several of these empirically, so he’s got a combination of sort of, like, he did, like, this is good science. Derive a bunch of conceptually clear derivations from this theory and show that they’re all quite easily, and he did it, you know, experimentally disconfirmable. And then it’s like, okay, this seems so right, and yet it turns out to be so wrong. And that’s an important thing in science, right? When you get one of those things going on, it means that it’s capturing something, and yet it’s capturing it in fundamentally the wrong way. And we have, of course, seen that as a phenomenon of problem solving throughout the course. And so then Aptard, and I reminded you of this, does the same thing that we saw the Gestalt camp doing in psychology, sorry, for insight problem solving, right? They, Aptard turns to the sort of perceptual machinery as an analogy that was used by the Gestalt psychologists as an analogy for what was going on at insight. So he talks about bi-stable systems, systems that can reverse spontaneously in a self-organizing way. Now, of course, the Gestaltists didn’t use that language, we’re using that anachronistically. And so he points out to something, which I have to tell you the truth, I’m getting really tired of seeing in books and papers and articles, which is the Necker cube. Again and again, the Necker cube, right? And so the idea is notice how it flips. And the same thing can have a very different salience landscape, very different aspectually, and that ability to flip is sort of fundamental. And we saw that perhaps in the end, after a lot of hard work, we might be able to make some formal sense of that Gestalt claim. So Aptard doesn’t do that work, and that’s a criticism, so I’m making it right now, right? But nevertheless, what he goes on to argue is that we have two fundamentally different framings. Just like in the Necker cube, you have two different framings of the same stimulus, we have two fundamentally different ways of framing our level of arousal. And we can flip between them, given different changes in the conditions, which will cause different framings to become more prominent. Okay, let’s go from saying that so abstractly and vaguely to trying to make it more specific. Okay. All right, so what Aptard proposes, right, with the same axes, right, we have, okay, I’ll put this back up. So this is the first one, the tonic cone, and this is unpleasant to pleasant, and this is low to high levels of arousal. So he’s proposing that we have two different modes. This is what he calls a meta-motivational mode. So these are fundamental framings of your level of arousal, and within those framings, you experience arousal in different ways. Okay. So one of these looks like this. And he says, this is where you should place relaxation and anxiety. And then the other one looks like this. And this is boredom and excitement. What would be interesting, what sort of comes out of this, is that the head graph is actually the intersection of the two, which is maybe why it was wrapping so much of our intuition. See, that’s the head graph there. So the idea here is, in one mode, as our arousal goes up, our hedonic tone goes down. In another mode, as our arousal goes up, our hedonic tone goes up. So instead of having it flipping, like within the same function, you actually have two different functions that intersect. So he calls this mode the telic mode and the paratelic mode. Now, this will all now start to connect back up to what we’ve already been talking about. So he says that the short form, it’s helpful but not completely accurate. But the way of thinking about this is that telic is work and paratelic is play. Work and play. So this is play, this is work, and then just so we have it clear, when he’s talking about this framing, he’s talking about the figure-ground relationship. What’s being figured is more salient, more relevant, what’s being backgrounded, etc. So the idea is, in the telic mode, and this would line up somewhat with Amabil’s extrinsic motivation. The paratelic mode would line up with intrinsic motivation. So here, and so what he organizes this in terms of the goal and the activity. Yes? Sorry, you said the paratelic mode is extrinsic motivation? No, I shouldn’t have. I should have said the… That’s what I thought. It’s intrinsic. Then I said it wrong. So thank you for correcting me. The paratelic mode is intrinsic, the telic mode is extrinsic. So thank you for that. Okay, so the idea is that when you pursue an activity for the sake of the goal, so he frames it like this. When the goal is central, right, and you’re doing the task for the sake of the goal, that’s the telic mode. So here’s the activity. The activity is backgrounded because the goal is foregrounded. That’s the telic mode. Paratelic is the activity is central, and what you do is you create goals in order to set up the activity. So for example, there’s goals in a game of chess. Let’s not include people who are playing for their life or someone or something. People are playing chess because they just want to play chess. The goals are set up in order to create the game. And the game exists for its own sake. Whereas in the telic thing, we set up the activity for the sake of the goal. So how are you framing it? Which is backgrounded, which is foregrounded? Now notice he’s using notions like we were talking about that overlap and can provide a connection point between the insight machinery and the motivational machinery. This notion of your salient landscape, what’s being foregrounded, what’s being backgrounded. And then he talks about what are the conditions that allow you to go into this mode? And some of the most important of the conditions have to be a sense of safety and security. Now, interestingly, what you can do then is you can flip people suddenly from one mode to the other by taking them from perceived risk to realization of safety. Okay, so it helps to explain bizarre things that human beings do. Periodically, human beings will pay quite a bit of money to jump out of airplanes. Okay, so try to think about this. This is very bizarre. So the idea is when you jump, you’re under threat because part of your brain is going, ah-ha-ha, right? But, and apparently I’ve talked to skydivers, it takes three jumps for the flip to occur. So you’ve got these two horrible experiences in your life and then you get the flip. Because what happens on the third jump is you jump, you’re in this mode, you have a very high level of arousal, tremendous anxiety, because you think you’re under threat and then the shoot goes and your brain suddenly realizes, oh, and you go boom, to very high excitement. Which is also, by the way, the way you make most horror movies is in reverse, although they’re not horror movies. Horror movies, horror is about losing your grip on reality. Most horror movies don’t do that. Most horror movies are startle and puncture movies. Things jump out at you and people get punctured. But what you do, right, in a horror movie, look, you know you’re going to die in a horror movie if you’ve just had sex. Like if you think you’re in a horror situation, don’t have sex. Don’t volunteer to go in the basement and see what’s down there. Don’t really want to get at the core issue here. No, don’t get at the core issue. Leave. What you do is you put a lot of sexual innuendo, right, and this has been going on for, you put people into the peritelic mode, sexual innuendo, and then they flip over here. And the excitement goes to anxiety. Because if you just started them with a very low level of arousal and then you threaten them, it’s not as shocking. You don’t get the powerful flip you get. That’s why there’s this, I mean, maybe there’s Freudian reasons, I don’t know. I’m always sort of like, you know, a little bit of Freud, right? But here’s an independent, completely independent of the Freudian mythology account for why, you know, we find sex and horror bound up together in a genre. So this is a very powerful theory. It starts to explain a lot of things. So here’s a suggestion, and some of you, you made this suggestion, so I’m going like, yes, right? Some of you are saying it’s kind of like insight, but it seems to be working on a different level or towards a different thing. What if part of what creative people can do is not so much a restructuring of a problem, what if they can restructure their metamotivational mode? So there would be overlap, right? There would be overlap with the insight machinery. They’d be using some of the same intentional processes, some of the same reframing. But what they’re reframing is not a problem, but what they’re reframing is their own interpretation of their own level of arousal. And they’re going into one of these modes. So maybe creative people have an extra degree of cognitive flexibility. In addition to the cognitive flexibility within sort of insight problem solving, maybe they found a way to extend that creativity to the restructuring of the metamotivational mode. And again, that is not a big stretch because the same kind of thing is happening in the same way. So they’re going into a metamotivational mode. And again, that is not a big stretch because the same kind of machinery is now being talked about, being talked about in insight problem solving, but it’s being talked about and extended to something different than what is usually talked about in insight. This is not the restructuring of a problem. So that would require all kinds of things. So first of all, it would require a lot of the intentional making frame and breaking frame things we talked about and the reversal kinds of stuff that he’s specifically talking about. And this would talk about that presumably creative people have a way of reinterpreting situations as fundamentally safe or playful that might not be so easily interpreted by other people. I don’t have any data for this. What I’m trying to do right now, I mean we have data for this part of it, and what I can do is make a very clear case that the same machinery is at work. What I’m trying to do is give you a hypothesis that actually gives a little bit more clarity to something many of you were proposing last class. Yes? Two questions. The first question is, so this predisposes that in the client level of arousal you have to be anxious more excited and you can’t be neither of those two? What would it be to be highly arousal in neither one of those? You just, speaking as someone, like when you exercise and you stop exercising, your heart rate can be very, like, happening and you’re highly aroused, but you’re not excited necessarily. Like you’re finished, so maybe you’re like, ah, I’m done. Yeah, so finished. But you’re also not anxious. Like you don’t feel any, either of those particularly. Right, so the one idea here is that whether or not there’s an equivalency relationship or an interpretation relationship. So he’s arguing that motivation is the interpretation of arousal, but that doesn’t commit him to saying that they’re identical, so that all levels of arousal are motivational levels, are motivational experiences. So I don’t think he’s committed to an identity claim. That’s why I think he tries to avoid that by using the terminology of metamotivational. So then by following into, if you have to be motivated, then is he saying that when you’re being creative or you’re producing things out of creative, you don’t have to be excited necessarily, you just need to be framed more in the paratellic mode? Yeah, I think so. But I think what he’s saying is, as the hedonic tone of the creativity goes up, you’re going to experience that in creativity and excitement, rather than anxiety. That’s the way the prediction would run. So in the beginning of talking about the reversal theory, you mentioned that you’re going to have to craft a similar therapy scale for arousal. Did you notice that it’s not necessarily physiological, but normal arousal? I said it was, it’s not identical to biological measures, because the biological measures do fall within an optimal curve, because if you push them biologically, you’re dead on either end. So we’re talking within where arousal isn’t killing you. So I just wanted to ask if you have a phenomenal experience of arousal, that would address this question of still being biologically arousal. Right. So putting together what you’re saying and what Chloe is saying, there’s probably a subset, and I think of it as a range within the range of biological arousal, there’s a subset that gets phenomenologically appropriated for motivation, which