Does the Intuition of Distinctness Result from Valid Reasoning? – Reply to Kammerer

According to an influential physicalist view, the intuition of distinctness is a cognitive illusion in the sense that it results from fallacious reasoning: we erroneously infer that the referents of phenomenal and physical concepts are different, from the fact that there is a certain difference between our uses of those concepts. (Kammerer, Review of Philosophy and Psychology 10:649–667, 2019) has recently argued, however, that it is psychologically implausible that the intuition of distinctness results from a fallacy: the reasoning process leading to this intuition is, in several psychological respects, similar to valid reasoning and dissimilar to typical fallacies, which gives us a reason to think that this process is a case of valid reasoning. I argue that there are no psychological reasons to think that the process underlying the intuition of distinctness (or at least the crucial part of this process) is a case of valid reasoning. There is, in fact, only one crucial psychological respect in which this process resembles valid reasoning, and although the two processes are similar in one crucial respect, this does not rule out that the intuition of distinctness results from a fallacy, namely, the sort of fallacious reasoning that physicalists have in mind. Furthermore, since the process underlying the intuition of distinctness resembles typical fallacies in one crucial respect, there is a reason to think that the intuition of distinctness does result from a fallacy.

Jays are sensitive to cognitive illusions

Jays hide food caches, steal them from conspecifics and use tactics to minimize cache theft. Jays are sensitive to the content of their own caches, retrieving items depending on their preferences and the perishability of the cached item. Whether jays impose the same content sensitivity when they steal caches is less clear. We adapted the ‘cups-and-balls’ magic routine, creating a cognitive illusion to test whether jays are sensitive to the (i) content of hidden items and (ii) type of displacement. Subjects were presented with two conditions in which hidden food was consistent with their expectations; and two conditions in which food was manipulated to violate their expectations by switching their second preferred food for their preferred food (up-value) or vice versa (de-value). Subjects readily accepted food when it was consistent with their expectations but were more likely to re-inspect the baited cup and alternative cup when their expectations were violated. In the de-value condition, jays exhibited longer latencies to consume the food and often rejected it. Dominant subjects were more likely to reject the food, suggesting that social factors influence their responses to cognitive illusions. Using cognitive illusions offers innovative avenues for investigating the psychological constraints in diverse animal minds.

Self-serving optimism in hedonic prediction: People believe in a bright future for themselves and their friends, but not for their enemies

According to longitudinal research, psychological well-being is remarkably stable over time. However, people may still believe that the future will deviate from the past. Across three experiments in Norway and USA (N=1,130; two pre-registered), participants were randomly assigned to report their well-being in the past or predict their future well-being. In line with a "bright-future hypothesis", people predicted higher levels of happiness and meaning in the future than their historical baseline from the past. We observed the same optimistic pattern for a 5-year horizon as a 1-year horizon, and participants who viewed themselves as pessimistic were no exception. Rather than being a cognitive illusion, the evidence favored a motivational explanation. Specifically, the effect was found both in separate judgment between-persons and joint evaluation within-persons, which means that participants did not "correct" their predictions even when the contrast with their own past became explicit (Study 2). This suggests that the participants believed that their future optimism was rational and accurate, although it deviates from their personal experience and is statistically unrealistic. Highlighting the social dimension of well-being predictions, our final experiment found that the expectation of future improvement generalized to judgments of a friend, but not to an enemy (Study 3). Seen as a whole, the results suggest that people predict a bright future when they want to see one.

Features of subjective age and psychological well-being at young age

The results of the subjective age of young people study are presented. Usage of clarifying questions in the study of subjective age and its components s substanatied. It was determined that the delimitation between situations of subjective age assessment reduces the uncertainty of self-perception. It was fixed that the cognitive illusion at young age is insignificant. It is also determined that the assessment of physical health and social functioning at this age is not associated with psychological well-being. In order to achieve and preserve psychological well-being at young age, role-playing and vital activity are of the greatest significance. It was found that the decrease in psychological well-being leads to a decreasing of subjective age. It is determined that the social subjective age forpeople who are 20-30 years old, could be used as a resource in therapy.

A Cold Shower for the Hot Hand Fallacy: Robust Evidence that Belief in the Hot Hand is Justified

The hot hand fallacy has long been considered a massive and widespread cognitive illusion with important implications in economics and finance. We develop a novel empirical strategy to correct for several fundamental limitations in the canonical study and replications, conduct an improved field experiment to test for the hot hand in its original domain (basketball shooting), and gather all extant controlled shooting data. We find strong evidence of hot hand shooting in every dataset, including on the individual level. Also, in a novel study of beliefs, we find that expert observers can predict (out-of-sample) which shooters are hotter.

Manipulating Meaning: Language and Ideology in the Commodification of Online Sociality

Marxist Internet scholars have recently shed light on the commodification and exploitation of social media users. While some of these studies have also acknowledged the ideological nature of how online sociality is understood and discussed, they have not yet addressed in great detail the ways in which ideology figures in the process of commodification of social media users. We address this question by combining Marxist ideology theory with insights from cognitive pragmatics. Focusing on the idea of illusion, we draw on Relevance Theory and employ the notions of “relevance” and “cognitive illusion” to discuss the ideological process we call context manipulation, a concept that helps bring to focus the discursive obscuring of the capitalist operational logic of social media corporations. We illustrate our cognitivepragmatic model of ideology with examples of Facebook’s discursive practices. The paper contributes to the discussion on ideology in cultural studies and the discussion on commodification of online sociality in critical Internet and media studies by offering a revised interpretation of Marx’s ideology theory that highlights the discursive and cognitive nature of ideological processes, and by elaborating on the workings of ideology in the specific context of corporate social media.

Inattentional Blindness and the Illusion of Attention

Many illusions reveal shortcuts that our visual system takes when making sense of the world; they show how the visual system breaks down, thereby revealing how it works. Another class of illusions, though, reveal not just the limits of vision but also the limits of the mind. We can fail to see something that is fully visible and distinctive, provided we are focusing our attention on something else. This inattentional blindness affects what we see, but it also influences what we think we will see. People mistakenly believe that they will notice such unexpected objects, a cognitive illusion about what captures attention.

Pseudocontingencies

In research on causal inference and in related paradigms (conditioning, cue learning, attribution), it has been traditionally taken for granted that the statistical contingency between cause and effect drives the cognitive inference process. However, while a contingency model implies a cognitive algorithm based on joint frequencies (i.e., the cell frequencies of a 2 x 2 contingency table), recent research on pseudocontingencies (PCs) suggests a different mental algorithm that is driven by base rates (i.e., the marginal frequencies of a 2 x 2 table). When the base rates of two variables are skewed in the same way, a positive contingency is inferred. In contrast, a negative contingency is inferred when base rates are skewed in opposite directions. The chapter describes PCs as a resilient cognitive illusion, as a proxy for inferring contingencies in the absence of solid information, and as a smart heuristic that affords valid inferences most of the time.

The role of behavioral finance in modern age investment

Decision making process is very complex task that involves various activities like industry and company analysis along with analysis of past performance of individual stocks/assets. Asunder from this, one of the most important factors that influence the individual's investment decision is cognitive illusions. Individual investor‘s behavior is influenced by various heuristic and biases, which are brought to light by the emerging field of behavioral finance. This paper provides aconceptual framework of the various principles of Behavioral Finance including cognitive illusion: Heuristics, Overconfidence, Representativeness, Anchoring, Gambler's Fallacy,Prospect Theory, Loss Aversion, Regret Aversion, Mental Accounting and Disposition Effect.