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Although the susceptibility to reasoning biases is often assumed to be a stable trait, the temporal stability of people’s performance on popular heuristics-and-biases tasks has been rarely directly tested. The present study addressed this issue and examined a potential determinant for answer change. Participants solved the same set of “bias” tasks twice in two test sessions, two weeks apart. We used the two-response paradigm to test the stability of both initial (intuitive) and final (deliberate) responses. We hypothesized that participants who showed higher conflict detection in their initial intuitive responses at session 1 (as indexed by a relative confidence decrease compared to control problems), would be less stable in their responses between session 1 and 2. Results showed that performance on the reasoning tasks was highly, but not entirely, stable two weeks later. Notably, conflict detection in session 1 was significantly more pronounced in those cases that participants changed their answer between session 1 and 2 than when they did not change their answer between sessions. We discuss practical and theoretical implications.

Traditionally, it has been assumed that logical thinking requires deliberation. However, people can also make logical responses quickly, exhibiting

Recent reasoning accounts suggest that people can process elementary logical principles intuitively. These controversial “logical intuitions” are believed to result from a learning process in which...

Human interactions often involve a choice between acting selfishly (in ones' own interest) and acting prosocially (in the interest of others). Fast and slow models of prosociality posit that people intuitively favor 1 of these choices (the selfish choice in some models, the prosocial choice in other models) and need to correct this intuition through deliberation to make the other choice. We present 7 studies that force us to reconsider this longstanding corrective dual-process view. Participants played various economic games in which they had to choose between a prosocial and a selfish option. We used a 2-response paradigm in which participants had to give their first, initial response under time pressure and cognitive load. Next, participants could take all the time they wanted to reflect on the problem and give a final response. This allowed us to identify the intuitively generated response that preceded the final response given after deliberation. Results consistently showed that both prosocial and selfish responses were predominantly made intuitively rather than after deliberate correction. Pace the deliberate correction view, the findings indicate that making prosocial and selfish choices does typically not rely on different types of reasoning modes (intuition vs. deliberation) but rather on different types of intuitions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Building on the old adage that the deliberate mind corrects the emotional heart, the influential dual process model of moral cognition has posited that utilitarian responding to moral dilemmas (i.e., choosing the greater good) requires deliberate correction of an intuitive deontological response. In the present article, we present 4 studies that force us to revise this longstanding "corrective" dual process assumption. We used a two-response paradigm in which participants had to give their first, initial response to moral dilemmas under time-pressure and cognitive load. Next, participants could take all the time they wanted to reflect on the problem and give a final response. This allowed us to identify the intuitively generated response that preceded the final response given after deliberation. Results consistently show that in the vast majority of cases (+ 70%) in which people opt for a utilitarian response after deliberation, the utilitarian response is already given in the initial phase. Hence, utilitarian responders do not need to deliberate to correct an initial deontological response. Their intuitive response is already utilitarian in nature. We show how this leads to a revised model in which moral judgments depend on the absolute and relative strength differences between competing deontological and utilitarian intuitions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

International audience; Influential studies on human thinking with the popular two-response paradigm typically ask participants to continuously alternate between intuitive ("fast") and deliberate ("slow") responding. One concern is that repeated deliberation in these studies will artificially boost the intuitive, "fast" reasoning performance. A recent alternative two-block paradigm therefore advised to present all fast trials in one block before the slow trials were presented. Here we tested directly whether allowing people to repeatedly deliberate will boost their intuitive reasoning performance by manipulating the order of the fast and slow blocks. In each block participants solved variants of the bat-and-ball problem. Maximum response time in fast blocks was 4s and 25s in the slow blocks. One group solved the fast trials before the slow trials, a second group solved the slow trials first, and a third mixed group alternated between slow and fast trials. Results showed that the order factor did not affect accuracy on the fast trials. This indicates that repeated deliberation does not boost people's intuitive reasoning performance.