makes sense. The organism is not going to run off every metabolic change and translate it into a motivational state. That would be ridiculous. So is that suggesting that people who have GAD would be less inclined to be creative? Well, it depends. Now that’s where this question gives you more flexibility theoretically, which also makes it more empirically challenging to test than the heavy end thing. Because people that have high levels of anxiety might be capable of creativity if they’ve sort of acquired skills of flipping, of reversing. So it might be that for some people highly creative behavior would be therapeutic for them, given this model. Okay, so now let’s pick it up. Because I want to try and show you where we do have quite a bit of empirical work that would tie this motivational restructuring to the cognitive restructuring thing, and that’s in the phenomena of flow. Let’s study a man made famous by Chik Setmahai, whose name is not pronounced in any way like how it’s written. That’s because I just said Chik Setmahai, and this is how his name is actually written. Still going. Still going. That’s pronounced Chik Setmahai. Which is like when you’re in England. Like when I was in England and I kept, for the first few days I kept pronouncing it like Esther Square until finally one of the two people said it’s Lester Square. And I got really pissed off because there’s all these letters. So then I started, right, what’s your name? Terwilliger, spelled like this. Terwilliger. Yes? It’s actually Hungarian and it’s basically a sound for sound correlation. It’s like literally that’s how you, it’s a very shallow algorithm which is kind of funny. Because we look at it and go ah, but it makes a lot of sense. But okay, my question is. Thank you for that. Fun fact. Anxiety and excitement, can they coexist? Because I feel like they can to some extent. Does it mean you get more towards the middle between high and low excitement? So that’s an interesting question because neither theory allows a mix. But this one perhaps could accommodate it better in that people might be flipping quite quickly back and forth. So when you sort of consider the dangers, you go into anxiety. But then when you feel safe, it goes back to, and you can flip very fast. That’s the whole point about this. I mean think about this guy. They can flip within like a second. Same thing with a movie. When the monster leaps out of the closet with the half naked teenagers. You go from excitement to more very rapidly. So there’s a possibility of sort of rapid oscillation. More of this needs to be done. And so again, I’m trying to tread very carefully here because the whole thing, the whole issue we’re trying to discuss is whether or not this is a viable construct. Can we get something in here that we can make a good theoretical case that’s independent from insight so that we can study it experimentally and empirically? And that’s still the open question in my mind. But I’m trying to do the opposite of straw manning. I’m trying to steel man this argument. Okay. So the flow state, which independently I think, but completely reminiscent of Aftor calls the flow state the autotelic state. Which in fact would have been a better name than Aftor’s peritelic. Because auto means the goal is within itself. All right. So let’s talk about the flow state and then potentially some of the cognitive machinery at work in it. And that may give us, and because there’s quite a bit of empirical research around the flow state, it’s not the same. I get it. It’s not the same as creativity. But it is regarded as deeply connected to, so for example, Chin-San Moai wrote a book called Creativity and Flow. So what I’m suggesting to you is it might be a test case in which we can take these ideas that we germinated in Aftor and see if we can get clearer about what the machinery might be at work in creativity that overlaps with, because that’s the hope here, overlaps with but is nevertheless independent from insight problem solving. Again, right, the idea is can we make a plausible case for the idea of creativity. So back to flow as a test case for where we may get the theoretical vocabulary that is empirically back that we’re looking for. So many of you have probably experienced the flow state. So the flow state is a state of intense involvement. You’re absorbed in the task. But the task is also highly demanding. So it’s not like you’re absorbed in a task where you’re just fiddling with a paperclip and your mind is sort of blank. You’re just going, as you wait for your death or something. Right? But we talk about killing time, which is a very strange metaphor to think about. So the idea is you get a paradoxical state in the flow state. You have a sense of intense effort because you can see how, you’re aware of how active you are. Right? But nevertheless it seems effortless to you. So terms like race or flow, right, are used. Now what’s interesting about flow, and this has been pretty well substantiated, is it seems to be a very clear instance of a genuine universal. And those are hard to find in psychology. What I mean by that is people of different socioeconomic statuses, different occupation, different ages, different genders, different historical, religious, cultural contexts, would describe this experience almost exactly the same at detailed levels. Which is really, really powerful. And Shiksa Mahal has argued, and I think very plausibly, the fact that it’s universal, right, and the fact that it has, he originally called it optimal experience, that it’s optimal in two senses, suggests something about it. Before we get to the suggestion, what does he mean by it’s optimal in two senses? It’s optimal in that many people regard this as the best experience you can have. We’ll talk a little bit more about its phenomenology in a minute. So much so, by the way, that there is some emerging evidence that the more you flow in life, the better you rate your life. The more flow experiences you have, the more meaningful, the better, the more you like your life. The fewer your flow experiences, the more you don’t like your life. The more you find your life lacking in meaning. Now, of course, there are other things that are predictive of meaning, and the interesting thing about meaning predictions is they separate from subjective well-being. Subjective well-being is sort of how good you feel. I’m sort of like, I don’t know, I feel really good right now. Sort of like you’re in the middle of a shampoo commercial or something. That’s subjective well-being. And the thing is there are experiences that reliably drive subjective well-being way down while driving meaning in life up. The prototypical one is having a kid. So having a child reliably makes your subjective well-being crash and collapse, and it cuts yours off your life too. And yet people say it’s one of the most reliable predictors of increased meaning in life. Okay, so what’s interesting is in this you seem to be getting all of that together. So it’s optimal, right? Subjective well-being and optimal in contributing towards meaning. It’s also optimal in performance. So people generally, the sense that people are performing at their best are often performing above what they could normally or usually do is largely true. So it’s optimal in both the senses of efficaciousness and experiential value. Where experiential value I’m using to cover both senses of subjective well-being, like yummy, yummy, good, good feelings, and meaning, meaningful life, meaning, meaning. Okay, so the way you get into the flow state is you have to have this situation, what he calls the flow channel. Which doesn’t quite map onto APTOR, and part of the work that needs to be done is to integrate these two together. Something that myself and Leo Ferraro are trying to do. But the basic idea here is, sorry, yes? You can extend the basic idea and not else. Okay, so the idea to be in the flow state is that you’re put in situations in which the demands of the situation can be just barely matched by your skills. So much so that you basically have to invest all of your attention and coordinate as many of the relevant skills as you can in order to meet the demands of the situation. So a prototypical example is when you’re sparring with somebody who’s as good as you or maybe even slightly better than you. You have to give everything you’ve got, as they say. Sorry, this will now start to sound like every sports beer commercial in existence. Because athletics, of course, are flow-inducing mechanisms. They have no other real good explanation. So what’s going on is that the task demands so much that you have to put all of your skills in, which is why you get this absorption, which is the key phenomenological aspect of it. Yes, thank you for waiting. So one of the issues that I can see immediately with this is that in this study, or one of the studies, they had this whole thing about measuring people at work and whether or not they’re like, oh, in work less people have high skills and high demand, therefore it must be the flow state, therefore people enjoy more work than they think. But if we just said previously that not all forms of arousal are necessarily motivational… That’s exactly the problem here. And that’s exactly it. Because it’s possible that you could be in the telep mode and have this situation and you wouldn’t flow. But even not being in the telep mode, it could also be not related to motivation at all. Taking notes really fast could be really focused and take all your skills, but you’re not anxious or excited. Your focus, usually when you’re taking notes, is not, what am I writing down? Is it good? It’s usually like, I have to do this really quickly, but I also have to pay attention. So it’s not goal-focused or inherently focused in terms of motivation. So it’s not… Well, I mean, that’s not quite right. It’s goal-focused, right? You try to take the best notes you can. You’re not just randomly writing stuff down. It’s kind of goal-focused, but it’s not the only thing you’re doing that’s goal-focused. Sure, that does. I get that. I’m not quite sure what to do about that point, but I do think the first point that I addressed is part of what I was trying to say about just having this might not necessarily put you into the flow state because you may be very teleically oriented rather than paratelically oriented or autotelically oriented. Or another way of putting this is that this may be necessary but not sufficient for flow. Yes? What’s the channel called again? The flow channel. Flow channel. That’s why the flow is in the channel. Okay. And are you going to talk about how I can integrate those two things? That’s what I was just doing. Okay. Sorry, I didn’t need to sound dismissive. That was just so disgusting. No, I know. I’m sorry. I apologize. That was just inappropriate. Okay. What I meant is this is what I’m doing. What I’m trying to say is, right, I’m picking up on what Chloe was saying. Part of what needs to be done is to, right, is that what’s not addressed here enough is the framing issue that APTER puts quite a bit of, directs a lot of attention to. And if I can just add one note to that, the problem also with this diagram, another problem with this diagram, is that it’s static. The problem for you is that you have this amazing capacity to do what we all call problem solving, learning, and so your skills improve in a situation, which means if the conditions remain unchanged, you will quickly drop out of flow. So that is why the flow is best induced in which the demands of the environment can ratchet up so that you’re constantly just beyond your skill capacity. That’s why sparring is an excellent example, because your opponent can ratchet up there right. So this helps to explain what is the best flow induction technology we have ever created. Okay, so you’re playing it, and it has levels that as you start to get better at the level, you get bumped to another level. Video games. Video games, which is how we induce flow typically in the lab. Yeah. It’s possible you won’t get into flow. Why is that? Because if you’re very extrinsically motivated, you might just remain highly anxious. It might not flip over into being a positive experience for you. Like I said, you’re not going to get into flow, you’re going to be in the flow. You’re going to be in the flow. You’re going to be in the flow. You’re going to be in the flow. It’s going to flip over into being a positive experience for you. Like I tell you while you’re running from a bear that you get into the flow