Valerie A. Thompson

Previous research has demonstrated that reasoners’ Feeling of Rightness (FOR) for a quick, intuitive responses predicts the amount of analytic thinki

De Neys proposed a “switch” model to address what he argued to be lacuna in dual-process theory, in which he theorized about the processes that initiate and terminate analytic thinking. We will argue that the author neglected to acknowledge the abundant literature on metacognitive functions, specifically, the meta-reasoning framework developed by Ackerman and Thompson (2017), that addresses just those questions.

Research on dual-process theories of judgment makes abundant use of reasoning problems that present a conflict between Type 1 intuitive responses and Type 2 rule-based responses. However, in many of these reasoning tasks, there is no way to discriminate between the adequate and inadequate use of rules based on logical or probabilistic principles. To experimentally discriminate between the two, we developed a new set of problems: rule-inadequate versions of standard base-rate problems (where base rates are made irrelevant). Across four experiments, we observed conflict sensitivity (measured in terms of response latencies and response confidence) in responses to standard base-rate problems but also in responses to rule-inadequate versions of these problems. This failure to discriminate between real and merely apparent (or spurious) conflict suggests that participants often misuse statistical information and draw conclusions based on irrelevant base rates. We conclude that inferring the sound use of statistical rules from normatively correct responses to standard conflict problems may be unwarranted when this kind of reasoning bias is not controlled for.

Evans and Stanovich (2013, this issue) propose that Type 1 processes should be defined in terms of autonomy, such that they are initiated and run to completion in the presence of relevant triggering conditions. In this commentary, I argue that their autonomous execution has implications for the nature of the representation that is formed and for the shape and outcome of subsequent Type 2 processes. In addition, I argue that Type 2 processes may also be triggered automatically, but that, unlike Type 1 processes, their completion requires working memory resources, and that the outcome of those processes is more flexible than that of Type 1 processes.

In two experiments we tested the hypothesis that the mechanisms that produce belief bias generalise across reasoning tasks. In formal reasoning (i.e., syllogisms) judgements of validity are influenced by actual validity, believability of the conclusions, and an interaction between the two. Although apparently analogous effects of belief and argument strength have been observed in informal reasoning, the design of those studies does not permit an analysis of the interaction effect. In the present studies we redesigned two informal reasoning tasks: the Argument Evaluation Task (AET) and a Law of Large Numbers (LLN) task in order to test the similarity of the phenomena concerned. Our findings provide little support for the idea that belief bias on formal and informal reasoning is a unitary phenomenon. First, there was no correlation across individuals in the extent of belief bias shown on the three tasks. Second, evidence for belief by strength interaction was observed only on AET and under conditions not required for the comparable finding on syllogistic reasoning. Finally, we found that while conclusion believability strongly influenced assessments of arguments strength, it had a relatively weak influence on the verbal justifications offered on the two informal reasoning tasks.