Summary Of The Cognitive Miser Model

Naive scientist:
NaÏve scientist assumes that humans engage in thorough thought processes. Heider proposes that humans are driven by the need to control their surroundings and a comprehensible world (Crisp, & Turner, 2010). The desire for a purposeful and predictable world causes humans to act like naïve scientists, rationally and logically measuring and evaluating behaviors, before making attributions. Internal attributions attribute causes of events to within the target and external attributions to conditions not within the target. Humans may commit attribution biases. One bias is the fundamental attribution error (FAE). People underestimate the effect of situational constraints and overestimate the effect of dispositional factors (Alicke,
This could be due to mental resources being highly valued and limited, and cognitive miserliness occurs out of efficiency (Fiske & Taylor, 1984). Tversky and Kahneman (1974) proposed 3 types of heuristics: representativeness, availability and anchoring. We will use the representativeness heuristic to illustrate the model.

This model suggests that individuals typically do not act like scientists who rationally analyse information in daily life. Instead, individuals are more inclined to act as cognitive misers using mental shortcuts to assess issues and ideas that are unfamiliar or of great salience. Hence there are shifts in thought process used by individuals and research focus whereby the naïve scientist model suggests a complex effortful thought process and an analytical focus, while the cognitive miser model suggests a simple effortless thought process and an efficiency
Sometimes, individuals are fully dedicated to problem solving, deliberatively considering the information. Other times, individuals utilise efficient, effort-conserving but error-prone strategies. The choice of strategy depends on presence of contextual factors (e.g: goals, motives), and is not necessarily conscious. Motivated tactician does not dismiss the cognitive miser model, but explains when meticulous strategies and cognitively economical strategies are employed.

Unlike cognitive miser model in which cognitive resources-conserving strategies are preferred, motivated tactician model suggests that individuals are capable of being deliberative and spontaneous. Thought processes used are different (i.e: mental shortcuts versus analytical strategies and mental shortcuts). Depending on which theory (e.g: Heuristic-Systematic Model) the hypothesis is based upon, factors (e.g: motivations, ability), that determine which process is more dominant, will be different. Previous social cognition models did not consider such factors. Hence, drivers of processes are also different. Specifically, the desire to use the least cognitive effort drives cognitive miser model, while main drivers of motivated tacticians are the different factors proposed by the different