state. Now, don’t laugh too much, because people in war do sometimes flip into the flow state. They’ll be in the middle of battle. This is reported. And what’s interesting is why they flip into the flow state, and other people who are also using all of their skills to meet a very demanding situation don’t flip into the flow state. And it has to do something with, right, they tend to lose a kind of egocentrism. Sorry, but in a bear situation, most likely in a war situation, wouldn’t the demands be higher than your skill? No, because you survive. I mean, your goal is don’t die, and you don’t. But wouldn’t you perceive it as, you know, like the bear is going to catch up with me? Well, if you just believe that, you’re dead. So you keep working towards the goal of not getting killed by the bear or by the acromats. Yes? There was a, in the book, I think, Rise of Superman by Stephen Collar and Jamie Will, they talk about flow state in like extreme sports, but they also talked about in like mountaineering, and one of the first sort of, you know, evidence of flow. This guy, I can’t remember who he was, Professor O’Farrell, but it must have been a few years ago, he fell off a cliff, and he did this exact flip where he was initially anxious. So that’s sort of like you’re running away from a bear, he’s falling off a cliff, he’s initially anxious. But then he flipped and got into flow state sort of midway down and started noticing detail, just like all this information. So I think, it sounds like, you know, you’re sort of getting the argument that these two need to be more tightly integrated together, and that the framing issue is actually much more crucial to flow than is properly acknowledged by Csikszentmihalyi’s theory, which of course is something for a baby to love to say. Because framing overlaps with, you know, breaking friend, making friend, etc., etc. Yes? When people test for cognitive flexibility, they look at promotion focus versus prevention focus affect. Does that tie into framing? Probably, yeah. So part of the problem also is we have, I mean, which is again, kind of, an ongoing issue in psychology in general. We have sort of related, it looks like related phenomena, or perhaps even the same phenomena under different titles or different terms being studied by different groups. Yeah. So yes, it could be. I don’t know enough about that literature. You can do it. The past generations of emotions I didn’t really look into, but it seems very vague. Yeah, I don’t, for example, I don’t think this maps on to, like, approach and avoid or any of those more basic kind of ideas. Okay. So let’s talk about some of the characteristics of the flow state. Let’s talk about some of the characteristics of the flow state. Okay, so as I said, there’s intense involvement. There’s the paradoxical state of intense effort that is being experienced as effortlessness. So what comes along with this is a sense of atonement, which when you write it down, try to remember the original meaning, because if this term has been taken over by Christianity and turned into something else, you probably would pronounce it as atonement, which is about Jesus’ sacrifice for humanity and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, that it’s actually out-onement. So you feel at one, you feel at one with your environment, and you feel deeply coupled and connected to it, which is probably part of why it is so conducive to an enhanced sense of meaning, because people typically express meaning in terms of deep connections and usually deep connections to what’s real, which of course is also problematic that flow can be, well we’ll talk about that later, flow can be hijacked by non-real environments. Okay, so what do I mean by that at one minute, like this happens again when I’m sparring, when you get into the flow state, like a punch is thrown and your hand just goes there, and you just know what to do next, it’s really cool, and you can sort of get, and I don’t mean to go hyperbolic or weird, you can get a sense of why people sort of came up with words like enthusiasm, which literally means to be possessed by God, and theos, because you feel like something is moving through you as opposed to you doing something, so that’s also connected with another feature, which might be the reverse of what we were talking about, why some people flip into flow and other people don’t, and I said what seems to trigger the flip is sort of being non-egocentric, being sort of allocentric rather than egocentric, and what makes that possible is the reverse seems to be the case, when you’re in the flow state, people lose, right, they lose self-consciousness, okay, now, that’s a very philosophically loaded term, I’m using Chick-Sentmaha’s language, so we have to soften it a bit, but first before we do, please do not put on the test, please think about it, don’t put that in the flow state, people lose consciousness, okay, you don’t do very much, very well when you’re unconscious, it’s not conducive to optimal performance, okay, so I’m forewarning you, if you say that, you will lose a lot of marks, because it’s a really not smart thing to say, now, what does he mean by self-consciousness, and many of you know, like, that’s a philosophically loaded term, he doesn’t mean sort of your sense of where you are in space and time, because you couldn’t spark, you couldn’t do like what the goalie needs to do in the net, you couldn’t do any of those things, okay, what he means is, you lose that reflective, natural ring nanny that’s in your mind, that is always concerned about your image presentation, how am I doing, how do I look, how’s my hair, what are they thinking about me, how’s this going, how am I doing, how’s my hair, how do I look, should I, maybe I should straighten it out, I should laugh a little bit more, how am I doing, how do I look, how’s my hair, you know that voice? And it also, that, so, we talked about this as sort of the, you know, the narrative ego, it’s part of an egocentric framing, because you’re running sort of an ongoing story in which you are the central protagonist, and so what people report, right, in the flow state is all of that, that narrative mattering, right, egocentrism is lost. Now, I’m not saying that procedural egocentrism is lost, obviously people still see themselves at the center of a phenomenological field, I’m talking, by the way, this is Verbecky trying to clean up Chik Set Mahai, so he’s not saying stupid stuff, right, right, so, but I think what can be plausibly argued, if you read through the reports, and I’ve read through a lot, right, is what is meant is that kind of narrative egocentrism, right, that is constantly doing image management is lost. Which is one of the, which is, for me, right, I do a lot of flow induction behavior, so, sorry, like I practice Tai Chi, I practice martial arts, I do lots of things, like Taoism is basically the religion of flow, that’s what it basically is. So, one of the, for me, one of the phenomenological benefits of the flow state is exactly that, you are free from that sort of self-conscious, napring, narrative, right, ego, it’s gone, it falls away, it also falls away in deep meditation, which is also important, because that would connect up to some of the framing machine we talked about. Other important features of the flow state, phenomenological features, super salience, when you’re in the flow state, people talk about it being like super salient, everything, it’s like the colors and the vividness and the attractiveness of things is very high. There’s an ongoing sense of discovery in the flow state, like you’re just, like you’re understanding and realizing things you didn’t quite understand or realize before, you’re making connections that you didn’t or couldn’t make before, right, so now you’re starting to see why this state is thought to be so intimately connected with creativity. Okay, now, Jig Sath Mohai doesn’t really give a good cognitive theory, I think the fact that the framing, right, the cognitive machinery, the cognitive aspects of the framing, hasn’t been sufficiently addressed, also comes into play, but he does ask a very good question about this, right, he tries to ask, why is it so highly valued, why is it universal, like what’s going on, does it fall from him, flow is a sense that humans have developed in order to recognize patterns of action that are worth preserving and transmitting over time, now of course that’s helpful but it’s ridiculously vague because we have all kinds of things that do that for us that aren’t flow, I think what he’s, and so if you read some of his other work, what he is pointing to, what he’s pointing to is that in the flow state, right, something is going on that evolution has marked, right, evolution really marks this so that human beings, right, seek this state out, it helps to explain, again, a lot of very bizarre behavior, so one of the activities that until video games was one of the best inducers of the flow state is rock climbing, now if you describe it sort of objectively, you sort of pretend you’re a Martian, rock climbing sounds like one of those horrors in the 80s that villains are subject to, okay you, thermistically, you know what you have to do, what, you have to climb this rock, oh, it will be very tiring and exhausting, you will scrape and hurt yourself, you will damage yourself, you can potentially fall and kill yourself, okay, then once you get to the top, yes, come back down. Okay, so, right, it seems that, right, why people do things like rock climbing is precisely because it induces the flow state, now that’s very helpful because we can start to ask ourselves why, why do things like rock climbing induce the flow state? So, one more thing from Chick-San-Mahai before we start to address these questions, he also talks about sort of the, he talks a lot about attention, he talks about it in different ways, and he uses different languages, sometimes he uses the language of entropy and information, and I think there’s a consistent picture in there, but I haven’t seen one place where it is all consistently worked out, so please be aware that I’m giving you my best sort of just, you know, attempt to integrate a Ghibli-kel kind of thing from him. So, the central features of how information flows within, right, the flow state, no pun intended. Okay, so, the information coming has to be clear, so, when you do, if you’re interacting with an environment and you do something, and what comes back from you is ambiguous, like a first date, you say something and then the other person, I don’t know, what, was that good? Did that work? I don’t know. Say something more. Again, don’t know. Again, don’t know. Again, don’t know. Which is why you get into this other state when you’re on a first date, which is sort of anti-flow, right? So, you need the opposite, you need, you do an action and the feedback from the environment is clear. Okay. Think again about video games. You do something and there’s clear feedback. This is one of the reasons why video games are intoxicating because the environment is so, is so responsive. Okay. Okay. Next, the information, in addition to being clear, has to be tightly coupled. There can’t be sort of weird temporal lags between your action and the response from the environment. It has to be tightly coupled. If I vary my action, so, as I vary my action, the environment should vary, vary tightly with it. Does that make sense? So, you know, when I’m sparring, I shift a little bit, the person shifts like zzzzzz, right? If I shift and nothing happens, I’m going to quickly either like, I’m just going to punch the person and they’re going to fall over, right? It’s going to get boring. So, tightly coupled, highly correlated variation. Okay. As delta x is highly predictive of delta y, right, next, the feedback has to be diagnostic. It has to be highly relevant, procedurally relevant. What does that mean? Error matters. So, what can kick you almost immediately out of the flow state is significant error. So, the idea is, but what he did, see, again, not, like this is good, but what he doesn’t say is, he doesn’t say, okay, that’s not completely fair. Sorry, again, many different voices in my head from this guy, because he talks differently at different times. He doesn’t talk a lot about the cognitive processes that will help generate this kind of information flow. Except, he reliably talks about one thing that does. Reliably. There is one cognitive process, right, and he leaves it just like, he doesn’t delve into it. So, the one