Everyday Thinking

Memory, Reasoning, and Judgment in the Real World

Stanley Woll

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN: 9780805814811
• eBook ISBN: 9781135693787
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

Appropriate as a textbook for courses in cognitive psychology or social cognition, Everyday Thinking reviews the rapidly growing literature on cognition in naturalistic settings. It differs from other textbooks in that, where possible, it focuses on thinking in real-world settings rather than in controlled laboratory settings and provides detailed treatments of each of the following topics:
* how we form impressions of and represent persons in memory;
* how we recognize and represent faces;
* how we reason in our day-to-day lives and go about solving everyday problems;
* how we make judgments and decisions;
* how we encode memories of events--both for future action and for our own life histories; and
* what are some of the implications of everyday knowledge and cognition for education and instruction. This book presents the theoretical positions and research evidence on each of these topics and examines the generally unexplored connections among them. As a result, this book presents the study of cognition in a more relevant form and in a context that readers can more readily apply to their own lives.

Chapter 1
The Value and Appeal of Research on Everyday Thought

On July 4th of this year I woke up and found that I had no orange juice or cereal—the staples of my usual breakfast. I kicked myself because I had meant to stop off to get these groceries the day before but forgot to do so. I got dressed and got ready to run down to the store to pick up these groceries, but discovered that my car keys, as well as the key to my lab, were not in their usual place. Because all of my other keys were there, and because I usually keep the two missing keys in the same pocket, I concluded that the most likely explanation was that I’d misplaced the keys when I changed pants the evening before. Therefore, I searched in a pile of clothes in my bedroom. (I’m a notorious slob, in addition to being absentminded.) This also seemed a likely place to search because I’d lost those keys there before. I did a quick search through the pile but did not see the keys. (I did find a pair of socks that I was missing, though.)

I then started to think of all the other possible locations where I might have left the keys. It seemed unlikely that I had locked the keys in the car, because both keys were missing, but I looked through the windows of my car anyway. The keys did not seem to be there. I checked the table next to my front door, where I might have laid the keys when fumbling around trying to lock the door. The keys were not there either. I looked where I’d left the videotapes that I’d rented the night before, even though that was unlikely because I’d gotten those tapes on an earlier trip and must have had the car key after that in order to drive the car later. Then I remembered that the last trip I’d made the night before was to get some teriyaki chicken for dinner, so I looked at the spot where I’d eaten dinner. I also recalled that I’d lost my spare car key in a stack of newspapers at that spot before. (Don’t ask—it’s the slob thing again.) I took apart a stack of newspapers but found neither the spare key nor my recent losses. (I must go back through that stack again; I know that the spare key is there somewhere.) Having exhausted most of my hypotheses and wanting to get some work done, I grabbed some cookies (no comment) and started grading papers from my summer school class. (I also watched a little of the Wimbledon finals—it was, after all, a holiday.) While working on those papers, I remembered that I’d picked up my mail on one of those trips last night, and had fumbled around with my keys (again) at that time, so I told myself that when I was finished with the grading, I’d check the mailbox and the surrounding area, even though I thought that was another unlikely scenario. When that possibility didn’t pan out, I told myself that I really needed to find those damn keys, so I took another, closer look in the aforementioned pile of clothes. Lo and behold, my car key was hiding under another pair of socks! Strangely enough, my lab key wasn’t there. (It showed up a couple of months later.) I never did go out and get the orange juice and cereal, though. (Maybe when I finish writing up this account.)

—An initial personal example of everyday memory and problem solving

INTRODUCTION

The subject of this book (and of the example just cited) is everyday thought or cognition. In the chapters that follow, I demonstrate that the study of everyday cognition (a) is enjoying a dramatic increase in popularity in recent years, (b) is of major significance for cognitive psychology and related disciplines, (c) merits closer examination, both conceptually and as a topic for future research, and (d) is damn interesting in its own right.

As a kind of working definition, everyday cognition refers to the ways in which we think about real-world, everyday issues in natural settings and under real-world conditions. In addition, as Banaji and Crowder (1989) and Klatzky (1991) have suggested, everyday cognition is sometimes concerned with applied problems (e.g., eyewitness testimony, how to use everyday knowledge to improve the effectiveness of instruction) and special popula-tions (e.g., expert racetrack handicappers, blind or brain-damaged patients, decision making by firefighters or weather forecasters). As you will see, the usual contrast here— implicit or explicit—is to traditional “artificial” laboratory experiments, although much of the research that I review in this book is of the laboratory sort.

