by Ben Hess, Managing Director, ThirdPool Recruiting
Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize winning psychologist, defines “cognitive ease” as a person’s natural desire to make decisions and judgments in an intuitive and automatic way.
“Cognitive strain” happens when decision making requires more conscious judgments and critical thinking.
Dr. Kahneman describes the difference this way:
Your mind is like a cockpit with a set of dials that indicate the current values of essential variables.
One of the dials measures cognitive ease, and its range is between “easy” and “strained.”
Easy is a sign that things are going well—no threats, no major news, no need to redirect attention or mobilize effort.
Strained indicates a problem exists which will require increased mobilization of [critical analysis resources].
When you are in a state of cognitive ease, you are probably in a good mood, like what you see, believe what you hear, trust your intuitions, and feel that the current situation is comfortably familiar.
When you feel cognitive strain, you are more likely to be more vigilant and suspicious, invest more effort in what you are doing, feel less comfortable, and make few errors, but you also are less intuitive and less
creative than usual.
By default, recruiting prospects experience cognitive strain during the recruiting process. In this state, it feels like you’re pushing them uphill.
Relieving the cognitive strain allows the process to move more freely.
How do you get a recruiting prospect to transition to a state of cognitive ease? We’ll cover this in the next Insight.
Until then, try looking at your interactions through this lens. Pushing someone experiencing cognitive strain produces a diminishing return.