Our brain is very powerful, you can notice that while making a guess our brain will react promptly, but when we need to sit and do math brain becomes lazy or dont want to do that.
So, this phenomenon is called as cognitive miser theory.
Cognitive means the mind and miser is like money. Cognitive miser literally means the person or mind who does not like to spend the money or mental energy.
Cognitive miser theory was coined by the Fiske and Shelley Taylor in 1984. He said that our brain is naturally lazy in nature. It hates to spend the mental energy. Instead, Mind is wired to save the mental energy by taking shorcuts and avoid deep thinking.
What is Cognitive Miser?
Our brain generate thousands of thought per day, without breaks. To analyze every single thought or thing is impossible for anyone. So, our brain is wired in a such a way that to prevent burnout. It avoids the cognitive resources and use it when there is necessary.
Brain has two choices, either goes into the deep, rational thinking or mental shortcuts. Brain choses the shortcuts to reach to conclusion or decision in day to day life. This is called as cognitive miser.
Why our braid does this?
Our brain has limited power in terms of the time, attention, memmory. So, deep thinking on everything leads to the thought burnout everytime. And sometime quick action helps us to do fast things in our day to day life, that mostly dont need much of thinking.
Tools of Cognitive Miser theory
There are two types of cognitive miser theory tools, heuristics and schemas. This two tool brain uses to save the mental energy.
Heuristics
Heuristics are the some of the mental rules set by our brain to take decisions in day to day life. It helps to avoid deep thinking and saves the mental energy.
Common examples of heuristics —
- When you go to the shop, you see two products, you assume that the product is expensive will be more good, even though you didnt know anything about the product itself. This mental shortcuts protects the mental energy of the person.
- Whenever any air plan crashes occurs then instead of looking for which is riskier travel like air or road. Our brain simply assumes that air travel is more risky while ignoring fact that air travelling is safe than road travelling statistically.
Schemas
Schemas are the mental blueprint of whatever you saw like a objects, person, places or situations. Our brain stores this data into schemas (mental blueprints) that helps individuals to deal into daily life without learning each everything daily.
Examples —
- When you visit a restaurent, your brain does not get blank. Right, brain tells you to take a sit, see the menu order food. So, each time your brain does not need to think, it is your schema (mental blueprints) that saves your energy on that.
- People often assume that how should police, teacher and a doctor should look and behave.
So, what is the difference between heuristics and schema?
Heuristics are the mental shortcuts and choices that brain makes, quickly and lets you decide what to do. Heuristics can sometimes lead to cognitive biases.
However, schemas are long term memmory organization structure, it lets you organize things that helps you to understand what things are and how they work.
Pros and Cons of the Cognitive Miser Theory
Good side points are,
- It saves time — instead of wasting time on small things brain uses shortcuts to take many decisions.
- It protects the brain from getting thought burnout.
Bad points are,
- It lead to take wrong decisions – However most of the decisions are small, but can be wrong due to no at all thinking in that.
- Our brain is entirely depend on different things to judge a thing, person or situation based on what we assume rather than thinking a rationally
- Our brain can easily believe in false news.
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