In the international bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, the renowned psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive (...) biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions. -/- Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Winner of the National Academy of Sciences Best Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2011, Thinking, Fast and Slow is destined to be a classic. (shrink)

Dual-process and dual-system theories in both cognitive and social psychology have been subjected to a number of recently published criticisms. However, they have been attacked as a category, incorrectly assuming there is a generic version that applies to all. We identify and respond to 5 main lines of argument made by such critics. We agree that some of these arguments have force against some of the theories in the literature but believe them to be overstated. We argue that the dual-processing (...) distinction is supported by much recent evidence in cognitive science. Our preferred theoretical approach is one in which rapid autonomous processes are assumed to yield default responses unless intervened on by distinctive higher order reasoning processes. What defines the difference is that Type 2 processing supports hypothetical thinking and load heavily on working memory. (shrink)

The program of research now known as the heuristics and biases approach began with a study of the statistical intuitions of experts, who were found to be excessively confident in the replicability of results from small samples. The persistence of such systematic errors in the intuitions of experts implied that their intuitive judgments may be governed by fundamentally different processes than the slower, more deliberate computations they had been trained to execute. The ancient idea that cognitive processes can be partitioned (...) into two main families--traditionally called intuition and reason--is now widely embraced under the general label of dual-process theories. Dual-process models come in many flavors, but all distinguish cognitive operations that are quick and associative from others that are slow and governed by rules. To represent intuitive and deliberate reasoning, we borrow the terms "system 1" and "system 2" from Stanovich and West. In the following section, we present an attribute-substitution model of heuristic judgment, which assumes that difficult questions are often answered by substituting an answer to an easier one. Following sections introduce a research design for studying attribute substitution, as well as discuss the controversy over the representativeness heuristic in the context of a dual-system view that we endorse. The final section situates representativeness within a broad family of prototype heuristics, in which properties of a prototypical exemplar dominate global judgments concerning an entire set. (shrink)

An analytic cognitive style denotes a propensity to set aside highly salient intuitions when engaging in problem solving. We assess the hypothesis that an analytic cognitive style is associated with a history of questioning, altering, and rejecting supernatural claims, both religious and paranormal. In two studies, we examined associations of God beliefs, religious engagement, conventional religious beliefs and paranormal beliefs with performance measures of cognitive ability and analytic cognitive style. An analytic cognitive style negatively predicted both religious and paranormal beliefs (...) when controlling for cognitive ability as well as religious engagement, sex, age, political ideology, and education. Participants more willing to engage in analytic reasoning were less likely to endorse supernatural beliefs. Further, an association between analytic cognitive style and religious engagement was mediated by religious beliefs, suggesting that an analytic cognitive style negatively affects religious engagement via lower acceptance of conventional religious beliefs. Results for types of God belief indicate that the association between an analytic cognitive style and God beliefs is more nuanced than mere acceptance and rejection, but also includes adopting less conventional God beliefs, such as Pantheism or Deism. Our data are consistent with the idea that two people who share the same cognitive ability, education, political ideology, sex, age and level of religious engagement can acquire very different sets of beliefs about the world if they differ in their propensity to think analytically. (shrink)

Distinctions have been proposed between systems of reasoning for centuries. This article distills properties shared by many of these distinctions and characterizes the resulting systems in light of recent findings and theoretical developments. One system is associative because its computations reflect similarity structure and relations of temporal contiguity. The other is "rule based" because it operates on symbolic structures that have logical content and variables and because its computations have the properties that are normally assigned to rules. The systems serve (...) complementary functions and can simultaneously generate different solutions to a reasoning problem. The rule-based system can suppress the associative system but not completely inhibit it. The article reviews evidence in favor of the distinction and its characterization. (shrink)

Human reasoning is often biased by stereotypical intuitions. The nature of such bias is not clear. Some authors claim that people are mere heuristic thinkers and are not aware that cued stereotypes might be inappropriate. Other authors claim that people always detect the conflict between their stereotypical thinking and normative reasoning, but simply fail to inhibit stereotypical thinking. Hence, it is unclear whether heuristic bias should be attributed to a lack of conflict detection or a failure of inhibition. We introduce (...) a neuroscientific approach that bears on this issue. Participants answered a classic decision-making problem while the activation of brain regions believed to be involved in conflict detection and response inhibition was monitored. Results showed that although the inhibition area was specifically activated when stereotypical responses were avoided, the conflict-detection area was activated even when people reasoned stereotypically. The findings suggest that people detect their bias when they give intuitive responses. (shrink)

An experiment is reported examining dual-process models of belief bias in syllogistic reasoning using a problem complexity manipulation and an inspection-time method to monitor processing latencies for premises and conclusions. Endorsement rates indicated increased belief bias on complex problems, a finding that runs counter to the “belief-first” selective scrutiny model, but which is consistent with other theories, including “reasoning-first” and “parallel-process” models. Inspection-time data revealed a number of effects that, again, arbitrated against the selective scrutiny model. The most striking inspection-time (...) result was an interaction between logic and belief on premise-processing times, whereby belief - logic conflict problems promoted increased latencies relative to non-conflict problems. This finding challenges belief-first and reasoning-first models, but is directly predicted by parallel-process models, which assume that the outputs of simultaneous heuristic and analytic processing streams lead to an awareness of belief - logic conflicts than then require time-consuming resolution. (shrink)

Recent research shows that in reasoning tasks, subjects usually produce an initial intuitive answer, accompanied by a metacognitive experience, which has been called feeling of rightness. This paper is aimed at exploring the complimentary experience of feeling of error, that is, the spontaneous, subtle sensation of cognitive uneasiness arising from conflict detection during thinking. We investigate FOE in two studies with the “bat-and-ball” reasoning task, in its standard and isomorphic control versions. Study 1 is a generation study, in which participants (...) are asked to generate their own response. Study 2 is an evaluation study, in which participants are asked to choose between two conflicting answers. In each study, the FOE is measured by the FOE questionnaire. Results show that the FOE is significantly present in the standard B&B task when participants give a wrong answer, that our questionnaire can measure it, and furthermore, that it is diagnostic of genuine error. (shrink)