Teach 5

AP Psychology · Modules 2.2a and 2.2b · Thinking, Problem Solving, Judgments, and Decision Making

In some ways, we display remarkable mental powers. Indeed, our ability to think creatively, to consider many different options and produce novel and valuable ideas, is a Homo sapiens hallmark.

Concepts

2.2-1 What are cognition and metacognition, and what are the functions of concepts?

Psychologists who study cognition focus on the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating information. One of these activities is metacognition (literally “beyond cognition”), or thinking about our thinking. Metacognition refers to our thinking when planning and assessing our understanding and performance. Students who use metacognition, who monitor and evaluate their learning, perform better academically (de Boer et al., 2018).

At a basic level, we form concepts, mental groupings of similar objects, events, ideas, or people. The concept chair includes many items, a baby’s high chair, a reclining chair, a dentist’s chair, all for sitting. Concepts simplify our thinking. Imagine life without them. We could not ask a child to “throw the ball” because there would be no concept of throw or ball. We could not say, “I want to earn money” because people aren’t born with a concept of earn or money. Concepts such as ball and money give us much information with little cognitive effort.

Concepts, Prototypes, and Schemas

We often form our concepts by developing a prototype, a mental image or best example of a category (Rosch, 1978). People more quickly agree that “a crow is a bird” than that “a penguin is a bird.” For most of us, the crow is the birdier bird; it more closely resembles our bird prototype. When something closely matches our prototype of a concept, we more readily recognize it as an example of the concept.

When we categorize people, we mentally shift them toward our category prototypes. Such was the experience of Belgian students who viewed ethnically blended faces. When viewing a blended face in which 70 percent of the features were prototypically White and 30 percent Asian, the students categorized the face as White (Figure 2.2-1). Later, as their memory shifted toward the White prototype, they were more likely to remember an 80 percent White face than the 70 percent White face they had actually seen (Corneille et al., 2004). Likewise, if shown a 70 percent Asian face, they later remembered a more prototypically Asian face. So, too, with sex: People who viewed 70 percent male faces later misremembered them as even more prototypically male (Huart et al., 2005).

Figure 2.2-1 Categorizing faces influences recollection. Shown a face that was 70 percent White, people tended to classify the person as White and to recollect the face as more White than it was. (Re-creation of experiment courtesy of Olivier Corneille.)

Move away from our prototypes, and category boundaries may blur. Is a tomato a fruit? Is a 17-year-old female a girl or a woman? Is a whale a fish or a mammal? Because a whale fails to match our mammal prototype, we are slower to recognize it as a mammal. Similarly, when symptoms don’t fit one of our disease prototypes, we are slow to perceive an illness (Bishop, 1991). People whose heart attack symptoms (shortness of breath, exhaustion, a dull weight in the chest) don’t match their heart attack prototype (sharp chest pain) may not seek help. And when behaviors don’t fit our discrimination prototypes, of White against Black, male against female, young against old, we often fail to notice prejudice. People more easily detect male prejudice against females than female prejudice against males or female prejudice against females (Cunningham et al., 2009; Inman & Baron, 1996). Although concepts speed and guide our thinking, they don’t always make us wise.

Developmental psychologist Jean Piaget [pee-ah-ZHAY], who studied the development of cognition in children, argued that our intellectual progression reflects an unceasing struggle to make sense of our experiences. To this end, the maturing brain builds schemas, concepts or mental molds into which we pour our experiences (Figure 2.2-2).

Figure 2.2-2 A changing marriage schema. Most people once had a marriage schema as a union between a man and a woman. By 2023, more than two dozen countries had legalized same-sex marriage. These new laws are both informed by and inform a culture’s changing marriage schema.

To explain how we use and adjust our schemas, Piaget proposed two more concepts. First, we assimilate new experiences, we interpret them according to our current schemas (understandings). Having a simple schema for dog, for example, a toddler may call all four-legged animals dogs. But as we interact with the world, we also adjust, or accommodate, our schemas to incorporate information provided by new experiences. Thus, the child soon learns that the original dog schema is too broad and accommodates by refining the category.

Thinking Creatively

2.2-2 What is creativity, and what fosters it?

Creativity is the ability to produce novel and valuable ideas (Hennessey & Amabile, 2010). Consider mathematician Andrew Wiles’ incredible, creative moment. Fermat’s last theorem (dreamed up by seventeenth-century mischievous genius Pierre de Fermat) had baffled the greatest mathematical minds for centuries, even after a $2 million prize (in today’s dollars) for the first proof was offered in 1908.

