What Is Cognitive Kindness?

www.psychologytoday.com

Karen Yu, Ph.D. and Warren Craft, Ph.D., MSSW

Choice Matters

It's time to prioritize being kind to our minds.

Posted Apr 12, 2021 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma

KEY POINTS

Source: Kristopher Roller/Unsplash

Being Kind to Our Minds

Valuable resources should ideally be requested and allocated intentionally.

And while we're often at least aware of the importance of treating
resources such as money and time with care, we often fail to even
recognize the importance of doing so for what are arguably our most
valuable individual and collective assets of all—our cognitive resources.

The birth of modern-day cognitive psychology is often referred to as "The

Cognitive Revolution." That revolution elevated the study of thought within
psychology. We need nothing short of a new kind of cognitive revolution,
one that elevates thinking not just within a field of study, but within our
lives. A revolution centered on what we call cognitive kindness. 

Cognitive kindness is a generosity of spirit toward others’ minds and one’s

own mind that proceeds from a fundamental valuing of our individual and
collective cognitive abilities. Cognitive kindness calls our attention to our
tremendous cognitive abilities—our abilities to reason and understand, to
imagine and create, to dream and design, to envision and enact. Ideally,
cognitive kindness is extended to others without the expectation of any
particular return for ourselves. It’s about empowering the thinking of
others. 

Cognitive kindness urges us to consider how we might apply what science

tells us about how our minds work to all that we do and design, in ways
that liberate and empower the full cognitive potential of each person. What
could that look like? Let's consider one example. And because being
effectively kind to the mind depends on an accurate understanding of how
our minds work, let's begin with a research finding.

Research Reveals: The Illusion of Transparency

Studies suggest that people often overestimate the extent to which their
thoughts, attitudes, and feelings are evident to others—a phenomenon
termed the illusion of transparency. 

For example, participants induced to lie overestimated the extent to which

others could tell that they were lying, and in another study, participants
asked to drink samples of good-tasting and foul-tasting liquids
overestimated the number of people who could tell which liquid they were
drinking (Gilovich, Medvec, & Savitsky, 1998).

From Research Toward Cognitive Kindness: Some Ideas

Now, how might we take that research finding and apply it toward
cognitive kindness—i.e., apply it in ways that ease and/or improve the
thinking of others in our everyday lives?

One Idea: Broadcast Your Intentions

Imagine this: You're out for a walk and are about to cross the exit from a
parking lot. You notice a car pull out of a parking space and approach the
exit. You're not sure whether the driver sees you or is planning to stop; the
driver may be wondering something similar about you. The illusion of
transparency tells us that even if we think our intentions are obvious, they
may not be. 

Why not broadcast your intention to walk behind and not in front of the
vehicle by angling your body accordingly and walking deliberately in that
direction? By doing so, you've substantially reduced the challenge for the
driver of accurately anticipating your next move (and perhaps also
prevented an accident).

You've just been cognitively kind in multiple ways: You've freed up

cognitive capacity for the driver and increased the driver's predictive
accuracy.

Another Idea: Broadcast (or Even Exaggerate) Your Interest

Now imagine you're attending a presentation that you're keenly interested

in. You'd expect this would be obvious to the presenter. Yet you also know
about the illusion of transparency. What might you do? 

Intentionally broadcasting—exaggerating even—indicators of your interest

can liberate the cognitive capacity of a presenter who is trying to figure out
whether the audience cares. Lean forward, nod your head, and make eye
contact, perhaps with a bit more gusto than you might feel is necessary. 
More Ideas: Your Ideas

In what other contexts and ways might we apply an understanding of the

illusion of transparency toward the goal of easing and improving
one another's thinking? How might it change what we aim to communicate,
how we choose to communicate it, and with whom? How might we bring
this to our various roles—leader, doctor, patient, teacher, student, parent—
to name a few possibilities? How might we bring it to our various realms
and modes of communication and our choices among them—in-person
conversation, phone call, email, websitel—to name a few? We encourage
your consideration of interactions and contexts large and small, personal
and professional, at the individual, organizational, and systems levels. 

The Possibility of Cognitive Kindness

The illusion of transparency is only one finding about how our minds work.
There are so many, many more. And each is a starting point for multiple
paths toward cognitive kindness. What might be possible if we genuinely
prioritized one another's minds as the valuable, incredible resource that
they are? 

In future posts, we'll further explore principles and possibilities for cognitive

kindness, each grounded in what science tells us about how our minds work.

TEDx Talk: The possibility of cognitive kindness

© Karen Yu

Facebook image: GalacticDreamer/Shutterstock

References