Easy?
I just posted the following comment to a post by Guy Kawasaki on his blog about the premise that people favor cognitive fluency - the idea that people prefer things that are easy to think about compared to those that are not.
Here was my comment: "I presume you may want to include a chapter on the contexts in which "easy" has the opposite effect. During the course of my firm's (socialens.com) recent research on the adoption of new media in organizations, an executive suggested (i'm paraphrasing heavily here) that one of the biggest reasons that C-Level folks have a hard time taking new media seriously is the simplistic names like "Twitter", "YouTube" etc. She jokingly suggested that, if they were to have been named with acronyms or something like "Ascendant Video" C-Level folks would have been all over these new technologies. I think she is probably correct, and if so, the counter-intuitive fact is that publicly espousing or using things which seem too easy is often associated with either a real or perceived loss of institutional or symbolic capital within the group."
I think the concept of cognitive fluency is interesting, but i wonder what happens to people's decisions when we marry cognitive fluency with social pressures? In my experience, humans do lots of cognitively, physically, and otherwise very difficult and uncomfortable things in the presence of others that they do not do when no one is watching. For example, many of the women i know will wear uncomfortable high heels in public, but take them off the minute they get home. I have seen men do the same with regard to neck ties. Also, many academics do amazing work in their profession, but when they have some down time the first thing they watch is 80's television re-runs.
I have no specific answer to this question, but it bears consideration, i think. A few possible sets of theories might inform this:
- Flow - a concept first promoted by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, who studied people's ability to get into an autotelic/flow state, where (and i'm paraphrasing here) they are able to match the challenges they face with their abilities. The interesting thing here is that "easy" isn't always more satisfying.
- Social, Institutional and Symbolic Capital - a concept first promoted by Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and later popularized by people like Robert Putnam. Bourdieu's concept explored the ways that people in a given community are affected by their quest to build social (connections with people), Institutional (ability to work within institutions), and symbolic (honor, prestige, etc) capital within that community
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If a life well lived is a project of artistic proportions, then our work is to find ways to synthesize the various pieces of our experience. When I'm not thinking hard, I like nothing better than to watch Doctor Who. I also like to crochet and blog and garden. My life's effort is to tease out the thread that makes these activities cohere, even if the narrative itself is a disjointed one.
Being the cynical person that I am, I just think a large number of individuals do not like to think. We just happen to surround ourselves with individuals that do (we're academics, it's just what we do). Thus, when one does not want to expand the cognitive cycles to, say, perhaps, dwell on the theory of relativity, they would rather dwell on what's going on in Jersey Shore at a superficial level (I'm sure sociologists have fun with reality shows).
Suffice it to say, my brain never shuts off, I am generally chugging along at a rather good rate whether I'm playing WoW, watching TV, or reading a book. I just always like to figure out what things truly are behind the curtain they present at the surface.
I'm reading 'Drive' by Daniel Pink, and he talks about intrinsic motivation, and how part of that is the desire to master something, and the satisfaction derived from it. He references Csíkszentmihályi's work in the book, unsurprisingly.
@Hagbard I wonder (and i can't say that i've found the answer): Is it that people don't like to think, or that they don't like to think about the things that western society (it's the only society i have really experienced) have privileged as "real thinking?" In other words, i have read Augustine's City of God and Toqueville's Democracy in America for enjoyment (in enough detail to have presented the latter at a Philosophy conference on it), but i also play basketball for enjoyment, and i am not sure that i can honestly say which of these activities requires more "real thinking."