Wiles had pondered Fermat’s theorem for more than 30 years. One morning, out of the blue, the final “incredible revelation” struck him. “It was so indescribably beautiful; it was so simple and so elegant. I couldn’t understand how I’d missed it…. It was the most important moment of my working life” (Singh, 1997, p. 25). Creative writers and physicists likewise experience many significant ideas, unbidden, during mind wandering (Gable et al., 2019). (Perhaps you can recall such an experience?)

Creativity is supported by a certain level of aptitude (ability to learn). Those who score exceptionally high in quantitative aptitude as 13-year-olds, for example, are later more likely to create published or patented work (Bernstein et al., 2019; Lubinski et al., 2014). Yet there is more to creativity than aptitude, or what intelligence tests reveal. Aptitude tests (such as the SAT) require convergent thinking, an ability to provide a single correct answer. Creativity tests (How many uses can you think of for a brick?) require divergent thinking, the ability to consider many different options and to think in novel ways. Functional fixedness occurs when our prior experiences inhibit our ability to find creative solutions (Chrysikou et al., 2016). Bricklayers may only see a brick as part of a home rather than as a possible doorstop.

What Fosters Creativity?

Robert Sternberg and his colleagues believe creativity has five components (Sternberg, 1988, 2003; Sternberg & Lubart, 1991, 1992):

1. Expertise, well-developed knowledge, furnishes the ideas, images, and phrases we use as mental building blocks. “Chance favors only the prepared mind,” observed Louis Pasteur. The more blocks we have, the more chances we have to combine them in novel ways. And the longer we work on a problem, the more creative are our solutions (Lucas & Nordgren, 2020).

2. Imaginative thinking skills provide the ability to see things in novel ways, to recognize patterns, and to make connections. Having mastered a problem’s basic elements, we can redefine or explore it in a new way.

3. A venturesome personality seeks new experiences, tolerates ambiguity and risk, and perseveres in overcoming obstacles.

4. Intrinsic motivation is the quality of being driven more by interest, satisfaction, and challenge than by external pressures (Amabile & Hennessey, 1992). Creative people focus less on extrinsic motivators, meeting deadlines, impressing people, or making money, than on the pleasure and stimulation of the work itself.

5. A creative environment sparks, supports, and refines creative ideas. Wiles stood on the shoulders of others and collaborated with a former student. A study of the careers of 2026 prominent scientists and inventors revealed that the most eminent were mentored, challenged, and supported by their colleagues (Simonton, 1992). Creativity-fostering environments support innovation, team building, and communication (Hülsheger et al., 2009). They also minimize anxiety and foster contemplation (Byron & Khazanchi, 2011).

For those seeking to boost the creative process, research offers some ideas:

Develop your expertise. Ask yourself what you care about and most enjoy. Follow your passion by broadening your knowledge base and becoming an expert at something.

Allow time for incubation. Think hard on a problem, but then set it aside and come back to it later. Periods of inattention to a problem (“sleeping on it”) allow for automatic processing to form associations (Zhong et al., 2008).

Set aside time for the mind to roam freely. Creativity springs from “defocused attention” (Simonton, 2012a,b). So, detach from attention-grabbing TV shows, social media, and video gaming. Jog, go for a long walk, or meditate. Serenity seeds spontaneity. “Time alone is … the font of creativity,” says playwright and musician Lin-Manuel Miranda (Hainey, 2016).

Experience other cultures and ways of thinking. Viewing life from a different perspective sometimes sets the creative juices flowing. Students who spend time in other cultures learn how to blend new norms with those from their home culture, which increases creativity (Godart et al., 2015; Lu et al., 2018). Even getting out of your neighborhood or embracing intercultural friendships fosters flexible thinking (Kim et al., 2013; Ritter et al., 2012).

Solving Problems and Making Decisions

Module 2.2b. In some ways we are not, as we will see, the “wise humans” our species name suggests. We fear the wrong things. We allow the day’s local hot or cold weather to color our judgments of global climate change. We tend to be overconfident in our judgments and to persevere in clinging to discredited beliefs. Clearly, we are often in need of improving our executive functions, the high-level cognitive abilities that collectively allow us to solve problems and make decisions effectively.

Problem-Solving Strategies

2.2-3 Which cognitive strategies assist our problem solving, and which obstacles hinder it?

One tribute to our rationality is our problem-solving skill. What’s the best route around this traffic jam? How should we handle a friend’s criticism? How, without our keys, can we get into the house?

