Chapter 5

Making comparison and applying your knowledge

Smart Thinking — Art Markman, PhD

• Reusing past experience requires finding similarities between past and present.
• Analogies allow you to use similarities from distant domains.
• Retrieving a good analogy can be difficult, but there are ways to improve it.

Applying Your Knowledge

• Your ability to reuse old knowledge in new situations is rooted in your capacity to find similarities between new experiences and ones that you have encountered in the past.
• Following the development of Smart Habits and the acquisition of High-Quality Knowledge, the third part of the Smart Thinking formula involves Applying the Knowledge that you have.
• Your knowledge is made up of two distinct types of information: objects and relations.
• Generally speaking, the objects in a situation are the things that you can label with nouns when you talk about them.
• Relations provide the information about the relationships among all of the objects in a setting. Relations are typically described with whole phrases in which one word (often a verb) states the relationship that holds among two or more other objects.
• We learn many different kinds of relationships over a lifetime. Some of them are spatial relationships that tell us where objects are located.
• Your knowledge also contains relations that describe actions.
• Other knowledge focuses on relationships in time.
• Another crucial type of knowledge involves the causal relationships that were the focus of Chapter 4 – Understanding how things work
• The objects and relations in your knowledge allow you to determine how new situations are like ones you have encountered in the past.
• All of this similarity between the new experience and your previous knowledge allows you to identify where you are and to figure out what to do.
• One of the particularly powerful aspects of similarity, though, is that a new situation does not need to be identical to a previous situation in order to be able to Apply Your Knowledge.

Finding Similarities

Your ability to find the commonalities in a pair acts as you might expect it would. Items that are similar share many characteristics and those that are dissimilar share fewer. You might expect that differences would act the opposite way. That is, pairs that are very dissimilar might have more differences than pairs that are very similar.

• For similar pairs, the many differences you list typically involve contrasting aspects of each option.

Each of the differences involves finding a point of commonality between the pair and then noticing that there is some difference related to this commonality.

Because these differences depend on the way your knowledge about the concepts is matched up (what psychological theories call alignment), these differences are called alignable differences.

• When finding the differences between dissimilar pairs like eggplant–giraffe, the experience is not at all like what happens when you think of differences for a pair of similar items. Your initial sense is that the pair is very different, but the actual differences of the pair don’t seem easy to access. Eventually, you tend to list properties of one item that have no corresponding property in the other item. For example, you might say that you eat eggplants, and you don’t eat giraffes. Or that giraffes have long necks and eggplants don’t. Because these differences reflect that there is no good alignment between your knowledge of the two concepts, these differences are called nonalignable differences.

The pattern of commonalities and differences that you can list for similar and dissimilar pairs reveals something interesting about the way comparison works. Our cognitive system wants us to focus on information that is likely to be useful for thinking. The differences between similar things are often helpful to know.

The Power of Comparisons

The power of comparisons is that they allow us to find parallels between two situations. Once we recognize that there is some similarity between those situations, we can then see whether the solution that works in one case will also work in another.

Comparison is not just a tool for problem solving; it is one of the core thinking processes. We classify new things based on how similar they are to items we have encountered in the past. Our reactions to new people are often affected by our interactions with similar people we have met. Habits are also based on similarity. We are likely to perform an action by habit when a new situation is similar to one in which the habit has applied before.

Comparisons also help you evaluate people, products, and performance. Television talent shows and sports competitions like figure skating promote these kinds of comparisons. The first performer sets a standard, and the next is compared to the first. This comparison highlights both the commonalities between performers as well as the alignable differences. Unique aspects of a new performance (nonalignable differences) will often tend to get less attention and emphasis than will aspects that correspond to elements of a previous performer.

Often, of course, we make comparisons among some set of items to distinguish them from each other. We contrast the singers in a talent show or the competitors in a figure skating competition to determine which one is best. Obviously, differences are most important for these contrasts. As a result, we tend to pay most attention to the differences among the various competitors, particularly the alignable differences.

This focus on commonalities and (particularly) alignable differences is also true for what you tend to notice and learn about new situations. That is, you can think about most of your experiences in the same way you evaluate singers at a talent show or skaters at a competition.

Obviously, unique properties can be noticed, but they are noticed despite the comparison not because of it. That is, for people to really become aware of the nonalignable properties of a new situation, those properties must call attention to themselves.

Comparisons focus you on the commonalities and alignable differences of the items being compared. The nonalignable differences, which are unique properties of items, tend not to be noticed or learned unless they are pointed out specially (or they are very prominent). This focus affects your perception of items that you are comparing and influences the way you Apply Your Knowledge to a new situation.

