How many times have you found yourself googling a question that you know you’ve heard the answer to before, but you just couldn’t remember it? Or have you ever wondered why you just couldn’t recall a small factoid that you read about in a news article the other day? Probably quite often, right?
Well, the internet may be to blame. A new phenomenon associated with our ability to remember things that we believe to be easily accessible through a quick internet search has emerged and has been coined the “google effect” based on the popular search engine. The internet can be thought of as a memory storage system outside of our own brain- like how a USB drive is an external memory storage device.
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http://www.medicaldaily.com/smartphones-tablets-and-tvs-all-screen-time-hurting-your-mind-and-body-335808
Imagine you encounter a time traveler who recently arrived in the present day from a couple hundred years ago. What would he or she be most impressed by in this day and age? Would it be the skyscrapers and developed roadways? The drastic decrease in the amount of untouched nature? The amount of leisure time and luxuries people have today compared to back then? No; perhaps the most amazing breakthrough that distinguishes today from a few centuries ago, though it is seemingly taken for granted by most who use it, is the phenomenon of us having almost all the information we could possibly need contained in a small box in our pockets. The ability to search the plethora of knowledge that is the internet at any time and any place allows us to access any information we want within seconds. Gone are the archaic days in which we needed to flip through countless books looking for a single quote or memorize facts that may or may not be useful in the future. So, why would we bother taking up space in our memory with such knowledge when we could simply remember where to find it? Read more…
Road rage is an example of a common emotional reaction that we might not understand in others
Picture this: you’re driving on a busy street with your friend. All of a sudden, a car comes out of nowhere and cuts you off. You’re in a hurry to get somewhere, and this makes you angry. So, you take the first opportunity to zoom into the left lane and speed past the car that cut you off, looking at the driver as you pass. Its not until your friend shouts “Watch out!” that you slam on the brakes and realize you almost hit the car in front of you at a red light. Your friend chastises you for overreacting and driving recklessly. They don’t understand why you would do what you did, and after calming down, you don’t either. Sound familiar?
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mercercognitivepsychology.pbworks.com A accurate depiction of of TOT happening in our daily lives (minus buying tongues)
Remember that time when you were trying to recall the celebrity who plays the main character in your favorite movie? You knew that their name began with the letter L, that they were in another movie about dreams, and that they finally won an Oscar. You may even say, “it’s on the tip of my tongue”. But for some reason you just can’t recall their name (by the way it’s Leonardo Dicaprio). It is something we’ve all experienced, and it is called the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon (TOT).
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An Unfortunate Event
Sometimes life feels like a progression of unfortunate events. You go and get ice cream and right before you take a bite the cone slips out of your hand, falls and then oozes on the pavement. You go back to the end of the ice cream line and by the time you get to the front they are out of your favorite flavor. It is easy to feel this way when you are having a bad day or if you are incredibly stressed by an overbearing workload. People also tend to feel this way around deadlines especially if nothing is going their way. For example, as a student you may have had a day like this. You walk into class and realize you left your assignment in another notebook. After class you check your phone and see a rejection email from the summer internship you had your heart set on. Just as you are putting your phone away you drop it and the screen cracks. Meanwhile the kid standing next to you asks how your final paper is going. In that moment you realize you wrote the due date incorrectly on your planner. A minute later you get a text from your lab partner (on your shattered phone) saying that tonight is the only night she can meet to work on the final project. It feels as if every possible thing in your life has gone wrong.
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Have you ever looked at the coverage map for a telecommunications company, like Verizon, and wondered why a company would choose to spend the money on a colored picture instead of just presenting the information in the paragraph? I mean, wouldn’t it be easier and cheaper to just write it all out? Probably, but it wouldn’t be as effective.
Below is a paragraph that describes Verizon’s coverage in the U.S., and a corresponding image that displays the data. When the information is laid out in text, I bet that you, the consumer, would have a much harder time articulating and remembering the information. But by presenting the information in a picture (like that shown below), you can easily discern and remember the differences between the coverage of four telecommunication companies. Why would this be true? It has to do with the way that we encode, or initially learn, information. This is a perfect example of the picture superiority effect, the phenomenon in which people are better at remembering images than they are at remembering words (click here for a quick, fun video that explains this phenomenon).