cognitive process that reliably is flow inducing is mindfulness. Which, again, makes sense, not given what he’s saying, but what the argument is going on in this class, because we’ve argued that mindfulness is, you know, a self-organizing dynamic of breaking frame and making frame. Yes? Like, with the idea… Could you speak more loudly, please? Yes. With the idea of, like, how you just said significant error, which can take you out of a flow state, doesn’t that, and also with the connection to mindfulness, does that go against the idea that there has to be a specific level of challenge within the flow state? Because, like, within mindfulness, there’s not necessarily that, like, control, controlling of a task, like, a challenge error in that sense? Right. So, it’s not that mindfulness is flow. He’s saying that training in mindfulness makes you more capable of going into flow. Yes. Okay. So, that’s one part. But the other part is, yeah, so the point is the environment has to be highly demanding, but your skills have to be such that you’re meeting the demands. If the error piles up very rapidly, then you fall out of the flow state. Okay. But what you need is, you need it such that, the environment is such that if error occurs, it matters. You can be in environments where errors don’t matter very much. Okay. Because the environments are very loose, right? If error doesn’t matter very much, chances are in that environment you can’t get into the flow state very readily. So, like, you wouldn’t really be able to get into, like, the flow state while gardening or something like that? Because there’s not necessarily a challenge, like, an error. Yeah. I mean, the errors wouldn’t have that much impact. Yeah. That’s interesting. What could you do to get the flow state in gardening? It would have to be sort of martial art gardening or something. I don’t, I mean, people can get very relaxed and content. I don’t deny that, but the flow state, yeah. Yeah. So where error signal doesn’t matter a lot, right, it’s very hard. Okay. So, again, the framing issue is clearly being invoked here because we know about the deep connection between mindfulness and insight. And we’ve got these features of the information flow feedback, right? Okay. So, oh, sorry, Chloe, I didn’t see your hand. I just have a really good question. So, because we’re talking about states that can’t, like, errors don’t matter, it’s hard to induce flow, but the tie-in to creativity of artwork probably produces a lot of flow. But some artworks, I mean, there’s, like, if you’re sculpting, you make an error, like, that can be pretty big. But for a lot of types of things, like, sketching or comics or even just writing, like, you can edit those. But if an error doesn’t actually, like, you can induce that, but how are you saying, like, an error does or doesn’t matter when it’s something that, like, even if it matters, you can say, like, you can also edit it so it doesn’t matter. Right. So that would be interesting. So people typically talk about, I’m trying to think of a writing instance. So producing poetry, many people report, can get you into the flow state. And then, of course, the thing there is that there is sort of a high error threshold. Jazz also is another artistic performance that is a very powerful flow inducer. And again, error really matters there because it’s, like, it’s highly noticed when it occurs. So I’m wondering, so what would be an instance? So is it sort of, I’m trying to get clear about what you’re, like, is it sort of painting and not caring what happens kind of thing? No, because in both poetry and in jazz, you don’t go from I have nothing to bam, this is all of my poetry, this is all of my jazz. You go through several things where you actually have lots and tons of error. Right. So you’ve gone through error and then you, in one sense, like in your first draft, error doesn’t matter because you can change all of that. Right. I’m saying how are you saying, like, matters in terms of matters for the final performance versus matters for each individual process? Right. It matters in the, yeah, it matters in the environment in which you’re trying to sort of do the thing for its own sake. So it would, so where it would matter in the poetry is when you’re trying to, where you’re going beyond sort of brainstorming, which by the way doesn’t seem to be flow-inducing, to actually trying to, like, get something that works as a poem. But then that’s still, like, an error? Like, I don’t know if I’m just not semantically… What’s going, let me make clear. So when you’re in the flow state, error goes down dramatically because you’ve got, as you were suggesting, you’ve got the expertise. But you’re in a situation where the error will be very salient and disruptive of the performance. Sometimes, but not always. Like, if you’re writing poetry, you can make lots of friends with spelling errors that going back to your second draft, you’ll be like, Like, what was I even thinking? Like, you thought you were in the flow state, you go back and you’re like, this is terrible. All of this needs to be rewritten. I just wrote the sentence, like, I used the word remember five times in the same paragraph. But so obviously when you were in the flow state previously, you did make a lot of errors. And those errors were obviously not salient at the time. Right. So that’s what I’m saying, like, how do you, lots of errors and then still in the flow state? Or is it like… The errors are, I assume, are going to be defined relative to the goal. So if all you’re trying to do is sort of get your ideas on paper, those errors typically aren’t going to block you from doing it. Lots of people want to respond to your work. Yes. I think you can think of it this way. So when you’re writing your ideas down, it doesn’t matter if there are errors or not. Because in that moment, you don’t think of them as errors. But if in that moment you do realize that you typed a word wrong or got one idea wrong, then you completely lose it. It’s like you lost your train of thought and you just pulled out of that. That’s what I mean. It’s whether or not it’s being appropriated in error relative to the goal of the task. Yes. Related to that, I think it would be possible to draw a parallel between poetry and, for example, when you’re writing an elegant paper or a journal after you write anything like that and you’re kind of going forward and you’re really writing sentence after sentence, this all makes sense and sounds good. Sometimes you’re like, oh, I lost that word. And then you have this feeling of, no, it’s a swit. You can’t think of what you should use there. Maybe that is the type of error in the situation that would have that stop. Okay, we’ll take two more on this. And then I’m sorry, but we’re going to have to close off this. I just want to suggest something to you, then we’ll take a break. Is that okay? Did somebody, Michelle and Mike? You’re done? Okay. So basically, because I personally do art and music, so some of the error things that we talked about, I think error provides a salience of action, I guess. So if you make an error, then you try your best to make up for that error, especially in painting and music. So if you play a note wrong, then you have to think about how to integrate that into the rest of your work. And then if you paint a wrong brush, then in digital you can just control the undo. But in real life painting, you have to make up for that mistake, whether to integrate it or to ask me for something else. I think so. And so, and Chik Sattmohai sometimes uses this language somewhere else, but I didn’t want to use it because it would sound sort of self-promotional. It talks about the errors have to be relevant to you. Or at least relevant to the tasks that are relevant to you. Okay. Okay. So I want to now just propose something to you. But well, I won’t fully propose it. I want to set up the proposal, then we’ll go on a break. We’ll come back and do the proposal. Then I’m going to try and unpack it and draw again some of the other machinery that may be at work. What we are seeing though is again that the framing machinery of insight can be doing lots of other stuff for us. That’s, I think that’s now, should be becoming non-controversial to you. The framing machinery can be used to switch between the paratellic and terat, and telic modes. And it can also be used to help engender the flow state. Okay. And so again, maybe creative people, again, notice I keep saying maybe because I’m trying to build an alternative here. Maybe creative people have a capacity to use framing in such a way to do these other kinds of transformations and also create more insight. Now, a little bit of the preamble. Okay. I’m going to shift into an argument here. And again, I have to, this is another area where I have published work. It’s coming out actually next year. Okay. So it’s a book, it’s the Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Thought, which is a weird title, Spontaneous Thought. It sounds like something that happens when you’ve got OCD or something. But what they meant by spontaneous thought is any of these aspects of cognition that don’t seem to be sort of ego driven, that it’s more that you participate in them than you directly make them happen. That’s what’s meant by spontaneous thought. Is that okay? So this is work that I did with Leo Ferraro and Ariane Heribene. And then there’s another paper that’s in submission that I’ve done with. And what I want to try to suggest to you is how we can understand flow in terms of a couple of important mechanisms. One is the insight machinery, which I’ve already been sort of foreshadowing. The other is the implicit learning machinery, right, which we haven’t talked about very much in the course. And then also the relationship between them. The relationship between them. Okay. So let’s take a break here. Come back at 2.45. And we’ll go deeper into flow. Or we’ll go more deeply into flow. Or other such self-referential topics. If you have your essay, please send it in. So what might be going on in the flow state cognitively? Should we sort of start integrating these different pieces around framing and changing the CELES landscape, etc.? So what myself and Leo and Ariane proposed is something that is sort of easy to explain to you. Part of what’s going on in flow, because there’s going to be a couple pieces of machinery. If we go back to the rock climbing example. Okay. So I’ve talked to rock climbers and there have been studies of people studying flow who have talked to rock climbers. And the thing about rock climbing is it’s kind of interesting because what seems to happen is you’re climbing along and you almost literally impasse. And then you have to sort of restructure how you are looking at it. You have to sort of alter the way you’re looking at things in a kind of a profound way. And then that affords you to move on to another location that challenges you with a potential impasse that you restructure around so that you don’t actually end up impassing. Because of course if you can’t restructure a way out of it and you impasse, you’re in a lot of trouble. And what seems to happen then is the idea that what’s going on is kind of a procedural priming that’s occurring from one moment to the next. You sort of restructure in one situation and it gets, it avoids becoming, it threatens to become an impasse and instead becomes a challenge that is overcome, that affords you moving to another situation that threatens to become an impasse that you restructure into a challenge that you overcome that affords you. And you see what happens here? What’s happening is you’re getting a procedural priming of one sort of insight experience, right? Priming the next one. So we actually said, we called this the insight cascade. Right? Where what’s happening is a cascade of breaking frame and making frame that is procedurally priming itself in such that things that are threatening as impasses are being restructured in time into challenges, right, that are overcome, that actually afford you moving to further on in the task or the environment in which you’re moving. So the advantages of thinking about this is because it would very nicely tie the cognitive machinery that we’ve been seeing going on here about framing, right, and reversing, right, and also some of the phenomenological aspects, the experiential aspects of flow. Because part of it would be, right, that ongoing sense of discovery that defines flow matches up with something like an insight cascade. Secondly, the supersalience of flow would be the moments of the supersalience from the aha moments being also strung together. So if you’ll allow me, speaking a little bit oversimplistically, it would be like flow is an extended aha moment, or extended aha moments that are interpenetrating each other. It would help to explain why the sense of deep involvement, it would help to explain why you tend to get out of that egocentric framework, because as you know, right, insight is as much something that self-organizes within you as something you directly do. So why that, again, let me build all the pieces. I mean, you’re free to ask questions along the way, but there’s going to be several pieces to this. So this would help to explain why your brain would like you to be on flow. Because think about what we talked about this. This would be like you basically stringing fluency spikes together. Fluency, fluency spike, fluency spike, fluency spike, fluency spike. Your brain is basically saying you’re in a situation in which you are training yourself to do a kind of ongoing problem solving at a high rate of fluency in situations that require a lot of insight. Or that’s a very long way of saying this really ramps up your insight problem solving abilities. It would tend to make insight more of a dispositional trait for you as opposed to a periodic state. So that would be one part of it. But I think there’s more going on in flow than that. Now I have to digress for a moment to explain something to you. And then to be patient with me, we’ll get back to it. So this goes back to basically some original work done by Arthur Reber in 1967. He wrote a culminating book on it, The Cognitive Unconscious in 1993. Ongoing work on this on the phenomenon known as implicit learning. And again, so this won’t initially connect. So give me time. Please give me time. So implicit learning works like this. You basically give people, so what you do is you create an artificial grammar. It’s called the Markov grammar. Not all artificial grammar is the Markov grammar. He used the Markov grammar. Look, that doesn’t matter. It’s an artificial grammar. You just create an arbitrary set of rules for letter and or number strings. Like your arbitrary rule might be you can’t have two vowels beside each other. You must have three consonants near each other. If you have two vowels, you have to have an odd number. You just create arbitrary rules. They’re not used morphologically in our numeracy or our literacy. So you just create an arbitrary set of rules. And then you create a whole bunch of strings. Like it might be letter strings. It might be TL227BC4 or something like that. You create these letter strings. And you make them long enough that you can’t sort of hold them in working memory. And then what I do is I show you a bunch of these strings that have been generated by the grammar. So every string that I show people has been generated by the grammar. Here’s one, here’s one, here’s one, here’s one, here’s one, here’s one, here’s one. Like you can imagine people like what? Okay, now here’s the task. Now people are going to be given two types of strings. They’re always going to be using the same letters and numbers, like the same number of letters and numbers. But some of them will have been, some of them new. So here’s the training set. Here’s the test set. Some of these will have been generated by the grammar, the grammatical, the artificial grammar. And some of them not. And so this is the task you give people. I’m going to give you a string and you’re going to tell me if it belongs with the previous strings. If it fits in with the previous strings. Do you understand the task? Now he was doing this originally because he was proposing about language learning, but then he got sort of sidetracked because of the results. People score well above chance on this. Reliably well above chance. They’ll say, yeah, that one belongs, that one doesn’t. That one belongs, that one doesn’t. That’s weird, right? It’s really weird. By the way, this is, implicit learning is taken as evidence that the Atkinson Schiffrin thing is wrong, that not everything passes through working memory in order to get into cognition. But that’s part of why it’s part of the bigger debate about things. But just so you know, if you come across, you may come across the idea of implicit learning in that area. I’m not going to talk about any of that. I want to concentrate on this. So what’s interesting is the following. Again, you can ask people, how are you doing this? The most common response is, I don’t know. The second most common response is people give you rules that they’re using. And it’s clearly that they’re confabulating because these rules would not predict their success. So they think they’re doing this, blah, blah, blah, blah, but they’re not because if they were doing blah, blah, blah, blah, they would not be succeeding the way they are. So people either don’t know or they confabulate. So what seems to be going on is, right, is you seem to have a capacity for picking up on very complex patterns. Very complex patterns. Now, here’s interesting. I give you the same, I take another group of participants, redo this experiment, but while this is happening, tell people to make this an explicit task. Tell them that the letter strings, the letter number strings have been generated by rules. Try to figure out the rules. Try to figure out the patterns. Okay, so make it an explicit task. Try to figure out the rules. Try to figure out the patterns. And then I’m going to give you ones, you’re going to have to tell me whether they belong or not. What do you think happens to people’s performance when you make it an explicit task like this? It goes down dramatically. They can’t do any better than chance. They often do worse, which is kind of strange. Maybe they’re actually masking something that would bring them up to chance or something. But anyways, it destroys it. Now, this is, implicit learning is a cottage industry. We keep generating experimental evidence for its existence. There is a lot of controversy about it, which I, sorry, I can’t go into it. I’m just going to give you my gist of it. I think a lot of the controversy around implicit learning has been a waste of time because the debate got framed, and I think very poorly, think about problem formulation, in terms of whether or not implicit learning was a conscious or unconscious process. Given that we have no good way of defining what the hell consciousness is, this has been a useless debate, as you can imagine. In terms like consciousness, awareness, attention, perception have all been slid around in the debate. So, I’m not going to try and give you what do I ultimately think is going on in the brain in implicit learning. What I take it is that the phenomena exists, and that in some sense, it’s taking place outside of explicit directed awareness. Yes? With implicit and explicit learning, I guess interchangeable with conscious and unconscious? No, that’s the problem. Because you presumably aren’t unconscious of the letter strings. Or subconscious processing, I think? Well, but most of even your conscious process is dependent on subconscious processing. When you’re paying attention to my face right now, what are you doing in order to make it into a face? You know? No. Does that mean you’re unconscious of my face? No. Are you fully unconscious of paying attention to my face? No. Anyways, this is the point, Michelle. I don’t want to do this because this debate is like, it just merbles around like a slightly broken down vehicle on the African Sabana. Is that part of procedural learning, or are they two different things? I think it’s procedural in the sense that what, I mean, I think this is, everybody in the controversy would agree on this. You’re picking up on complex patterns in a way that’s largely adaptable. Is that? Yeah. So I think given how we’ve talked about it in this class, it would count as the acquisition of a kind of skill. But I think there’s a better way of saying what you require than a skill, which is what Hogarth argues. Hogarth argues that what you get out of implicit learning, and actually you can also reverse this, he gives a way of operationalizing or understanding something that has typically not been well operationalized or understood. He says that the result of implicit learning is intuition. Intuition is your ability to make judgments or to perform appropriate actions, often without knowing how or why you know how to do this. In fact, intuitions would in fact seem to be the capacity for responding to very complex patterns and not knowing how you’re capable of doing it. Yes? So then in tests of intelligence, when they’re asking you what comes next, what’s the pattern? Because they’re being explicit, is that going to affect them because they’re not going to use intuition? Yes. I think so. But their metric is intuition. No, I think you’re right. Because people are directed to frame it and pursue it as an explicit task, they’re not testing for intuition. Yes. Which of course is problematic then. So what seems to be going on here is, in Hogarth’s work is, we’ve got a way to operationalize something that was very mysterious. Now the problem is intuition has meant a couple things. The first thing is that intuition has meant something like this, where you have this hunch, or you just have a sense, you just know what to do. There’s that. And you make intuitive judgments all the time. In fact, most of your judgments are intuitive. So you’re making ongoing intuitive judgments, for example, about what’s the proper way to posture your body right now. This is fine. And even this is kind of okay. But if he was sort of putting his feet up here and stretching his arms back, it’s like, what’s wrong with Thomas? Doesn’t he understand that this is a classroom? Okay. So a lot of your judgments are intuitive. In fact, what seems to be the case is the more complex, the more there are interacting variables, the better it is usually for you to rely on your intuitive judgment than your analytic judgment. So there seems to be, and Hogarth talks about this, an accuracy complexity trade-off. Okay. So this is important. And notice that this is a term that is also often invoked in the context of creativity. Creativity is thought to be a very intuitive process. Now, part of that got, of course, taken up by romanticism as a philosophy of epistemology and aesthetics. That was generally a disaster. But there’s an important idea here, I think, that being able to work with very complex patterns is an important ability. But, and here’s Hogarth’s point, intuition’s power is also, its greatest strength is its greatest weakness. Its greatest power is also its greatest peril. See, it picks up on patterns, it picks up on complex patterns implicitly. Non-reflectively, non-directively. Which means, right, it has two very important limitations. There was actually a book written called, how, what was the name of the book? Intuition, its power and its peril. Two limitations. Intuition, implicit learning, can’t distinguish causation from correlation. It’ll pick up on any complex pattern. It’ll pick up on a causal pattern, a correlational pattern, a mixture of causation and correlation, it doesn’t distinguish them. And it’s kind of locked at the level of concrete operations. It can’t generalize, in the sense of extrapolating. It only forms patterns in terms of what has been presented as opposed to what could be the case. It’s stuck on actuality, it never explores possibility. Okay, so those are two sort of very, very dangerous aspects of intuition. Which of course is why your intuition can go radically wrong. Because it can pick up on illusory patterns, and it can make very incorrect, right, judgments because it works in terms of only what has happened, not what can happen. Now, Pogarus says, interestingly, he wrote a book called, Educating Intuition, about how do we try to enhance the power of intuition while reducing the peril. And he says, well first of all, you can’t replace implicit learning with explicit learning. That’s a disaster. So what can you do explicitly? Well what you can do explicitly is to pay attention to the environment in which you’re doing your implicit learning. You can set the environment up explicitly when you can, obviously, depending on whether or not you have that intervention power. But if you can, you can explicitly set up the environment so as to help address these issues. And he says, these are exactly the issues you face in science. You