To be more specific, in this book I discuss three main topics: (a) memory for real-world experiences and objects such as people, faces, events (such as losing keys), prior intentions (such as buying orange juice or going to look in my mailbox), and one’s own history; (b) informal reasoning about everyday issues such as grocery shopping, finding keys, or planning work projects or a career, and everyday, practical intelligence; and (c) everyday judgment and decision making. These topics have typically been discussed in relative isolation from each other under a variety of different labels: for example, everyday cognition (Rogoff & Lave, 1984), memory in the “real world” (G.Cohen, 1989), naturalistic decision making (e.g., G.A.Klein, Orasanu, Calderwood, & Zsambok, 1993), informal reasoning (e.g., Galotti, 1989; Voss, Perkins, & Segal, 1991), everyday reasoning (e.g., Galotti, 1989); and problem solving (Sinnott, 1989), practical intelligence (Sternberg & Wagner, 1986), and the practical aspects of memory (Gruneberg, Morris, & Sykes, 1978, 1988). In this book I point to some of the common themes and issues among these different topics and try to lay the groundwork for a more general, coherent discipline of everyday cognition.

Before I discuss some of the points at issue in the debate over the study of everyday cognition, I will give a general impression of the differences between research on this topic and traditional, laboratory research on memory and cognition. I do so by citing some examples of the sorts of tasks and topics addressed in the two areas (in addition to looking for keys).

SOME EXAMPLES OF LABORATORY AND REAL-WORLD MEMORY AND PROBLEM SOLVING

Research on Memory

As an example of a traditional laboratory study on memory, assume that you are presented with the following list of words (from Searleman & Herrmann, 1994): dog, bus, mouse, chair, tulip, train, table, horse, rose, petunia, airplane, goat, sofa, pig, bed, boat, lilac, truck, marigold, dresser. You are then asked to recall these words in whatever order you wish. The evidence presented by Bousfield (1953) from this sort of experiment is that participants recall words such as these in clusters corresponding to the categories built into the list, for example, animals, vehicles, furniture, flowers—hence, the term category clustering, or clustering in recall. Along similar lines, Tulving (1962) demonstrated that when there was no structure built into the word list, participants imposed their own structure, or what Tulving called subjective organization, on the list in their recall, that is, by recalling the words in a consistent order on successive trials with the same list. These two types of studies indicate that participants have, in the first case, discovered the conceptual structure built into the list or, in the second case, imposed their own structure, although we do not necessarily know what that organization is. In both cases, participants are asked to recall a word list with known, controlled properties, and the experimenter can compare their recall with this controlled list. As discussed in chapter 2, this kind of methodology has also been applied to topics in everyday cognition such as impression formation or person memory (e.g., Hamilton, Katz, & Leirer, 1980).

Contrast this type of research with the study of autobiographical memory (AM), which I discuss in chapters 5 and 6. In this research you may be asked to recall experiences from, say, when you were in elementary or high school, or you may receive a set of cue words, for instance, objects, activities, or emotions, and then be asked to describe a related personal memory for each word. These memories may subsequently be analyzed in terms of the relative number recalled for different time periods (e.g., adolescence vs. adulthood) or in terms of which type of cue (e.g., activities vs. emotions) elicits which kinds of and how many memories.

On the face of it, there appears to be some overlap between this type of study and laboratory studies of memory; for example, both use free or cued recall procedures (although less traditional methods such as diary keeping or think-aloud protocols have also been used in AM research). There are, however, some obvious differences between the two types of study. Specifically, traditional memory research typically involves presenting a controlled set of stimuli to participants. In the early verbal-learning tradition these stimuli consisted of nonsense syllables that explicitly controlled for meaning; in the Bousfield (1953) study, stimuli were selected to emphasize the common meaning behind the words. These stimuli are learned under controlled conditions with a relatively short interval between presentation and recall. Also, because the stimulus list is controlled, the experimenter can compare participants’ recall with that original list so that recall accuracy can be calculated.