“Among the four major wireless carriers, only Verizon’s 4G network is 100% 4G LTE the gold standard of wireless technology. Available in over 500 cities, Verizon 4G LTE covers almost 97% of the U.S. population. Experience the speed and power in more places.”
http://www.phonearena.com/news/Which-carrier-offers-the-fastest-mobile-data-and-coverage-4G–3G-speed-comparison_id53828
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www.riskology.co
You wake up one day with the urge to build something—let’s say it’s a chair for your kitchen table. You print the instructions from online, go to the hardware store to get supplies, and then you set up shop in the garage, ready to build your masterpiece. It already seems like quite an undertaking, doesn’t it? And that’s before you realize that you will make a cut too short, need more wood, and all of a sudden the project is going to take twice as long as expected. So, as you stand there in the garage amidst your frustration, you might ask yourself…why the heck am I doing this? Well, I have good news for you. Wood-working enthusiast or not, thanks to the IKEA effect, you’re going to love that chair far more than the one you saw last week at Bob’s Discount Furniture.
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Happiness, health, love, and money — what else would anyone need? These most universal of human interests are often the center of common phrases, called aphorisms, that express some general principle about how our world works . . . or so they claim. For example, we all know that great spenders are bad lenders, and surely, what sobriety conceals, alcohol reveals. Many people are very familiar with these aphorisms through previous, repeated exposure to them. One critical feature contributing to the popularity of these phrases is their rhyming pattern. But how about the phrase an apple a day keeps you pretty healthy? Well, maybe not. The botched rhyme in this last phrase makes us question the truth behind the statement. This is due to the Rhyme-as-Reason Effect. This effect is a cognitive bias by which people judge the validity and accuracy of a statement as being more true if the statement rhymes. So, although the aphorisms are very vague, the use of rhyme as a rhetorical device asserts their claim in a more persuasive way. 
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There is a cold crispness to the air, but the sun in the cloudless sky gives you the little bit of warmth you need to feel comfortable. It is an early November day, and it is time for the U-12 soccer championship. Maybe you are a player, a parent, a friend, even a referee here today. There are four teams here with the same goal in mind, to win all their games so that they get crowned champion. The Cheshire Rams are the ones you are hoping to win today. You do not know how the day is going to go because all of the teams here have had great records this season and are all very competitive for the title. Hours later, the Cheshire Rams have done it. They are champions! You are in the car riding back, and all you can think to yourself is “wow, I knew it would happen!”
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-06-26/news/ct-x-0626-keilman-column-20130626_1_more-kids-score-childhood-obesity
What is Hindsight Bias?
Did you actually know that the outcome would happen as it did? The truth is, most likely not. Read more…
As someone who is a fan of true crime podcasts, I couldn’t help but to binge-listen to the episodes of Wrongful Convictions–a podcast by the Innocence Project detailing stories of people who were convicted for crimes they did not commit. In one of the stories, a person was convicted due to the misidentification by one of the victims of the crime. This eyewitness testimony was enough to carry a 30-year-old sentence in prison.
Pattern recognition of faces of other races can vary according to the cross-race bias.
PC: The Guardian
There are several cognitive errors that could make of this eyewitness testimony (and others) unreliable. Daniel Schacter described in the Seven Sins of Memory (2001) different cognitive errors that the memory is sensitive to, including memory biases. In the case of the person wrongfully convicted, a cross-race or own-race bias could have influenced the misidentification. An own-race bias refers to the tendency of being more accurate at recognizing faces of your own race than faces of another race (Malpass & Kravits, 1969). The bias is not exclusive to the context of eyewitness testimonies and the criminal justice system, however; you can stumble upon the own-race bias during a trivial day. For example, have you ever had a feeling that people who don’t belong to your racial category look “all the same” to you? Or have you wondered why you are very good at recognizing faces of your own racial profile yet can’t make the same accurate distinctions cross-racially? Or maybe, have you ever confused two people from outside your race because you couldn’t distinguish certain individual characteristics to make them apart? Then you’re in the right place to learn about this cross-race phenomenon! In this blog, we discuss possible mechanisms behind the cross-race bias.
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