Thinking, Fast and Slow

5: Cognitive Ease
“Easy” and “Strained”: The technical term for cognitive ease is fluency.
diverse inputs and outputs: Adam L. Alter and Daniel M. Oppenheimer,
“Uniting the Tribes of Fluency to Form a Metacognitive Nation,”
Personality and Social Psychology Review 13 (2009): 219–35.
“Becoming Famous Overnight”: Larry L. Jacoby, Colleen Kelley, Judith
Brown, and Jennifer Jasechko, “Becoming Famous Overnight: Limits on
the Ability to Avoid Unconscious Influences of the Past,” 
Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology 56 (1989): 326–38.
nicely stated the problem: Bruce W. A. Whittlesea, Larry L. Jacoby, and
Krista Girard, “Illusions of Immediate Memory: Evidence of an Attributional

---

Basis for Feelings of Familiarity and Perceptual Quality,” 
Journal of
Memory and Language 29 (1990): 716–32.
The impression of familiarity: Normally, when you meet a friend you can
immediately place and name him; you often know where you met him last,
what he was wearing, and what you said to each other. The feeling of
familiarity becomes relevant only when such specific memories are not
available. It is a fallback. Although its reliability is imperfect, the fallback is
much better than nothing. It is the sense of familiarity that protects you from
the embarrassment of being (and acting) astonished when you are greeted
as an old friend by someone who only looks vaguely familiar.
“body temperature of a chicken”: Ian Begg, Victoria Armour, and Thérèse
Kerr, “On Believing What We Remember,” 
Canadian Journal of
Behavioural Science 17 (1985): 199–214.
low credibility: Daniel M. Oppenheimer, “Consequences of Erudite
Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long
Words Needlessly,” 
Applied Cognitive Psychology 20 (2006): 139–56.
when they rhymed: Matthew S. Mc Glone and Jessica Tofighbakhsh,
“Birds of a Feather Flock Conjointly (?): Rhyme as Reas
{Rhy
Psychological Science 11 (2000): 424–28.
fictitious Turkish companies: Anuj K. Shah and Daniel M. Oppenheimer,
“Easy Does It: The Role of Fluency in Cue Weighting,” 
Judgment and
Decision Making Journal 2 (2007): 371–79.
engaged and analytic mode: Adam L. Alter, Daniel M. Oppenheimer,
Nicholas Epley, and Rebecca Eyre, “Overcoming Intuition: Metacognitive
Difficulty Activates Analytic Reasoning,” 
Journal of Experimental
Psychology—General 136 (2007): 569–76.
pictures of objects: Piotr Winkielman and John T. Cacioppo, “Mind at
Ease Puts a Smile on the Face: Psychophysiological Evidence That
Processing Facilitation Increases Positive Affect,” 
Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology 81 (2001): 989–1000.
small advantage: Adam L. Alter and Daniel M. Oppenheimer, “Predicting
Short-Term Stock Fluctuations by Using Processing Fluency,” 
PNAS 103
(2006). Michael J. Cooper, Orlin Dimitrov, and P. Raghavendra Rau, “A
Rose.com
by Any Other Name,” 
Journal of Finance 56 (2001): 2371–88.
clunky labels: Pascal Pensa, “Nomen Est Omen: How Company Names
Influence Shortand Long-Run Stock Market Performance,” 
Social Science
Research Network Working Paper, September 2006.
mere exposure effect: Robert B. Zajonc, “Attitudinal Effects of Mere
Exposure,” 
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 9 (1968): 1–27.
favorite experiments: Robert B. Zajonc and D. W. Rajecki, “Exposure and

---

Affect: A Field Experiment,” 
Psychonomic Science 17 (1969): 216–17.
never consciously sees: Jennifer L. Monahan, Sheila T. Murphy, and
Robert B. Zajonc, “Subliminal Mere Exposure: Specific, General, and
Diffuse Effects,” 
Psychological Science 11 (2000): 462–66.
inhabiting the shell: D. W. Rajecki, “Effects of Prenatal Exposure to
Auditory or Visual Stimulation on Postnatal Distress Vocalizations in
Chicks,” 
Behavioral Biology 11 (1974): 525–36.
“The consequences…social stability”: Robert B. Zajonc, “Mere Exposure:
A Gateway to the Subliminal,” 
Current Directions in Psychological
Science 10 (2001): 227.
triad of words: Annette Bolte, Thomas Goschke, and Julius Kuhl, “Emotion
and Intuition: Effects of Positive and Negative Mood on Implicit Judgments
of Semantic Coherence,” 
Psychological Science 14 (2003): 416–21.
association is retrieved: The analysis excludes all cases in which the
subject actually found the correct solution. It shows that even subjects who
will ultimately fail to find a common association have some idea of whether
there is one to be found.
increase cognitive ease: Sascha Topolinski and Fritz Strack, “The
Architecture of Intuition: Fluency and Affect Determine {ectition Intuitive
Judgments of Semantic and Visual Coherence and Judgments of
Grammaticality in Artificial Grammar Learning,” 
Journal of Experimental
Psychology—General 138 (2009): 39–63.
doubled accuracy: Bolte, Goschke, and Kuhl, “Emotion and Intuition.”
form a cluster: 
Barbara 
Fredrickson, 
Positivity: Groundbreaking
Research Reveals How to Embrace the Hidden Strength of Positive
Emotions, Overcome Negativity, and Thrive (New York: Random House,
2009). Joseph P. Forgas and Rebekah East, “On Being Happy and
Gullible: Mood Effects on Skepticism and the Detection of Deception,”
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 44 (2008): 1362–67.
smiling reaction: Sascha Topolinski et al., “The Face of Fluency: Semantic
Coherence Automatically Elicits a Specific Pattern of Facial Muscle
Reactions,” 
Cognition and Emotion 23 (2009): 260–71.
“previous research…individuals”: Sascha Topolinski and Fritz Strack,
“The Analysis of Intuition: Processing Fluency and Affect in Judgments of
Semantic Coherence,” 
Cognition and Emotion 23 (2009): 1465–1503.