have to try to distinguish causation from correlation, and you have to test possibility, not just actuality. So what he says, although he didn’t really address the second one as well as the first, and that’s something that Leo and I picked up on. What he says is, set up the situation like we do in science. So what we do in science is we set up the situation so that the feedback we’re getting from the environment, the patterns we’re picking up, the feedback on the patterns we’re picking up, sorry, will help us to distinguish causation from correlation. So what do we do? He says, well, you want to make sure that the feedback you’re getting, like in this, is clear. Yes, that is a pattern, no, that’s a pattern. You have to have very clear feedback. So if you’re implicitly learning in situations where there’s all kinds of ambiguous information, you’re going to glom onto all kinds of correlational patterns. So you want your feedback and your actions to be tightly coupled, because that’s what we do in an experiment. We vary the independent variable and see how tightly the dependent variable tracks it. So you want it tightly coupled. And then the third thing is error matters. Error should have the capacity to impact on your pattern generating machinery. And he says, he calls this a kind learning environment, because if you set your implicit machinery at work within that environment, you significantly increase the chances that the intuitions you’ve picked up are intuitions about causal patterns as opposed to correlational or hybrid patterns. And you’ve seen those three before. Where have you seen those before? Remember? Anybody remember those? Yes. Those are the three characteristics you need for flow. So part of what I think, well it’s part of what we think, part of what we argue, flow is an evolutionary marker for when you’re acquiring good intuitions. When you’re acquiring intuitions in the situation which optimizes their chance of actually picking up on real patterns. So I think flow is not only there for an insight cascade, it’s also optimized for optimization for implicit learning intuition. Here’s an interesting thing, and this is, by the way, the connection between intuition and flow is not Holger, that’s Ruben Gibb-Garros. Here’s another thing that you get in flow if you were doing these two together. And this is something that would actually address the second weakness in intuition that Holger doesn’t address as well. Namely that intuition only tracks what happens, not what can happen. The thing about insight is it opens you up to novelty, to change, to discovery. And that addresses the second weakness of intuition. You’re not just glumming onto existing patterns, you’re searching for and exploring discovered novel patterns. So not only are these both going on, this can reinforce this, and of course this can provide all kinds of information in terms of what kinds of insight cascades you can have. Yes? In your previous lecture you talked about machine learning about tanks. Would that be the equivalent of our intuition? Yeah, when the tank glums onto the correlational pattern. And notice it’s both. The way it’s being given feedback is too restricted, so it goes correlational and it only pays attention to what has actually happened rather than exploring possibilities that disconfirm the patterns that it’s generated. Yes. Did that answer your question? So what we’re arguing is, I’m getting some very positive feedback, sorry that’s sort of self-referential I guess, is that we think this is the cognitive machinery at work in flow. That what it is, is this coupling together of an insight cascade and the optimization from implicit learning. And so they’re mutually also optimizing each other. And then that would help to explain why this would be so evolutionarily like rewarded. Because this is very, very powerfully adaptive, this kind of practice, this kind of play. Now, that may mean therefore that we have a lot of stuff we can talk about in addition to insight problem solving that’s going on in creativity. Creativity may involve reframing that allows for metamotivational restructuring that affords the possibility of getting into the flow state and that couples the insight machinery to the implicit learning machinery. So there might be much more therefore going on in creativity than this. There’s one further restructuring that might be at work that some of you have suggested. And I’m going to mention that and then I can only give it like three minutes and then we have to move on. But this does pick up again on play versus work. Which is, think about a lot again of the flow inducing behavior, because it’s prototypical of what I’m going to describe. A lot of the behavior like jazz and rock climbing and martial arts, you’re problem seeking rather than problem solving. Like you’re problem finding. You’re trying to find problems and impose them on yourself. As opposed to dealing with problems that have been presented to you in order to achieve some goal. Again, this lines up with creativity being much more peritellic and intrinsically motivated, etc. That this machinery, this metamotivational restructuring machinery, this potentially flow induction, this coupling of the insight machinery to the implicit learning machinery also probably lines up with that people are generally problem finding and problem seeking much more than just problem solving. So they’re kind of using the insight machinery in reverse. They’re using the insight machinery to explore and find things rather than respond to what has been presented to them. So that’s my best attempt to try and be anti-wise-berg. Namely to try and talk about creativity in terms of machinery that would be deeply interwoven with the insight machinery, but would nevertheless be independent from it. So creativity is basically doing all of this other stuff in a way that appropriates and extends the insight machinery in a powerful manner. All right. Now we have to talk about something that we have sort of put aside for a while, which is the inferential machinery. So I think I’ve made a very good case to you that there’s lots going on in thinking that isn’t reasoning. So sort of a non-Cartesian view of cognition. We’ve understood thinking is largely problem solving and that problem solving has all this problem formulation, this intentional machinery that we’ve extended into creativity. It has a lot of this motivational, metamotivational, implicit learning machinery. There’s lots of this stuff going on. But there is of course part of our cognition that is centrally oriented around inference. And that I think is what we should use the term reasoning for. So basically what we want to understand is reasoning in terms of inference, where inference is the use of evidence to alter belief. And of course beliefs can count as evidence that we use to alter beliefs. So of course this idea, the study of inference, predates psychology by literally millennia. So initially this is studied very extensively by philosophers because philosophers had argued that the central feature you want of belief is truth. So that what we should study is our inferential patterns, patterns of how we use evidence to alter beliefs. And beliefs can count as evidence for altering other beliefs. What patterns we use that alter belief in a way that is truth preserving. So truth preserving is this idea that if I start with true things and I do my manipulations, my inferential manipulations, I will end up with true things. So we’ve talked about this already. We’ve talked about the difference between induction in which you’re using a pattern of inference to increase the probability of truth preservation. Versus deduction wherein you are using a pattern of inferences that is guaranteed to give you truth preservation. Now truth preservation is not truth. Truth preservation is not truth. Truth preservation means that if I have an argument pattern, if I put truth into it, I will get truth out. But I could put non-truth into an argument and get non-truth out. So what we’re talking about when we’re talking about truth preservation, we’re not talking about the claim that truth is being generated by the argument. That’s what’s called truth preservation. What we’re saying is if truth is going into the argument, truth is guaranteed to come out of the argument. That matters because then what you’re really caring about when you’re talking about validity is exactly that. Does the pattern of inferences guarantee that if the content is truthful, it goes in, then the content that comes out will be truthful? Because you’re not actually talking about the truth of the content but the truth preservation ability of the structure, this is why logic is formal logic. You’re not paying attention to the content. You’re paying attention to the structure, the patterning of inferences that are deductively valid. Those patterns that guarantee to do truth preservation. There’s all kinds of patterns but the form of reasoning inference that is most useful to people in general is conditional reasoning. Conditional reasoning is how we list conditions to their consequences. Conditional reasoning is any reasoning in which you’re using an if-then. If you give me five dollars, then I will give you this chocolate bar. If you gave me five dollars, here is the chocolate bar. Because conditional reasoning is basically how we align and organize different facts so that we can make connections to other facts. And thereby transfer truth that we have for about one set of facts to potentially giving us truth about other sets of facts. Okay, so the whole thing about conditional reasoning is there’s basically four key forms. This was discovered in the ancient world, mostly by the stoic philosophers, for some of you who have done 371 with me. It’s one of their big inventions, figuring out conditional logic, conditional reasoning. Because it allows you to talk about hypotheticals in your logic as opposed to just actuals. Okay, so if P, then Q. P, therefore Q. Okay, so what you have to determine. Now, we use variables because we’re not caring about the content of what we’re talking about. We’re only caring about the form. Formal logic. Now, is this valid? It is incorrect to ask is it true. Valid means if this is true and this is true, is it impossible for this to be false? So if this is true and this is true, is it impossible for this to be false? So, right, some of you might have done my product, so let’s just sort of give a, like, go. If it’s raining, then the streets are wet. It is raining, therefore the streets are wet. So if this is true, if it’s true that when it’s raining the streets are wet and it’s true that it’s raining, is it possible for the streets not to be wet? Is it? No. Okay, so this is valid. If the premises are true, then the conclusion must be true. It’s valid even if the premises are false. Right? If Donald Trump is a lizard, then one day he will, you know, he will shed his skin. Donald Trump is a lizard, therefore one day he will shed his skin. That’s valid, but even though the premises are presumably false. So we might be a little bit unclear about some of that. Okay, so this is known as modus ponens, because the soets were largely, when this work was really getting going, were largely Romans and Mrs. Latt, and it’s very boring. This just means the method of putting, because you’re putting the P out. Okay, this is known as the antecedent, because it comes before the then. This is known as the consequent, because it comes after the then. So you have to know a little bit of this if we’re going to talk about the psychology of reasoning. Okay, so what about this one? If P, then Q, Q, therefore P. Is that valid? No. So if it’s raining, then the streets are wet. The streets are wet, therefore it’s raining. Does that follow? No. No, because they could have just washed the streets, for example. Okay, so that’s not valid. It is possible for the premises to be true and the conclusion to be false. So this is known as a fallacy. Okay, and fallacy is where logic and psychology meet, because it is a mixed term. Okay, so this is the fallacy of affirming the consequent. See? This is the consequent and you’re affirming it. This is the fallacy of affirming the consequent. That’s a really grotesque Q, right? Look at, wow, my ears. I didn’t get too bold on those. Okay, so this is the fallacy of affirming the consequent. Okay? Now, what do I mean by a fallacy? A fallacy is an invalid form of inference or implication that is mistaken for being a legitimate