For autobiographical memory, on the other hand, there is (usually) little or no control over the remembered materials, the conditions under which they were learned or rehearsed, or over the accuracy of participants’ recall—all of which are characteristics that have been considered critical by traditional memory researchers (see Pillemer, 1998). Equally important, the to-be-recalled material has personal meaning to participants; it is part of their personal life history rather than a set of relatively arbitrary syllables or general words prepared by the experimenter. Finally, AM research examines memories that participants bring into the lab, memories that may be years or decades old (see Rubin, 1996).

Mathematical Calculations

Another example of the difference between, say, standard instruction in math versus math as practiced in everyday situations, is given by Jean Lave (1988; see also Lave, Murtaugh, & de la Rocha, 1984). First, consider the following standard arithmetic problems: 57+114=?; 65–9=?; 10×11 =?; or which of these fractions is larger:

or

Now assume that you are shopping in a grocery store and you are trying to determine which price of each of the following pairs of products is the best buy: a 7-oz. package of canned chili for 79¢, or a 4-oz. package for 490; a 23-oz. jar of barbeque sauce for $ 1.17, or an 18-oz. jar for 890; a 32-oz. package of cheddar cheese for $5.29, or a 9-oz. package for $1.59?

As discussed in chapter 8, Lave (1988; Lave et al., 1984) has conducted precisely this sort of research, comparing the uses of arithmetic by American adults in standard mathematical problem-solving tasks with everyday grocery shopping. The first finding Lave reported is that performance on the comparison price problems (carried out in an actual grocery store) is unrelated to performance on the arithmetic test or to participants’ years of schooling. Equally important, Lave distinguishes between mathematical calculation as a goal in and of itself and such calculations as a means toward another end—for example, finding a good buy at the grocery store. In the first case, participants try (often unsuccessfully) to use standard rules or procedures; in the latter case, people use (mostly successfully) shortcuts or heuristics and, in particular, a form of rounding and “gap-closing” approximation (see chap. 8). Once again, the emphasis is on the differences between mathematical reasoning as practiced in the classroom versus that practiced in everyday situations.

Human Judgment and Decision Making.

One final example of these differences comes from the area of human judgment and decision making. First, consider the following standard urn problem in probability theory (Bar-Hillel, 1973). You have a choice between two bets: either the chance of choosing a colored ball from an urn containing 2 colored balls along with 18 white balls, or of drawing (with replacement) four consecutive colored balls from an urn containing 10 colored and 10 white balls. In this problem, participants generally choose the latter conjunctive bet, that is, betting on the conjunction of four different events, even though the actual probability of that drawing is .06, whereas the chance for the former drawing is. 10.

Or consider the following story problem example from Tversky and Kahneman (1974, p. 1125), which contains a hint of everyday content:

A certain town is served by two hospitals. In the larger hospital about 45 babies are born each day, and in the smaller hospital about 15 babies are born each day. As you know, about 50 percent of all babies are boys. However, the exact percentage varies from day to day. Sometimes it may be higher than 50 percent, sometimes lower.

For a period of one year, each hospital recorded the number of days on which more than 60 percent of the babies born were boys. Which hospital do you think recorded more such days?

The larger hospital (21)

The smaller hospital (21)

About the same (that is, within 5% of each other) (53)

(The numbers in parentheses refer to the number of participants who chose each alternative.) It is clear, then, that for this problem a majority (56%) of participants chose the third option, and an equal number (22%) chose each of the other two options, suggesting that, in general, participants ignored the sample sizes; that is, they ignored the fact that larger samples are less likely to depart from the expected value of 50% than are smaller samples.

Now consider the following account by G.A.Klein (1989, 1993) of the decision-making process of experts in a given area, for example, urban firefighters, Israeli tank commanders, and intensive care unit nurses. Klein and others (e.g., Zsambok & Klein, 1997) have described what they call naturalistic decision making, or decisions made on the spot in the real world by people experienced in a given area. In this view, experts do not explicitly consider and weigh all the alternatives, but rather use their background knowledge about that area to identify a particular situation as being of a certain type associated with a particular course of action. Thus, a firefighter may “know” from the pattern of the flames and from the color of the smoke that a fire is of a certain type which requires a particular sort of strategy. Or a driver may approach a curve and make an immediate judgment of this curve as of a certain sort that requires a certain reduction of speed and a particular maneuvering of the steering wheel without having to explicitly calculate the rate of acceleration or the angle of the curve or all the possible alternatives for action.