Instantly Smarter

Comparisons in Choice

When you make important choices, you often compare the options to each other as part of the process of helping you reach a decision.

These comparisons focus you on the alignable differences of the options rather than the nonalignable differences. This focus influences both what you are likely to remember about the options later as well as what you are likely to choose. Aspects of the options that are comparable or alignable will be better remembered and will play a greater role in choices than aspects that are nonalignable. This will happen even when the nonalignable aspects of the options are actually fairly important.

This might seem a little counterintuitive, because you might assume you can think about a nonalignable difference as a case where one option has a property and the other just has a value of zero for that property. When comparing a house with a pool to one without a pool, you might think that you could represent that as a house with zero pools. Strange as it may seem, though, a large number of studies suggests that you tend to give unique nonalignable properties less weight in the choice than you would if the feature had had some correspondence in the other option. To ensure that you do not miss important properties in a choice, there are three things you can do:

• Try to evaluate each of the options independently rather than comparing them.

• Be systematic about your choice.

When the choice is important, write down the various aspects of the options. By making some kind of table or chart, you help make sure that aspects of the options you might forget still have a chance to play a role in the decision.

• Use your emotions.

If one of the options feels particularly good, that feeling should be taken into account.

How do you use your past experience?

The essayist George Santayana is credited with the following quotation: “Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” To use the past, though, it is crucial to figure out which elements of the past are important for understanding the present and future, because the past does not repeat itself precisely.

Lessons for Analogy

On the one hand, analogies provide a key way to structure how you think about a new arena of knowledge that you do not understand well.

On the other hand, Analogy is a potent source of predictions, but these predictions need to be verified in some other way, because the analogy does not guarantee they will be true.

To use an analogy, though, it is crucial to have High-Quality Knowledge about the base domain. Causal knowledge is particularly important to good analogies. Thus the more you know about how and why things work the way they do (high-quality causal knowledge) the more likely you will be to draw good analogies from one arena of knowledge to another.

Communicating with Analogies

Analogies provide ways to communicate concepts that would otherwise be hard to articulate. Analogies can be effective given the limits of our vocabulary. We have lots of words for objects (like camera), and descriptions of objects (like compact or digital). We have fewer words for causal knowledge. We describe actions with verbs (like John took a picture of the children). But when we want to describe the way things work, it can often be more difficult to do unless we know the complex and specialized vocabulary that experts have. Even if we have a basic understanding of the fundamental idea of taking a picture (by exposing film to light briefly) and developing those pictures (by first developing the film into a negative and then projecting that negative onto photosensitive paper), it can be difficult to describe this sequence and the reasons behind it.

A less cumbersome way to describe the actions and causal knowledge associated with a new domain is to use an analogy.

Using analogies to communicate has one other benefit: When the listener hears the analogy, he or she has to do a little work to find the correspondences between the base and target domain and to understand what is being communicated. The more effort you exert when you encounter new information, the more likely you are to remember it later. So, the effort involved in understanding the analogy makes it more memorable. In addition, people’s preference for the product is enhanced by the feeling that they discovered something new about it on their own. Using an analogy in conversation makes the topic more memorable and better liked by the listener.

The Analogy Bottleneck

I am hardly the first person to propose that analogies can be important for solving new problems. In his book, How to Solve It, mathematician George PÓlya suggested that if you are trying to solve a difficult problem, you should find another problem that you solved in the past that is similar to the new problem and reuse the solution. PÓlya was basically saying that analogy is a really powerful way to solve problems.

Even though analogies can be very helpful for solving problems, we often have difficulty retrieving the information we need from memory to make the analogy when we need it. That leaves us with a bit of a paradox. On the one hand, analogies are very useful for solving problems. On the other hand, we are often unable to retrieve a base domain that we know about when we need it. This highlights a key bottleneck in our formula for Smart Thinking: Applying Knowledge. We have talked about ways of developing Smart Habits and for ensuring that you have High-Quality Knowledge. Now, it’s time to look for ways to draw on that knowledge from memory when you need it.

IMPROVING ACCESS TO BASE DOMAINS

The reason why relevant base domains are hard to extract from memory is related to the importance of Smart Habits in thinking. Most of your life is spent in a world in which the proper thing to do is the same thing you did when you were in a nearly identical situation in the past.

In general, then, you live in a world of literal similarity. In fact, in many situations it would be delusional to start off by being reminded of things primarily from other domains.

Thus we are strongly biased to pull things from memory when they share both objects and relations with the current situation. For instance, the first time you walk into a new fast-food restaurant, you will easily call to mind other fast-food restaurants you have visited. So, how can you improve your ability to use analogy to solve problems by pulling potential base domains from memory?

