The Experience of Thinking

How the Fluency of Mental Processes Influences Cognition and Behaviour

Christian Unkelbach, Rainer Greifeneder

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781848720657
• eBook ISBN: 9781136157899
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

When retrieving a quote from memory, evaluating a testimony's truthfulness, or deciding which products to buy, people experience immediate feelings of ease or difficulty, of fluency or disfluency. Such "experiences of thinking" occur with every cognitive process, including perceiving, processing, storing, and retrieving information, and they have been the defining element of a vibrant field of scientific inquiry during the last four decades.

This book brings together the latest research on how such experiences of thinking influence cognition and behavior. The chapters present recent theoretical developments and describe the effects of these influences, as well as the practical implications of this research. The book includes contributions from the leading scholars in the field and provides a comprehensive survey of this expanding area. This integrative overview will be invaluable to researchers, teachers, students, and professionals in the field of social and cognitive psychology.

1 Experiencing thinking

Rainer Greifeneder and Christian Unkelbach

What could be more rational than thinking? Thinking, the act of reasoning, of gauging and weighing arguments, of considering and re-considering, is generally regarded as solid and factual. It is celebrated as the latest gain in evolution, separating homo sapiens from its predecessors. It is the supreme discipline higher education aims for. And it is almost antagonistic to the notion of feelings, which are often perceived as erroneous and fallible—think of Mr. Spock’s condescension for Captain Kirk’s often feeling-based decisions. When societies invest in and cherish the intellectual capabilities of their members, it is thinking based on logic and rationality that they aspire to. SATs (in the US) or large-scale scholarly research projects such as PISA in Europe focus on knowledge, logic, and deduction, following the implicit assumption that there is nothing more to thinking than thought content and declarative rules applied to this content. And yet, research during the last four decades has poignantly demonstrated that what is prized as rational is closely intertwined with feelings. In fact, every act of thinking is associated with experiences. Consider naming ten reasons why thinking and feeling have nothing in common. Even if you manage (and we think you will not), the mere attempt of naming these reasons likely felt difficult. Likewise, consider reading the non-word “ndoetvio” compared to the word “devotion”—most likely the process of reading the former felt more difficult than reading the latter. Such examples illustrate that despite the rational pedestal thought is put on, every mental process comes with an experiential component. These “experiences of thinking” influence judgments, decisions, further cognition, and behavior, and some even argue that it is the feeling component of thinking that constitutes the true adaptive advantage of human cognition.

The present volume puts the spotlight on these experiences accompanying thought and their consequences for cognition and behavior. Not from the standpoint of a biasing influence or unrequested fail-out of what seemingly pure thinking is about—but from an integrative standpoint that considers both the process of thinking itself and how this process feels. Thinking is thereby meant in its broadest sense, encompassing all kinds of mental processes, including, for instance, perceiving, categorizing, storing, retrieving, or generating information. Taking a similarly broad perspective, all experiences or feelings accompanying mental operations are jointly referred to as “experiences of thinking.” As these experiences can be located on a continuum of easy to difficult, fluent to disfluent, they are also referred to as “ease of processing” or “fluency” in the literature. In what follows, we use these termini interchangeably, but emphasize what is likely the term most researchers can subscribe to, “fluency.” We define this fluency as the subjective experience of ease or difficulty associated with mental processing. Note that fluency is used in the literature both to denote a specific (fluent) experience and the abstract concept, which encompasses the full continuum from disfluency to fluency. To increase reading flow, we follow this lead and refrain from separately referring to disfluency and fluency when talking about the abstract concept.

