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Several teams of German psychologists that have studied the RAT in recent years have come up with remarkable discoveries about cognitive ease. One of the teams raised two questions: Can people feel that a triad of words has a solution before they know what the solution is? How does mood influence performance in this task? To find out, they first made some of their subjects happy and others sad, by asking them to think for several minutes about happy or sad episodes in their lives. Then they presented these subjects with a series of triads, half of them linked (such as dive, light, rocket) and half unlinked (such as dream, ball, book), and instructed them to press one of two keys very quickly to indicate their guess about whether the triad was linked. The time allowed for this guess, 2 seconds, was much too short for the actual solution to come to anyone’s mind. The first surprise is that people’s guesses are much more accurate than they would be by chance. I find this astonishing. A sense of cognitive ease is apparently generated by a very faint signal from the associative machine, which “knows” that the three words are coherent (share an association) long before the association is retrieved. The role of cognitive ease in the judgment was confirmed experimentally by another German team: manipulations that increase cognitive ease (priming, a clear font, pre-exposing words) all increase the tendency to see the words as linked. Another remarkable discovery is the powerful effect of mood on this intuitive performance. The experimenters computed an “intuition index” to measure accuracy. They found that putting the participants in a good mood before the test by having them think happy thoughts more than doubled accuracy. An even more striking result is that unhappy subjects were completely incapable of performing the intuitive task accurately; their guesses were no better than random. Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition. These findings add to the growing evidence that good mood, intuition, creativity, gullibility, and increased reliance on System 1 form a cluster. At the other pole, sadness, vigilance, suspicion, an analytic approach, and increased effort also go together. A happy mood loosens the control of System 2 over performance: when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors. Here again, as in the mere exposure effect, the connection makes biological sense. A good mood is a signal that things are generally going well, the environment is safe, and it is all right to let one’s guard down. A bad mood indicates that things are not going very well, there may be a threat, and vigilance is required. Cognitive ease is both a cause and a consequence of a pleasant feeling.
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