Cognitive Load and Effective Donation

(previous title: Very low cognitive load) 

Trusting choices made by the same brain that turns my hot 9th grade teacher into a knife-bearing possum at the last second every damn night.

Sean Thomason

We can't trust brains when taken as a whole. Why should we trust their subareas?

Cognitive load is the load related to the executive control of working memory. Depending on what you are doing, the more parallel/extraneous cognitive load you have, the worse you'll do it. (The process may be the same as what the literature calls "Ego Depletion" or "system 2 depletion", the jury is still up on that)

If you go here and enter 0 as lower limit and 1.000.000 as upper limit, and try to keep the number in mind until you are done reading post and comments, you'll get a bit of load while you read this post. 

Now you may process numbers verbally, visually, or both. More generally, for anything you keep in mind, you are likely allocating it in a part of the brain that is primarily concerned with a sensory modality, so it will have some "flavour","shape", "location", "sound", or "proprioceptual location". It is harder to consciously memorize things using odours, since those have shortcuts within the brain. 

Let us in turn examine two domains in which understanding cognitive load can help you win: Moral Dilemmas and Personal Policy

Moral Games/Dilemmas

In Dictator game (you're given $20 and you can give any amount to a stranger and keep the rest) the effect of load is negligible.

In the tested versions of the Trolley problems (kill/indirectly kill/let die one to save five) people are likely to become less utilitarian when under non-visual load. It is assumed that higher functions of the brain (in VMPF cortex) - which integrate higher moral judgement with emotional taste buttons - fails to integrate, making the "fast thinking", emotional mode be the only one reacting.

Visual information about the problem brings into salience the gory aspect of killing someone, and other lower level features that incline non-utilitarian decisions. So when visual load requires you to memorize something else, like a bird drawing, you become more utilitarian since you fail to visualize the one person being killed (which we do more than the five) in as much gory detail. (Greene et al,2011)

(Bednar et al.2012) show that when playing two games simultaneously, the strategy of one spills over to the other one. Critically, heuristics that are useful for both games were used, increasing the likelihood that those heuristics will be suboptimal in each case. 

In altruistic donation scenarios, with donations to suffering people at stake, (Small et al. 2007) more load increased scope insensitivity, so less load made the donation more proportional to how many people are suffering. Contrary to load, priming increases the capacity of an area/module, by using it and not keeping the information stored, leaving free usable space. (Dickert et al.2010) shows that priming for empathy increases donation amount (but not decision to donate), whereas priming calculation decreases it.

Taken together, these studies indicate that to make people donate more it is most effective to, after being primed for thinking about how they will feel about themselves, and for empathic feelings, make them feel empathically and non-visually someone from their own race. After all that you make them keep a number and a drawing in mind, and this is the optimal time to donate.

Personal Policy

If given a choice between a high carb food, and a low carb one, people undergoing diets are substantially more likely to choose the high carb one if they are keeping some information in mind.

Forgetful people, and those with ADHD know that, for them, out of sight means out of mind. Through luck, intelligence, blind error or psychological help, they learn to put things, literally, in front of them, to avoid 'losing them' in their minds corner somewhere. They have a lower storage size for executive memory tasks.

Positive psychologists advise us to make our daily tasks, specially the ones we are always reluctant to start, in very visible places. Alternatively, we can make the commitment to start them smaller, but this only works if we actually remember to do them.

Marketing appropriates cognitive load in a terrible way. They know if we are overwhelmed with information, we are more likely to agree. They'll inform us more than what we need, and we aren't left with enough brain to decide well. One more reason to keep advertisement out of sight and out of mind.

Effective use of Cognitive Load

Once you understand how it works, it is simple to use cognitive load as a tool: