The cookie effect
Tough Choices: How Making Decisions Tires Your Brain: Scientific American
This is a link to an article published in Scientific American
It describes, in short, how our brain works in some ways like a muscle. It can be depleted after repeated use, leading to false choices. What is so interesting about this article is not the fact that depleted mindpower can have detrimental effects on our concetration or choice making. Everybody has felt this. What is very interesting in this article is something that cognitive psychologists always knew, and appears again and again in various researches and in various forms. The fact that we know jack about the decisions we make 
Certainly Freud had spoken of a subconscious mind (or "id", as it is also called, depending on the historical period of psychanalysis that we’re talking, even though these two nearly mean the same thing). But cognitive psychology has taken the concept of the subconscious to a different, more mundane, level (that is no incest, sexual puns, Oedipus etc. 
). It’s obvious that decision making is a very simple process that we perform every day. What this article does, is to summarize the finding of two papers (paper 1, paper 2) that study the correlation between depletion of our cognitive resources and decision making.
It suggests (based on some solid evidence) that the simple act of making choices (instead of just stating our preferences), waiting in the line or resisting the tempation to eat deplete our resources. And in that case, we rely more on what Kahneman and Frederick (2002) named System 1, the more intuitive driven system. System 2 is what we call "reason".
The use of intuitive systems is not necessarily a bad thing. Many times we have to make simple decisions that do not require high level thinking. System 1 can save resources in that cases (like when we drive from work back home). However, in a cognitively ladden world, with countless stimuli that fight for our attention and force us to act, the human mind can only do so much before it "overloads".
Daniel Kahneman, nobel laureate (2002, prize in economics)
Fiske and Taylor (1984) had described us as "cognitive misers". That means that the human mind has limited resources and has to find ways to cope with the environment that make the best out of its capacity. And that’s where the fun begins.
The paper by Anastasiya Pocheptsova gives at the end some economic examples like car or ticket buying. But Scientific American really digs into this whole concept. Cognitive depletion by trivial tasks such as not eating a candy, so subtle that is undetectable by us, can influence our actions and, thus, our life.
Here comes the butterfly
Just relax for a moment. Empty your mind and then try to think of all the trivial things you had to do today. Then yesterday, the day before that, etc. Then think of important decisions you had to make in your life. Think about career, job, wife, or of anything you consider important. Would you believe that these decisions could have in part be influenced by the cognitive depletion of your brain driven by your resistance to not eating a cookie?
Killer life-changin’ cookie
That’s what’s fascinating about researches such as these. The fact that they show us things for ourselves hidden even to us. The butterfly can move its wings in America and cause a hurricane in Tokyo. A single cookie can deplete you of your resources and change your life forever. And even if that’s not always the case, think of that this is the case at least for a few times. And then add all each member of society together, each one trying to resist a cookie and then you got chaos out of what once seemed to be order. Therefore people, behold and beware of the mighty cookie effect!
July 31st, 2008 at 5:24 pm
[...] course, readers of Encefalus already know that people don’t always act rationally (The Cookie Effect, Lotteries, poverty and social implications). BPS Research Digest also mentions two more researches [...]