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In everyday life, we use previous experience to predict where we should pay attention. Different environments create different expectations. This was profoundly illustrated by the scientist Jared Diamond in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel. He describes an adventure wandering through the New Guinea jungle with native New Guineans. He relates that these natives tend to perform poorly at tasks Westerners have been trained to do since childhood. But they are hardly stupid. They can detect the most subtle changes in the jungle, good for following the tracks of a predator or for finding the way back home. They know which insects to leave alone, know where food exists, can build and tear down shelters with ease. Diamond, who had never spent time in such places, has no ability to pay attention to these things. Were he to be tested on such tasks, he also would perform poorly.
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Most entrepreneurs put in tremendous amounts of time and effort in creating and launching new products and services and then make the mistake of overpricing them. They have created something they care deeply about, it’s theirs, and this powerful sense of ownership distorts their perception of value which causes them to overprice their products. While many of them are quick to realize that their initial prices are too high, not all these people are happy or willing to drop their prices to make their products more attractive. And this can be a very costly mistake that may lead to the failure of their new business. When you launch a new product or service, your priority should be to get sufficient market adoption as soon as possible and you should be ready to sacrifice your initial prices and profits to achieve this aim. Once you have strong sales volumes, you can increase your prices to maximize your profits.
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In most respects, humans are one of a relatively small number of species that evolved a very different strategy of investing more energy to reproduce more slowly. Like apes and elephants, we mature at a leisurely pace, grow large bodies, and have few babies but devote much time and energy to raising them well. This unusual strategy succeeds because while apes and elephants produce fewer babies than mice, a larger percentage of their offspring survive to then reproduce. A house mouse can become a mother when she is just five weeks old, has
four to ten pups per litter, and can have a new litter every two months over the course of her approximately twelvemonth life. However, the vast majority of her pups die young. In contrast, a chimp or elephant mother does not reproduce until she is at least twelve years old, and she gives birth to only one infant every five or six years over the next thirty or so years. About half of these offspring make it to becoming parents.
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When scientists make an important new discovery or experimentally prove some hypothesis, they do not, in general, keep that information to themselves so that they alone can consider its meaning and derive additional theories from it. Instead, they publish their results and make their data available for inspection. This makes it possible for other scientists to reconsider their data and possibly refute their conclusions. More important, though, it makes it possible for other scientists to use that data to construct new hypotheses and perform new experiments. The assumption is that society as a whole will end up knowing more if information is spread as widely as possible, rather than being limited to a few people. In a strict sense, every scientist depends on the work of other scientists.
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In the 1930s, the British psychologist Sir Frederic Bartlett asked people to listen to folktales from other countries and then recall these stories at a later date. As you might guess, unfamiliar stories were not remembered as well as familiar stories. Surprisingly, however, errors in memory were not random. Rather, subjects often rewrote similar parts of the stories in their own minds — particularly the parts that made the least sense to them. Bartlett concluded that when facing problems, humans draw upon mental schemata, or shelves of stored knowledge in our brains, to fill in any minor gaps in our memories. Therefore, remembering is an imaginative process that involves building upon past experiences.
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History, people often say, repeats itself. And looking at the historical records of the ancient civilizations, some things do seem to happen again and again. (B) Civilizations expand, get overextended, and then collapse as in the cases of Rome, which went under in 476 AD, and the British Empire, which fell apart more than a thousand years later in the post‐World War II era. But is this always the case? (A) If so, archaeology would be pretty boring; one thing would happen again and again. But that’s not what archaeologists see. Some civilizations end suddenly, like the Aztec and Inca, conquered by invaders in the 1520s AD. (C) Those empires never had the chance to collapse as a result of overexpansion. So in the case of civilizations, “history repeats itself” seems to be an oversimplification.
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Stanford psychology professor Dr. Carol Dweck is the internationally recognized pioneer of the concept of “growth mindset” as a way to continually grow, learn, and persevere in our efforts. (C) Dweck found that kids who are told they’re “smart” actually underperform in future tasks, by choosing easier tasks to avoid evidence that they are not smart, which Dweck calls having a “fixed mindset.” (B) In contrast, Dweck found, kids who are praised not for their smarts but for their effort develop what Dweck calls a “growth mindset.” They learn that their effort is what led to their success, and if they continue to try, over time they’ll improve and achieve more things. (A) These kids end up taking on tougher things, and feel better about themselves. “Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,” Dweck has explained.
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To monitor our surroundings is to focus on what’s outside of ourselves: what we see, hear, smell, feel, and perhaps even taste. But sometimes what really marks a place is something less specific — a feeling within us. An interesting example emerged from a study of subway passenger behavior. Researchers trying to understand why people sit where they sit or stand where they stand in subway and metro trains examined the factors that shape the way riders used and navigated that space in different situations. One of their findings involved the reasons many riders like to plant themselves close to the train’s doors. Partly this was the obvious convenience of being able to exit more quickly. But it was shaped partly by a more abstract sensation — the desire to avoid the sometimes uncomfortable feeling of accidentally making eye contact with seated passengers. We can’t see feelings — but they’re very real, and they influence our experience of the world.
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We have a ‘diving reflex’, like other marine mammals. This means that special nerve endings on our faces, around the mouth and nose, trigger this reflex only when the facial region goes under water. If we are in the water, with our head out in the air, there is no diving reflex. But if we sink just our face in a bowl of water, while the whole of the rest of our body is in the dry air, the diving reflex is triggered. It automatically closes down the airway, reducing the risk of swallowing water, and it narrows the small airpassages in the lungs. At the same time the heart rate is slowed down to half speed and blood is shunted to the vital organs, protecting them from the effects of the brief stop in breathing. By contrast, if a chimpanzee or a gorilla found itself in water with its face below the surface, it would panic, its heart would race and it would quickly drown.
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There is a natural assumption of truth, or a truth bias when humans communicate with one another. In other words, when we’re listening to others or reading their words, our automatic assumption is that the other person is telling the truth. This usually works out fine. If you ask someone where the restroom is located or if it’s raining outside, you can safely assume that most people will not lie in their responses. Imagine how difficult it would be to converse with someone if you assumed that everything they were telling you was false! Indeed, questioning the truth of a statement and then choosing not to believe it requires additional mental steps. For the most part, humans are “cognitive misers,” which means we typically don’t expend more mental effort than seems necessary in a given situation. It makes sense then, that when we see something online, even if it is fake, our default is to believe it, at least at first.
We humans are unlikely to (A) doubt the truth of information we receive, due to our tendency to (B)save mental effort.
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아직 모두 검증하지 못함 2025년 6월 12일