Some problems we solve through trial and error. Thomas Edison tried thousands of light bulb filaments before stumbling upon one that worked. For other problems, we use algorithms, step-by-step procedures that guarantee a solution. But step-by-step algorithms can be laborious and exasperating. To find a word using the 10 letters in SPLOYOCHYG, for example, you could try each letter in each of the 10 positions, 907,200 permutations in all. Rather than give you a computing brain the size of a beach ball, nature resorts to heuristics, simpler thinking strategies. Thus, you might reduce the number of options in the SPLOYOCHYG example by grouping letters that often appear together (CH and GY) and excluding rare letter combinations (such as YY). By using heuristics and then applying trial and error, you may hit on the answer. Have you guessed it?

Sometimes no problem-solving strategy seems to be at work at all, and we arrive at a solution to a problem through insight. Brain scans show bursts of activity associated with sudden flashes of insight (Kounios & Beeman, 2014). In one study, researchers asked people to think of a word that forms a compound word or phrase with each of three other words in a set (such as cream, skate, and water) and to press a button to sound a bell when they knew the answer. A sudden Aha! insight led to about half the solutions. Before the Aha! moment, the problem solvers’ frontal lobes (involved in focusing attention) were active. At the instant of discovery, there was a burst of activity in the right temporal lobe, just above the ear (Figure 2.2-3).

Figure 2.2-3 The Aha! moment.

Psychologist Wolfgang Köhler (1925) showed that humans are not the only creatures to display insight. He placed a piece of fruit and a long stick outside the cage of a chimpanzee named Sultan, beyond his reach. Inside the cage, Köhler placed a short stick, which Sultan grabbed, using it to try to reach the fruit. After several failed attempts, the chimpanzee dropped the stick and seemed to survey the situation. Then suddenly (as if thinking “Aha!”), Sultan jumped up and seized the short stick again. This time, he used it to pull in the longer stick, which he then used to reach the fruit. (For one example of a chimpanzee’s use of foresight, see Figure EM.3-1a.)

Birds, too, have displayed insight. One experiment, by Christopher Bird (yes, really) and Nathan Emery (2009), brought to life an Aesop fable in which a thirsty crow is unable to reach the water in a partly filled pitcher. See the crow’s solution in Figure EM.3-1b. Other crows have fashioned wire or sticks for extracting food, such as insects in rotting logs (Jelbert et al., 2018; Rutz et al., 2016). One African grey parrot has equaled or bettered the performance of Harvard students at a complex shell game testing visual memory (Pailian et al., 2020).

Insight often strikes suddenly, creating a happy sense of satisfaction (Knoblich & Oellinger, 2006; Metcalfe, 1986). The joy of a joke may similarly lie in our sudden comprehension of an unexpected ending or a double meaning: “You don’t need a parachute to skydive. You only need a parachute to skydive twice.”

Insightful as we are, other cognitive tendencies may lead us astray. We seek news that not only informs us, but also affirms us. Confirmation bias, for example, leads us to seek evidence for our ideas more eagerly than we hunt for evidence against them (Klayman & Ha, 1987; Skov & Sherman, 1986). In a classic study, Peter Wason (1960) gave British university students a set of three numbers (2-4-6) and told them the series was based on a rule. Their task was to guess the rule. (It was simple: any three ascending numbers.) Before submitting their answers, students generated their own three-number sets, and Wason told them whether their sets conformed to his rule. Once they were certain they had the rule, the students could announce it. The result? Most students formed a wrong idea (“Maybe it’s counting by twos”) and then searched only for confirming evidence. Seldom right but never in doubt.

Fixation and Mental Set

In real life, having formed a belief (that people can or cannot change their sexual orientation, or that gun control laws fail or do not fail to save lives), we prefer information that supports our belief. And once we get hung up on an incorrect view of a problem, it’s hard to approach it from a different angle. This obstacle to problem solving is called fixation, an inability to come to a fresh perspective. See if fixation prevents you from solving the matchstick problem in Figure 2.2-4.

Figure 2.2-4 The matchstick problem. How would you arrange six matches to form four equilateral triangles?

A prime example of fixation is mental set, our tendency to approach a problem with the mindset of what has worked for us previously. Indeed, solutions that worked in the past often do work on new problems. Consider: Given the sequence O-T-T-F-?-?-?, what are the final three letters? Most people have difficulty recognizing that the three final letters are F(ive), S(ix), and S(even). But solving this problem may make the next one easier: Given the sequence J-F-M-A-?-?-?, what are the final three letters? (If you don’t get this one, ask yourself what month it is.)

Just as a perceptual set predisposes us to what we perceive, a mental set predisposes us to how we think. Sometimes this can be an obstacle to problem solving, as when our mental set from our past experiences with matchsticks predisposes us to arrange them in two dimensions.

Reading source: Myers, Psychology for the AP® Course, Module 2.2a–2.2b. Prepared for AP Psychology, Royal High School.