How Cognitive Fluency Affects Decision Making

Here is one of the easiest ways to make a positive personal impact: show up on time.  Louis XVIII, King of France in the late 18th and early 19th century is reputed to have  said, “Punctuality is the politeness of kings.”  Nice turn of a phrase, Louis. Seriously though, there is a lot in those six words.  Kings (especially before the revolution) didn’t need to be punctual.  They could show up when they wanted.  Afterall, people would wait for them.But Louis suggests that one way a king can show respect for other people is to meet them at the appointed time.  If this is true for kings, it certainly is true for you and me. 

The Hawthorne effect refers to a type of reactivity in which individuals modify an aspect of their behavior in response to their awareness of being observed.[1][2]

That Doesn’t Mean You Should Spread Your Goals All Over The InternetAnother popular research article came out a few years ago from Peter Gollwitzer et al. titled When Intentions Go Public. The basic conclusion was:Identity-related behavioral intentions that had been noticed by other people were translated into action less intensively than those that had been ignored.

Darren Finkelstein is The Accountability Guy®

Today, the network properties of large arrays of signalling proteins, common in bacteria that rely on whip-like flagella to navigate chemical gradients (chemotaxis), are an active area of research. Highly conserved over the course of evolution, this architecture has been compared only slightly tongue-in-cheek to a ‘nanobrain’, because it functions as a network, is capable of processing large amounts of information, is exquisitely sensitive to tiny changes in environmental conditions, and is positioned at the leading pole of the cell, akin to the cell’s ‘head’ but one that shifts position as the cell changes direction.

Evolution had laid a foundation of capacities considered cognitive well before nervous systems appeared

cognition is computation over representations

Cognition comprises the means by which organisms become familiar with, value, exploit and evade features of their surroundings in order to survive, thrive and reproduce