form of reasoning. So if there’s a logical aspect, it’s invalid, but if there’s a psychological aspect, people often take it to be valid. The logical aspect is it’s invalid. The psychological aspect is people often take it to be valid. And soon as we’re talking about fallacy, we’re into the psychology of reasoning. We’re into the psychology of reasoning. Why do people fall prey to fallacious reasoning? Okay, here’s another one. Okay, this means not, it means not something like not P, not Q. It’s not the case that P is not the case that Q. Okay, there’s different, this is the one I was talking about. They change it about every 10, 15 years. So if P, then Q, right? Not P, therefore not Q. Is that valid? No. Okay, so if it’s raining and the streets are wet, it’s not raining, therefore the streets are not wet. No, they just wash the streets. Okay, so that’s invalid. This is the fallacy. When people fall prey to this, this is the fallacy of denying the antecedent. The fallacy of denying the antecedent. You wanted to say something earlier? I thought you were going to say turn direction with modus tollens. No, I’m going to do modus tollens now. If P, then Q, not Q, therefore not P. Is that valid? So if it’s raining and the streets are wet, the streets aren’t wet, therefore it’s not raining. Is it possible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false? No. So that’s valid. That’s valid. It’s truth preserving. Remember? Valid. Not true, valid. And that’s what’s interesting about this. With this notion of validity, we can talk about things that aren’t currently the case and still talk about them rationally. Okay, so notice how you seem to have, and I’m using this language carefully, you seem to have strong intuitions about these. You seem to be able to tell me valid, invalid, etc., etc. But the very fact that we have this sense of fallacy means that perhaps it is the case that people make mistakes. They judge invalid patterns to be valid. Okay. So, way back in 1966, a long time ago, Wason set up a task, a psychological experiment, to see about this. Now I’m going to give you his formulation, and there’s been some problems with it, but his original. But all the ones you might initially come up with have been addressed by other variations on it. There’s versions of this that instead of using letters and numbers, like I’m going to give you the right and left side of a card and circles and things like that. So, what you need to know is that this, what’s called the Wason Selection Task, is a cottage industry. It is an ongoing people, I guarantee you right now there are people in North America and Europe, in psych labs, doing stuff on the Wason Selection Task. And you’ll see why in a second. Okay. So, he gave people cards, and one of the possible defects with this is front versus back. It’s not always the same for people as first versus second. So, like I said, there’s a version of this that you use left and right instead. But if you just take that into account, we can use his original presentation. I’m doing this because the original presentation is usually the one you will see in textbooks. Even though I don’t think it is exactly the best format, it is the most familiar. Okay. Alright. So, you give people these cards, right. And here’s the test. Name the cards that need to be turned over in order to test the following rule. Name the cards that need to be turned over in order to test the following rule. If there is a vowel on one side of the card, then there is an even number on the other side of the card. If there is a vowel on one side of the card, then there is an even number on the other side of the card. So, you ask people to turn over which cards they need to turn over. And these two responses reliably make up 90% of the response. People either say turn over this or turn over this and this. So, if you put those two groups together, that’s 90% of all respondents, reliably. Remember, the respondents are almost always you guys. We’re talking about educated people, etc. Now, does anybody see why that’s problematic? Yes? Right. In fact, turning over the four doesn’t really help you. Okay. What you should turn over is the first card and the last card. Because you’re testing for confirmation and disconfirmation. Right? But reliably, this is what people do. The one way of interpreting this, I mean, so some people interpret this as an example of confirmation bias. And that’s one way of saying it. And that’s not inconsistent also with seeing this as also fallacious reasoning. Right? Basically, the fallacy of affirming the consequence. Now, this is odd. This is why this became so provocative to people. It’s like, wait a sec, what’s going on here? People seem to get this. Right? They seem to get this. This is a really easy task. It’s just some letters and numbers. People know vowels and even number and all. They’ve known that since they were like five. How is it that such a simple task is reliably failed? Right? What’s going on? Now, initially, this is 66. And people started sort of looking into it. They first thought it was some design features. They cleaned it up, blah, blah, blah. I already mentioned all of that. And then it kept, it was reliably happening. And this is around the same time that we’re getting all the other stuff. You know, some of the stuff that you’ve talked about in this class, like the failure of transfer, Hick and Holyoke, remember that? Again, this was seeming to say, you know what? Most people are stupid. That was the conclusion. Because if 90% of the cream of the crop of the society are failing this task, isn’t that direct? I mean, this is reliable, robust result. Isn’t this evidence that most people are incapable of conditional reasoning in even the basic form? And conditional reasoning is the core of reasoning. If we can’t do this, right? So again, maybe, you know, the 10% should be running the society, which of course they are, but that’s a different thing. Okay, so people started to try and figure out what’s going on here. What’s going on here? Okay? And what happened was a really, another experiment, again, that gets replicated in many different ways, put a really powerful twist on this. So remember that in the, please remember that in the original WSA, the failure rate is 90%. Okay, so Griggs and Cox replaced it in 1982. Okay, so they replaced it like this, right? So the first card means drinking a beer. The second card says drinking a Coke. The third card says 22 years of age. And this one says 16 years of age. You now ask people the following, okay? Imagine that you’re a police officer on duty, and your job is to ensure that people are obeying the law and that they are not being abused. Imagine that you’re a police officer on duty, and your job is to ensure that people are obeying the laws about age and the consumption of alcohol. Here’s the rule. If a person is drinking beer, then that person must be over 19 years of age. This is a situation that you might be dimly familiar with. Now, right, select the cards you need to definitely turn over and determine if the rule is being followed. Now, right, people pick this and this at 72%. They go from 10% success to 72% success. Now, that’s weird, because the logic is exactly equal, and you’re getting a dramatic difference in results. Now, this looks perplexing, and when I do cognitive development 312, one way of talking about this is that, like, according to Piaget, most of us aren’t adults, because according to Piaget, the epitome of adulthood is when you do not need concrete operations, you do not need concrete material in order to reason. You should be able to reason completely formally and abstractly. When you give people the purely formal version, they fail horribly, but if you put in concrete, they succeed. So we’re all stuck at the level of concrete operations. None of us have achieved adulthood. That’s a little extreme. That’s also not good news for democracy, right? Because if you raise kids, you don’t do a democracy. You’re a parent and you have five kids. What should we do today? Let’s think about that. That’s a bad idea. That’s a very bad idea. Okay? So the issue that… Yes? What’s the other 28% of people over the human population doing? Should we get that right? Why? Well, that’s a good question. Okay, but the answer to the second question, I think, is dependent on a better answer to the… A good answer to the first question is, why are so many people now getting it right? Because if we know what changed, we could give a better answer as to what failed to change for the other 28. The 28 is a lot less than 90. So a rather large proportion is the problem. Well, sort of. Yeah, it should be, given that this is supposed to be so obvious. And we’ll see instances where you can get this number higher. Okay, well, let’s keep going. Okay, now, first of all, a name for this. The name is like chunky. It sounds explanatory, but it’s not, so be careful. The name is like chunky. It sounds explanatory, but it’s not. It’s descriptive. It’s not explanatory. It sounds explanatory, but it’s not. It’s actually descriptive. It’s not really explaining anything, even though it sounds explanatory, because it’s really just descriptive. Because what it’s actually pointing to is a problem that needs to be solved, not the solution to the problem, because these are known as content effects. Content effects. Why does it sound like an explanation? It sounds like if you give people content, they do better. The problem with that is that’s a non-explanation, because the word content is a non-explanatory term, right? In the sense that I need to know specifically what kind of content you’re talking about, because even this has some content to it. So people realize that. So to be fair, this seems a little bit different. When people created the name content effects, they were labeling a problem, and then they started generating a theoretical debate as to what the answer is. So here’s another way of putting it. One of the central questions in the psychology of reasoning is to explain the problem. The answer is to explain content effects. Because if the core of reasoning is inference, and our most important form of inference is conditional reasoning, it’s conditional inference, then the core phenomena that we need in order to explain the psychological aspects of this, why we sometimes reason fallaciously, are content effects. Content effects seem to reduce fallacy. But why? What’s going on? What is the core content? So just like we operationalize thinking in terms of problem formulation, we can ultimately operationalize reasoning in terms of a core phenomena. So the parallel to insight is within thinking as problem solving, a core thing to talk about as a way of trying to really get at these core issues was insight. The core thing within reasoning, content effects. Any questions so far? By the way, many of you won’t view 3.12 with me, but that’s an important criticism to Piaget. Because there’s lots of stuff in which we don’t operate according to the definition of formal operations, and they’re supposed to be out of us. Yeah, did you want to say something? Just that maybe, in general we define more things as stuff people can’t do, so maybe concrete, you can’t ever do abstraction ever, versus like you can, but not always that. You’re doing it always, but you have the ability. That’s a fair way to save I mean, Tage, in some ways, because he does have an absolutist sort of monolithic idea that you’re completely in one stage or another. But then that defense becomes equally problematic, because there’s all kinds of evidence that we don’t seem to be monolithically in one stage or another. Okay, so, the question arises, what explains the differences between these two versions of what are epologically, formally the same tasks? So obviously a psychological difference is at work, not a logical difference. And this of course is why psychology has something important to say about reasoning above and beyond what philosophers and logicians say about it. So, one way of trying to say what content is, and this is the most, how can I say it? This is the hypothesis that people most want to be true, because they keep trying to test it and find evidence for it. It is probably one of the most disconfirmed hypothesis in psychology, nevertheless. And this is the idea that what I’ve done, what helps, what drives content effects is the familiarity of the information. This is the familiarity hypothesis, it’s also known as the availability hypothesis, meaning how available it is to your memory, etc. We’ll take a look at that one second, because it’s more pervasive. So, another way people have tried to get at content effects, which I sort of used with you in my Piaget analog, but ultimately doesn’t turn out to be right, is the idea of concreteness. So, a tempting way to think about this is the difference between the rigs and cocks and the waist, and the waist is abstract and the rigs and cocks is concrete. And it’s the use of concrete information that is causing the facilitation. So, I’m not going to always put it on all the cards, because I take it and you can just figure out what it would be. I’m just going to do the rule. So, Manticore and Evans, this had already been done by the way, 519 earlier, which is interesting given the rigs and cocks. So, what they did is they did the waist and selection task with more, and so this comes before rigs and cocks, pay attention to that. That’s why I said it’s interesting. Their rule was a completely concrete rule. If I eat haddock, then I drink gin, which is strange. If I eat haddock, which is a kind of fish, then I drink gin. So, if you make it this concrete, and then you put it on the cards, eating haddock, blah, blah, blah. So, that’s a completely concrete rule. It’s not abstract. You put people into the waist and selection task with this completely concrete rule, and the success rate on the task is 10%. 