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.

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“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

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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.