I am going to summarize this week’s EID posts out of order
today because I am really interested in getting your opinions about two of
them. One of them is a really controversial debate in cognitive science and the
other is a really controversial debate in society as a whole. So whichever (or both) of these groups you
belong to, please let me know what you think.
The society-wide debate is whether people (kids primarily)
who play violent video games are more likely to be aggressive or less considerate
afterwards. This has some visceral
appeal to it. You might think that it
has a temporary effect – kids get into an aggressive mood while playing and it
primes them to stay this way for some period of time afterwards, probably in
the order of hours. Or you could think
that consistently playing violent games has a more permanent effect, rewiring
their brains to get used to being destructive and anti-social. But the truth is that the evidence is
mixed. It is not as clear a relationship
as the most ardent believer thinks. But
it is not purely in our imagination either.
My post looked at one alternative hypothesis, but feel free to comment
on the basic question too.
The cognitive science debate is whether you think that
cognitive heuristics like anchoring and priming are speed/accuracy tradeoffs
only, and therefore reduce the accuracy of decisions in order to act faster –
which has evolutionary advantages. Or whether
unconscious thinking can increase accuracy because of its greater capacity – in
which case overriding it with deliberate thought can reduce decision quality. My instinct tells me that it is both, simply
because that is the way most things usually fall in the complex world in which we
live. Occam’s razor aside, the simplest
answer is not always the correct one.
The other two posts were pretty straightforward, but also
important topics. The article on Monday
brought up the idea that the details of a situation can make or break whether a
design works. As with the two debates
above, this is because the real world is pretty complicated. I was not familiar with the fall-recovery
system problem that this article talked about until I read about it in
ISHN.
Similarly, Wednesday’s article about safety footwear
introduces the wide variety of components that go into something as simple as a
pair of safety shoes. I won’t look at my
pair in the same way again.