For our present purposes, the important point is that everyday judgment and decision making not only involve a richer context of environmental cues, but also draw on our everyday background knowledge of situations and are oftentimes made without great conscious deliberation. Thus, subjective utility theory, subjective value theory, or sampling theory may offer a good normative model of decision making, but they (and the numerous lab studies conducted on their behalf) do not give an adequate characterization of decision making in the real world.

SOME GENERAL ISSUES IN EVERYDAY COGNITION

Armed with a working definition of everyday cognition and a trio of examples, let me now turn to a more systematic discussion of the issues surrounding theory and research on that topic. As in the examples just presented, my emphasis is on the differences and debates between advocates of traditional lab research on memory and cognition on the one hand and those championing the study of everyday cognition on the other. For convenience, I begin with an explicit contrast drawn between these two different forms of research in the study of memory.

How Valid (and Valuable) Is Research on Everyday Memory and Problem-Solving?

A major impetus to the study of naturalistic or real-world memory, and by implication, to the current¹ study of everyday cognition in general, was a rather provocative chapter by Ulric Neisser (1978). This chapter was based on Neisser’s keynote speech to the first in a series of conferences on practical aspects of memory. In an often-cited passage, and one that apparently rang true for a large number of researchers, Neisser made the following assertion: “If X is an interesting or socially significant aspect of memory, then psychologists have hardly ever studied X” (p. 4). In other words, over the last 100 years, from Ebbinghaus to the present day, traditional laboratory research on memory has seldom examined the kinds of questions that are of interest to most of us in our daily lives. In support of this position, Neisser cited such phenomena as our failure to recall the sources of quotations, our recall for lectures or speeches, students’ long-term retention of what they have learned in school—all issues that we would expect to be of interest to researchers who are also educators. And yet, at least in 1976, Neisser was unable to find examples of research on these topics, or much substantial research on other topics such as memory for childhood experiences, memory (or lack thereof) for appointments, memory for names and for old, familiar places, to name just a few. In short, Neisser claimed that traditional memory research has failed to establish the ecological validity (cf. Brunswik, 1956), of its findings, or the applicability of these findings to the real world.

Neisser’s (1978) attack on traditional memory research led to a rather heated debate over the merits and limitations of a laboratory approach versus focusing on everyday memory. The next volley in this debate came in an article by Banaji and Crowder (1989) titled “The Bankruptcy of Everyday Memory.” This article in turn led to a series of articles in the American Psychologist (Loftus, 199 la) debating the pros and cons of the two approaches, followed by another round of debate in the book Memory in Everyday Life (Davies & Logic, 1993). In the sections that follow I discuss some of the central issues raised in this debate and some of the arguments on both sides of these issues.

The Issue of Generalizability. Neisser (1978) quite accurately saw that at least one major reason for the failure of memory researchers to address the question of everyday cognition is that “they [psychologists] believe they are doing something more important. They are working toward a general theory of memory, a scientific understanding of its underlying mechanisms, more fundamental and far-reaching than any research on worldly questions could possibly be” (p. 6). In other words, most researchers in the field of memory and cognition see their task as being the search for general, universal laws of cognitive functioning. Neisser’s position, however, is that there are very few meaningful principles that have held up over the many years of memory research and that laboratory research per se is incapable of establishing, or at least unlikely in principle to establish, such meaningful laws.

In response to Neisser (1978), Banaji and Crowder (1989) argued for the importance of distinguishing between two different forms of generalizability—namely, generalizability or ecological validity of methods versus the generalizability of conclusions arrived at by research; they argued that the two...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Chapter 1: The Value and Appeal of Research on Everyday Thought
• Chapter 2: Forming and Remembering Impressions of People
• Chapter 3: Placing Faces
• Chapter 4: Remembering Everyday Events and Actions and Planning for Future Actions
• Chapter 5: Autobiographical Memory: What, How Well, and From What Periods Do We Remember Our Own Histories?
• Chapter 6: How We Represent, Organize, and Retrieve Autobiographical Memories
• Chapter 7: Skills, Expertise, and Their Generality: The Backgrounds of Practical Intelligence and Everyday Reasoning
• Chapter 8: From the Workplace to the Racetrack and Beyond: Representative Research on Everyday Reasoning and Practical Intelligence
• Chapter 9: The Study of Heuristics and Judgment Biases: How Rational or Irrational Are We?
• Chapter 10: Instructional Implications of Everyday Reasoning
• Chapter 11: A Reconsideration of the Field of Everyday Cognition
• References