While phenomenological experiences of the kind discussed here were a central part in early theories about cognitive and mental processes (e.g., Wundt, 1862), psychology soon abandoned its experiential and phenomenological roots: initially, in the rise of behaviorism, which treated everything inside the human being as part of a black box that is beyond scientific investigations, because it is too unreliable and too subjective; later, during the cognitive revolution, which conceptualized humans as pure information processors, guided by computer metaphors of human cognition. It must have been against this background that Gerald Clore wrote: “We are better prepared to study the content of thought than the experience of thinking” (Clore, 1992: p. 133), mercilessly exposing a one-sided approach to research on cognitive and thinking processes. Today, 20 years after this assessment, we believe that psychological science is well-prepared to study the experience of thinking, and the present book is a strong testimony to the advances that psychological research has made in this respect. This volume brings together research findings and conceptualizations about how the experience of thinking, and more specifically, the fluency and disfluency associated with mental processing, influences judgments, decisions, and behavior. To lay the foundation for these contributions, in what follows, we delineate what we mean by “experiences of thinking” or “fluency.”

What is fluency?

If you venture an experiential peek into your cognitive control room, no doubt you can feel what this book is about. Some operations are easy or fluent (like reading this sentence), other mental operations may be difficult or disfluent (for various reasons such as font size). Fluency experiences are common, but people do not always focus on them. Yet, if people attend to their mental processes, the feeling component tied to all thinking can be experienced. Nevertheless, although people are familiar with fluency experiences, what exactly fluency is as a scientific concept may still be blurry. Sharpening the concept is not an easy endeavor because fluency is intangible and by the definition of an experience, highly subjective, just like “love” or “Schadenfreude.” With such intangible concepts, the solution is often to recruit descriptive features such as “Love is when you cannot be without the other person” or “Love is, when the world is colored purple.” None of these “pseudo-definitions” exactly says what love is, but together they trace a picture of essential features that allows for gaining a better understanding what love must be about. Here we follow a similar approach and attempt to triangulate the fluency concept by means of five core components.

First, fluency is a feeling. It provides experiential information about otherwise inaccessible mental processes (e.g., memory retrieval) and thus feedback about the state of the cognitive system. By defining fluency as a feeling, we suggest that fluency is experienced the same way people experience emotional or bodily feelings, like appetite or hunger (which provide feedback about the state of the digestive system and nutrition level of the bloodstream, although people are largely agnostic as how these experiences are generated). By the same token, we suggest that fluency is available to conscious deliberation the same way that emotional or bodily feelings are. While it is not necessary that the fluency experience is always conscious, it should be consciously available if the attention is placed on it; a state termed pre-conscious (Dehaene et al., 2006: pp. 206–207).

Second, fluency arises as a by-product from mental operations. It has been characterized as the experiential output of an internal monitoring system that constantly screens how mental processing proceeds (Whittlesea & Williams, 2000). Note that this second component sets the fluency concept apart from perceptions of fluency resulting from other sources such as coordinated action or speech, which may also be termed as “fluent” but do not result from internal cognitive processes.

Third, fluency is informative about the ease or difficulty with which some mental operation is executed. This feature places the fluency concept on an easy-difficult dimension. While there are other possible dimensions, such as intensity, the easy-difficult distinction would appear to be the most defining one.

Fourth, the subjective location of a specific experience on the easy-difficult dimension is a function of prior experiences. That reading this subordinate clause feels subjectively difficult reflects the existence of (many) prior reading experiences that were easier to decipher. More generally, whether a specific mental operation is experienced as easy or difficult depends also on comparisons with prior processing experiences. This reflects the general law of relativism (Parducci, 1968; Mussweiler, 2003) applied to the experience of performing mental operations.

Finally, fluency is an integrative experience that summarizes ongoing mental activity. For instance, having difficulty in retrieving a specific word from memory summarizes the process of finding this word in the associative network structure; how this search proceeds is a function of, for instance, the information previously stored in the associative network structure, previous activation of the searched or related information, concurrent processing demands, and so forth. The experience associated with retrieving summarizes all these contributing aspects in one feeling. At least two critical consequences ensue: on the hand, for fluency to be informative, it needs to be attributed to a specific source and interpreted in its context (see Unkelbach & Greifeneder, Ch. 2). On the other hand, this summarizing function allows fast and efficient information processing when relying on fluency in further downstream cognition (Koriat & Levy-Sadot, 1999, coined the term “meta-summary”).

