Guilty: When Cold Cognition Trumps Trickster’s Heat
The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, the solution comes to you, and you don’t know how or why.
— Albert Einstein
Photograph: Seth Wenig/EPA
When a tiger comes through the bamboo brake, your Hot Cognition, keenly focused on anomalies in the present moment, sets you running even before you think TIGER, or RUN! Cold Cognition, your predictive mind, knows better: there were no tigers here yesterday, can’t be one here today. Cold Cognition makes you, Darwin Award in hand, a nice snack for the tiger.
We long for Hot Cognition’s direct experience of the present moment which Cold Cognition prevents access to.
Improvisers are masters of Hot Cognition. The magic they perform, finding impromptu responses to their fellow improvisers’ calls—yes, and…— is a testament to Hot Cognition’s power and allure. We all long to live in the moment. At times we all long, like Belushi, samurai sword in hand, to slash back against Cold Cognition, our normal, everyday, metronome-bound rational lives.
Of course, Belushi wasn’t a samurai. Improv is built on amusing fictions—or lies—that sometimes lead to insight or to innovation. Sometimes, amusing or not, the lies are just dead wrong.
Neuroscience explains that our mental lives are a constant battle between those two kinds of attention: Hot and Cold Cognition, explained by cognitive scientist and author Daniel Kahneman as Fast and Slow Thinking. This new science confirms a chestnut often attributed to Einstein that “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift … and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” Improvisers fulfill Einstein’s apparent longing to honor the sacred gift, intuition.
But Einstein’s point is not to promote intuition at the expense of rationality. The goal is collaboration. Einstein prized intuition and imagination but he wasn’t ready to throw E=mc2 or the rest of his beloved mathematics under the bus. Hot and Cold Cognition both evolved to perform important functions. They are meant to work together. If there is any “meant” in bio evolution: evolution proceeds just by accidents—improvisations—that work out well.
Neither intuition’s present insights nor rational evidence from past experience should be silenced. Hot Cognition’s role is to respond with instinct-driven immediacy to that anomalous tiger. But sometimes, responding to scant evidence from the brain stem rather than the pre-frontal cortex, Hot Cognition gets things wrong. Its narrative—there’s a tiger, run!—was meant to save your life but might turn out a mere red herring. Improv, driven by Hot Cognition, is really nothing but a string of lies that lead either to laughs or to some aha! moment, the shock of recognition that Del Close, the mad genius of comic improv, said was the true goal of improvising.
If that tiger you intuited turns out to be no grand life-saving aha but just a billy-goat, at some point Cold Cognition, responding to the evidence, should issue an about-face. As Kahneman remarks, “It turns out you can have intuitions for bad reasons. All it takes is a thought that comes to your mind automatically and with high confidence, and you’ll think that it’s an intuition, and you’ll trust it. But the correlation between confidence and accuracy is not high.”
Ever confident, Donald J. Trump, Trickster-in-Chief, master of Hot Cognition and the present moment, according to the Washington Post confected 30,000 lies during his presidency.
The prosecutors under Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg turned their case—built on historical evidence pieced together with infinite care using logic and legal precedent—into an overwhelmingly persuasive narrative: guilty on 34 counts.
The defense was dominated by Trump’s fear and anger—favorite sons of Hot Cognition.
To the surprise of many, the defense in their cross-examination did not challenge The National Enquirer’s David Pecker’s damning testimony that he colluded with Trump to “catch and kill” the Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal stories. Some speculate that they used kid gloves because Trump—who many thought oversteered the defense—feared what Pecker still held tucked away in his infamous AMI safe. Are there more Jeffrey Epstein stories and pictures hiding in that woodpile? Who knows? Apparently, Trump does.
If fear ensured that the defense laid no glove on Pecker, anger shaped the no-holds-barred attacks on Stormy Daniels and Michael Cohen. Neither cross-examination contributed to shaping an alternative narrative to offer in Trump’s defense. In their rough intensity, both attacks seem to have made the jury favor the witnesses.
Relying on Hot Cognition in a felony trial is like bringing a knife to a gunfight. In this case, 34 gunfights. Trusting in Hot Cognition, at best Trump ran true to form.
We long for more access to Hot Cognition in our lives. But when called to assess the authority of someone whose “gut knows more than many brains,” that’s when my Cold Cognition kicks in. Yours should, too.
Matt Wuerker
Don’t forget: all that doom scrolling on social media is driven by Hot Cognition’s bedfellows, fear and anger. While espousing the democratic-leaning openness to many voices, social media favor the loud, adrenaline-fueled mobs that not by accident are embracing autocracy around the globe.
We shouldn’t be surprised: fear and anger’s clicks pay the bills, driving social media’s advertising sales and Trump’s record-breaking $52.8 million haul after the verdict.
In that regard Hot Cognition paid off—bigly.
