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    Cognitive miser

    认知吝啬者

    Model
    Also called
    cognitive miserliness, miserly processing

    What is a cognitive miser?

    The cognitive miser is how Fiske and Taylor’s Social Cognition (1984) described the thinker: with limited capacity to process information, people take shortcuts whenever they can, settling for quick, adequate answers over slow, accurate ones.[1]

    Standard

    A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

    Work it out, then pick an answer.

    Control

    A magazine and a banana cost $2.90 in total. The magazine costs $2. How much does the banana cost?

    Without the “more than,” the intuitive answer, $0.90, is right.

    Answered correctly

    Standard 21%
    Control 98%

    Confidence in their answer

    Wrong on the standard 85%
    Control 98%

    Data: De Neys et al. (2013), 248 French university students; confidence counts each person’s first problem only.

    The bat-and-ball problem and its control version. Data from De Neys et al. (2013); the original items were in French and used other objects. Select a part for details
    The bat-and-ball problem and its control version. Data from De Neys et al. (2013); the original items were in French and used other objects. Save as image (PNG)

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    Key points

    • The book presented it as the third view of the thinker, after the consistency seeker and the naive scientist, and credited the label to Taylor (1981).[1]
    • The shortcuts include stereotypes and decision heuristics. Observers, for example, judged that the speaker they happened to face, the one who caught their attention, had influenced the conversation more.[2]
    • Fiske and Taylor later revised the picture: people are motivated tacticians, sometimes misers and sometimes deeper thinkers, depending on their goals and motives.[2]
    • In reasoning research the term means defaulting to cheap, intuitive processing. Only 21% solved the bat-and-ball problem in one study, and high cognitive ability is no guarantee against such errors.[3][4]

    An example

    Ms. Wang draws up her team’s on-call schedule. Seeing “new hire,” she assumes the newcomers don’t know the process and gives every important shift to veterans without asking what the new people have done. The schedule is quick to make, but it overlooks a newcomer who has run the same kind of project.

    Misreadings and limits

    The model does not say people are lazy or dim: many shortcuts work well most of the time.[1] People who give the wrong bat-and-ball answer are also less sure of it than of their answer to an easy control version.[4] Nor is it an excuse: in sex-discrimination cases, judging employees by category instead of as individuals was the very problem raised.[2]

    Sources

    1. 1 Fiske, S. T., & Taylor, S. E. (1984). Social cognition. Random House. View source
    2. 2 Fiske, S. T., & Taylor, S. E. (2020). Social cognition evolves: Illustrations from our work on intergroup bias and on healthy adaptation. Psicothema, 32(3), 291–297. doi:10.7334/psicothema2020.197
    3. 3 Toplak, M. E., West, R. F., & Stanovich, K. E. (2011). The Cognitive Reflection Test as a predictor of performance on heuristics-and-biases tasks. Memory & Cognition, 39(7), 1275–1289. doi:10.3758/s13421-011-0104-1
    4. 4 De Neys, W., Rossi, S., & Houdé, O. (2013). Bats, balls, and substitution sensitivity: Cognitive misers are no happy fools. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 20(2), 269–273. doi:10.3758/s13423-013-0384-5

    Last checked against sources: October 27, 2026