10%. Or, like we said, the failure rate goes back to 90%. Concreteness, and I know your brain doesn’t like this, but it’s been tested, concreteness is not the relevant variable. Yes? College, isn’t that less familiar still? But we’re not talking about familiarity right now. We’re talking about concreteness. We’ll come back to familiarity, because that’s the response you want to make. You say, aha! It’s not concreteness, it’s familiarity. That’s why I did concreteness first. Okay. So, this is explicitly not familiar, although you’re sort of familiar with how to do it, but this is a weird situation. It sounds like something in parts of London, probably late at night or something. So, instead, it’s clearly though that these terms are concrete terms. They’re much lower on anybody’s taxonomic scale. Yes? So, is the waste of selection task like measuring a person’s ability to be rational? Is that like rationality? Well, that’s a good question. And I’m not going to talk about it, because we do that in 371. So, what you want to ask is, right, what is it? Is being a good reasoner the definition of rationality? Is that – it’s obviously necessary. Okay. Your question is – my question to you is, is it sufficient for being rational? Is being an optimal reasoner the same thing as being a rational human being? Hmm. And before you leap to yes, because first of all, your culture does this. It says – Before you do that, your culture often also tends to do this. It tends to create this with being logical. You should already be getting a sense that’s a mistake. And you know why you can’t be comprehensive logical, because that will commit you to combinatorial – Explosion. Explosion. So, this is already questionable. Doesn’t mean that you can be illogical and be rational. The relationship is much more complex. So, you can’t be logical. Okay. Now, what about this one? Here’s a lot of reasons why it’s not going to be enough, because perhaps in addition to being an optimal reasoner, right, you have to care about things – the right things in the right way. You have to self-regulate in order to perhaps achieve long-term goals over short-term goals. And those don’t seem to be the same skills. So, you have to be able to do that. You have to be able to do that. Here’s a definitive area in which this is constantly – you constantly get evidence for it. Being a good moral reasoner does not translate into being a moral person. You can be an optimal moral reasoner, very rational in that sense, but that doesn’t make you a moral person. Okay. That’s not enough to give you a moral reasoner. It’s not enough to give you a reasoner. Okay? Okay. That’s not enough to give you, like, I’ve now shut you down and you should go away. I’m just giving you an indication of why, what you’re proposing is at least open to a lot of question, a lot of exploration. Okay. Is that okay? Okay. All right. So, what about the familiarity thing? Well, this is much more complex because the problem with familiarity is we really have a lot of trouble defining it and getting clear on what it means. Okay? So, we’re going to, what are you going to, I’m going to talk about a couple of studies here, but then what you’re going to see is every other theory about content effects also will set up the experiment to show you that familiarity is not the issue. So, not only, so, you might not find these two experiments enough, but every other theory about content effects does this, in addition to whatever else it’s doing, it will, it’ll design the experiment to show that familiarity isn’t the issue. That’s what I mean by it being one of the most disconfirmed things. Now, the problem with that, of course, is that common sense logs concreteness and familiarity, and that’s why we want this to be the case. Okay. So, again, 1979, again, coming before Griggs-Box, Griggs-Well and Hiddy, 1979. Sorry. So, try to, this was obviously done in Canada, because this would not work if this, okay. So, they tried, I think it was done here at U of T, because this makes sense. I should check that out, I’m sorry. Oh, yeah, another name for, oh, sorry, there’s three names for the familiarity hypothesis. Familiarity, the availability, and also called the memory queue hypothesis, just queuing memory. Okay, so what they use is they use what is sort of a familiar conjunction for many people. How many of you have traveled to Ottawa? Okay, how many of you took an airplane? How many of you took a car or a similar vehicle? Okay, so that’s it. Most people drive to Ottawa, so it is highly familiar that Ottawa is something you get to in a car. So, what they did is they used this rule, every time I think of Ottawa, I remember a car. That should be a highly familiar thing, yes? You should nod yes, because we just did it in the room. They took that, right, and put it into the waste and selection task. And guess what? No facilitation, success rate around 10%. What’s this kind of weird? And then I’m going to show you the opposite, where you can get success where people are unfamiliar. Yes, Michelle? Wouldn’t the rule be kind of weird, because when I think of Ottawa, I remember other things rather than the car. So I don’t remember the way that I traveled to Ottawa, but I remember when I saw Ottawa. So when the rule kind of… Well, you need a conditional relationship. So they picked one. So you got to Ottawa by car. If you say that they didn’t get the one connection I made, that’s going to be impossible to test, right? That’s why we sort of just see if it is this familiar to people. Well, yes it is. However, again, I did caution you. Remember, you’re going to see every instance of the waste and selection task challenging the familiarity hypothesis. That’s just one. Let’s take a look at the opposite. And so there was two versions of this experiment done by… Which is really weird, there’s none of the same here, so I don’t quite know what’s going on there in terms of replication. Replication is relatively rare in psychology, and yet that replication here in the same year, 1981, again, by the way, before it brings in Cox. So it’s hard to accuse any of these as sort of just theoretical bias. This seems to be genuinely independent evidence because it happened before the Griggs and Cox experiment. That’s one of the reasons why I chose these. Okay, so first they went and they selected for participants with no retail experience. They had no retail experience. That was a condition. They had no retail experience. So I just had to imagine that they were a Sears store manager. That tells you how dated this is. Okay? They had to imagine they were a Sears stores manager. Okay. Here’s the rule. Here’s the rule that’s going to be put into the Ways and Selection Test. Here’s the rule. If the purchase exceeds $30,thenthereceiptmusthavethesignatureofthemanagerontheback.Now,noneofthesepeoplehaveretailexperience.Tha{t}^{\prime }saveryarbitrary,weirdrule.Thechancesofthisbeingfamiliartothemisvery,verylow.Ifthepurchaseexceeds$30, then the receipt must have the signature of the manager on the back. You put that rule into the Ways and Selection Test and you get a 70% success rate. Again, how is familiarity doing? It’s not doing very well here. See, that’s what I mean. You start to put all these experiments together and familiarity is going to become increasingly untenable. We’ve already seen the concreteness alone. And those are the two things that common sense immediately offers up. And if one of those had worked, there wouldn’t be an issue. And what I’m going to show you is, well, I’m already showing you, is 91 does. And then that, then it starts to become mysterious. You just start asking yourself, what is going on? What is making this difference? Yes? Is it because people are more salient to things that are disallowed than things? Because in the other case… No, no, no, that’s good what you’re doing. That’s good. In the other case, the issue was they weren’t selecting the one that disconfirms it, right? Whereas in this one, it’s more salient, which would disconfirm it. Okay, so it’s… Yeah, it’s the up… So what Chloe is saying is that the central idea that we’re going to explore in the most significant initial theoretical alternative, which is pragmatic reasoning schema, because she switched to a permission obligation framework. She used language of allowing or not. And that’s going to be a central idea behind the pragmatic reasoning schema. So what I’m going to ask you to do is put a pin in that. We’re going to come back to that idea. So, very well done. Congratulations. Feel good about yourself. Is it possible that the reason the minority effect doesn’t work is because when you associate the P and Q very closely, you have more tendency to affirm the consequence? So one version of that… I mean, this might not be specifically what you’re thinking, but one version is some people think that what’s going on is people are turning the conditional into a biconditional. And so there are some instances in which that’s the case, but again, that really doesn’t help, right? Because why do they only do it in some situations and not in others? Have you really answered the question or just renamed it? So why is it that they treat it as a conditional when it’s beer and so forth, but they treat it like a biconditional when it’s letters and numbers? Because they would associate, for example, in the food and drink case, they associate them together. So whether you have this one first or the other one first. But why do they associate… because what I need is they associate in one type and they don’t associate in the other. Presumably when they’re not associating, they’re doing it correctly, and your explanation is, but when they’re doing it incorrectly, they’re associating. So why are they associating where they’re doing it incorrectly and not associating when they’re doing it correctly? What’s the reason? So you really just sort of renamed the problem, right? Because you’re going to say, well, familiarity or concreteness. Now, the fact that people might be doing that could be the case. Yes? Could there be like a correlation versus correlation? Now, you’re actually proposing something else that went into pragmatic reasoning scheme of theory. Okay. Yes. So notice you’re already talking about other conditional relationships other than logical ones. So there’s social contract relationships of permission and obligation alluded to by Chloe. And there’s causal relationships that Michelle is pointing out to. And neither one of those are equivalent to logical relationships. But nevertheless, we use if-then, not just for logical relationships, but for logical relationships. We use if-then not just for logical relationships, but also for social contract relationships and also for causal relationships. Could it be that people have many kinds of relations for the if-then other than just logical ones? This is what pragmatic reasoning scheme is going to ask. And we’ll take a look at it next week. I have to go right away, guys. I can’t stay after class, answer questions. And if you have any desperate pleas about the fact that your essay is in, you’re going to have to come and talk to me during office hours.