These aspects tie fluency experiences to the realm of meta-cognition, that is, thinking about thinking (Nelson, 1996). This becomes evident, for instance, when considering that one can deliberate about the meaning of a given experience and its implications.

Just because fluency experiences are subjective and not easy to pinpoint, there is not always consensus about the right definition or its essential components, or in case of experimental psychology, the right manipulation to create fluency experiences. Therefore, across the book, there will be deviations from the components outlined here: for example, the consciousness component will be challenged (Oppenheimer & Alter, Ch. 6), or the idea that fluency is a by-product of mental activities (Topolinski, Ch. 3). Nevertheless, we believe that these five characteristics offer a good starting point and a refined picture of what we mean by fluency (and what not). It is obvious that this perspective encompasses a wide array of phenomena, all of which, however, are characterized by these five fundamental building blocks. Therefore, although labeled differently in the literature, we treat classic thinking experiences such as the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon (e.g., Schwartz, 2002) or the feeling-of-knowing (e.g., Koriat, 1993) as fluency experiences, too (see also Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009; Topolinski & Reber, 2010).

Why are fluency effects interesting?

Research on fluency and thinking experiences has reclaimed the feeling component for modern cognitive psychology. This constitutes an important advancement beyond the long-time dominant computer metaphor and enriches psychological research—in fact, it makes the pure information-processing approach to scientific psychology again human. As Ch. 4 aptly states: “Once more with feeling!” This contribution to scientific research will be presented, for example, in the chapters on how fluency experiences emerge (Topolinski, Ch. 3), how fluency relates to emotional feelings (Garcia-Marques, Mackie, Claypool, & Garcia-Marques, Ch. 4), or if scientists investigate this topic in the proper manner (Fiedler, Ch. 14).

Yet, investigating fluency is not only important for propelling scientific knowledge, but has direct practical implications for everyday life, too. For example, it is known since the 1930s that the legibility of an essay has a potent influence on how the essay is evaluated, averaging up to one letter grade (James, 1929). This legibility effect may have serious consequences for those who do not write legibly, for instance, with respect to university acceptance. By uncovering the mechanism underlying this effect, fluency research explains a long acknowledged source of error in performance evaluation (Greifeneder et al., 2010). Relatedly, fluency has been shown to determine how deeply information is encoded and which information therefore is likely to be recalled later (Oppenheimer & Alter, Ch. 6). Contrary to many contemporary accounts in school and university didactics, fluency research shows that rendering learning ever easier may have detrimental consequences (see also Fiedler, Ch. 14). Fluency research also uncovered cognitive mechanisms that are critical in the courtroom. When evaluating eyewitness testimonies, for instance, it is important to know that statements that are easily processed are believed more (Unkelbach, 2007), and that people tend to identify fluently processed faces as “seen before” (Kleider & Goldinger, 2004). Among others, fluency research may help to create better settings for eyewitness line-ups (Fiedler, Ch. 14) and thus to increase fairness in the legal system. As final examples, consider that the ease or difficulty with which commentaries in evaluation forms can be given has been shown to affect final course evaluations (Fox, 2006). Moreover, it has been reported that non-native speakers appear less credible because processing their language output is less fluent (Lev-Ari & Keysar, 2010). Again, fluency research may help to understand how such biasing influences come about, and how they may be cured.

Curiously, the above examples suggest that fluency provides not veridical information but is rather a source of error. Yet, as often in psychology, the answer is not that simple. The contributors to this book will also present evidence that fluen...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• 1 Experiencing thinking
• Part I Principles of fluency
• Part II Fluency in social processing
• Part III Adaptive and strategic uses of fluency
• Part IV Final assessment
• Author index
• Subject index