You need to create a Smart Habit to take a new situation and focus on its relational meaning rather than focusing primarily on the objects. To help you do that, begin with some basic practice with proverbs. To get you started, give each of the following proverbs a relational definition (rephrase it in a more abstract way) and then think about other situations that come to mind. For example, the essence of the proverb “One cannot play all instruments in the band” can be expressed as “It takes individuals with different skills to do anything important.” A calm sea does not make a skilled sailor. Sweep the snow on your own porch before you brush the frost from mine. Put too much in a bag and it breaks. Flies come to feasts unasked. Great oaks from little acorns grow. If a son is uneducated, his father is to blame. It is a silly fish that is caught twice with the same bait. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. One man’s meat is another man’s poison. One should be satisfied with beer when the wine is gone.

To create a habit of thinking about the essence of situations, you might want to try more than just the preceding ten proverbs. If you type “list of proverbs” into a search engine, you will find a number of websites with many more examples that you can use to hone your relational description skills. After you have done this for a while, the proverbs have a second benefit. You will probably find a few proverbs that express the essence of problems you have encountered in the past. You can use the proverb to communicate that essence to someone else. Perhaps more important, using a proverb as a description of a problem may help you recognize new situations that share this essence in the future.

The key idea here is that proverbs are one way to help you categorize new situations based on a relational essence rather than based on the objects that are involved in the situation.

Creating Relational Categories

• Using your knowledge requires that you recognize that some new thing should be treated similarly to something you encountered in the past. Most of the things in our world that we categorize are objects.

Part of what makes objects so easy to categorize for people is that we have words that refer to those categories. Chairs may come in all shapes and sizes. Some have wheels. Some are comfortable. Some are big and bulky. Some can be folded and carried in a pouch. Having a word that we use to label the category helps us recognize new examples of that category when we encounter them again in the future.

Smart Thinking involves using analogies to Apply Your Knowledge. To make you more effective at recognizing potential analogies, it would be great if you had categories that applied to different situations that were all analogous rather than to different objects. Unfortunately, while the language (or languages) you speak provide you with lots of words for objects, language provides very few words that name the relational similarities that are shared by different situations that are analogous.

So, you have to create those labels yourself. One way to do that is to use proverbs. There are many other ways that you could create labels for categories of analogous situations. For each, the key is to find something that provides an effective description of the basis of the analogy.

I started this section by pointing out that languages have few words for categories of analogous situations. You probably do have a few such labels, though, and you should create the Smart Habit to use them now that you know why they are helpful. Return to the case of Dr. Lee and her patient with the inoperable tumor: Dr. Lee wanted to damage unhealthy tissue without harming the healthy tissue surrounding the tumor. The idea of destroying a target without harming nontargets brings to mind the term collateral damage. Collateral damage started as a military term to refer to the destruction of nonmilitary targets during military operations.

• Story titles and joke punch lines can also be used as relational labels. Stories and jokes encapsulate a set of relationships among characters. It would be cumbersome to have to retell the story or joke every time you wanted to think about those relationships, but the title of the story or the punch line of the joke can be used as a label that refers to the whole thing.

Using these techniques will take some practice and preparation. You may not know a lot of proverbs right now. You probably have not thought about the various ways of giving labels to categories of problems that you have encountered. You may never have thought of jokes as invitations to categorize situations. But you can create Smart Habits if you become more mindful of the way you choose to think about difficult problems. The effort you put into finding new ways to think about problems will be rewarded in the improvements in how well you can think of analogous situations. It will take some time, but this is a surefire way to improve your ability of Applying Knowledge.

The Takeaway

Similarity and analogy are crucial for helping you Apply Your Knowledge. You draw on experiences that are very much like the one you are in right now to determine what to do next. You tend to focus on what the current situation has in common with previous situations as well as on the differences that are related to those common aspects. Unique (or nonalignable) elements are generally not emphasized in your thinking. Your ability to find similarities between two situations is actually quite flexible. In addition to finding obvious similarities, you are skilled at making analogy comparisons that focus on the similarities between what you know (base domain) and what you don’t know (target domain). While the objects in those domains need not be similar, analogies highlight the relational similarities and can be used to communicate information about the similarities, making the target domain easier to understand. These inferences by analogy have to be treated with caution, though, because they are not guaranteed to be true. Although analogies are a powerful way to help you understand new situations, you often do not retrieve analogies that you know from memory. Information is usually drawn from memory based on the overall similarity of the new situation to something you encountered in the past. To focus retrieval on analogies, it is important to redescribe the problem to emphasize its essence and to deemphasize the objects. Using proverbs, relational category labels, story plots (or more prosaically, case studies), and even jokes helps make you smarter by improving your ability to Apply Knowledge to solve new problems.