International audience; Although human thinking is often biased by erroneous intuitions, recent de-bias studies suggest that people’s performance can be boosted by short training interventions, where the correct answers to reasoning problems are explained. However, the nature of this training effect remains unclear. Does training help participants correct erroneous intuitions through deliberation? Or does it help them develop correct intuitions? We addressed this issue in three studies, by focusing on the well-known Bat-and-Ball problem. We used a two-response paradigm in which participants first gave an initial intuitive response, under time pressure and cognitive load, and then gave a final response after deliberation. Studies 1 and 2 showed that not only did training boost performance, it did so as early as the intuitive stage. After training, most participants solved the problems correctly from the outset and no longer needed to correct an initial incorrect answer through deliberation. Study 3 indicated that this sound intuiting sustained over at least two months. The findings confirm that a short training can boost sound reasoning at an intuitive stage. We discuss key theoretical and applied implications.

International audience; One of the key components of the susceptibility to cognitive biases is the ability to monitor for conflict that may arise between intuitively cued "heuristic" answers and logical principles. While there is evidence that people differ in their ability to detect such conflicts, it is not clear which individual factors are driving these differences. In the present large-scale study (N = 399) we explored the role of cognitive ability, thinking dispositions, numeracy, cognitive reflection, and mindware instantiation (i.e. knowledge of logical principles) as potential predictors of individual differences in conflict detection ability and overall accuracy on a battery of reasoning problems. Results showed that mindware instantiation was the single best predictor of both conflict detection efficiency and reasoning accuracy. Cognitive reflection, thinking dispositions, numeracy, and cognitive ability played a significant but smaller role. The full regression model accounted for 40% of the variance in overall reasoning accuracy, but only 7% of the variance in conflict detection efficiency. We discuss the implications of these findings for popular process models of bias susceptibility.

International audience; Cognitive capacity is commonly assumed to predict performance in classic reasoning tasks because people higher in cognitive capacity are believed to be better at deliberately correcting biasing erroneous intuitions. However, recent findings suggest that there can also be a positive correlation between cognitive capacity and correct intuitive thinking. Here we present results from 2 studies that directly contrasted whether cognitive capacity is more predictive of having correct intuitions or successful deliberate correction of an incorrect intuition. We used a two-response paradigm in which people were required to give a fast intuitive response under time pressure and cognitive load and afterwards were given the time to deliberate. We used a direction-of-change analysis to check whether correct responses were generated intuitively or whether they resulted from deliberate correction (i.e., an initial incorrect-to-correct final response change). Results showed that although cognitive capacity was associated with the correction tendency (overall r = .13) it primarily predicted correct intuitive responding (overall r = .42). These findings force us to rethink the nature of sound reasoning and the role of cognitive capacity in reasoning. Rather than being good at deliberately correcting erroneous intuitions, smart reasoners simply seem to have more accurate intuitions.

Although a good rational number understanding is very important, many learners struggle to understand fractions. Recent research attributes many of these difficulties to the natural number bias – the tendency to apply natural number features in rational number tasks where this is inappropriate. Previous correlational dual process studies found evidence for the intuitive nature of the natural number bias in learners’ response latencies. However, the reported correlations do not ascertain the causality that is assumed in this ascription. In the present study we therefore experimentally elicited intuitive responses in a fraction comparison task in educated adults by restricting reaction time. Results show that the natural number bias has an intuitive character. Findings also indicate that the detection of conflict between the natural number-based answer and the correct answer seems to work at an intuitive level. ispartof: Memory & Cognition vol:48 issue:7 pages:1171-1180 ispartof: location:United States status: Published online

National audience; Some economic transactions require people to trust strangers, whose trustworthiness is unknown. In these circumstances, behavioral studies have shown that adults (but not young adolescents) seem to have some minimal ability to detect the trustworthiness of adult strangers based on their facial features. In this study, we explored the neural correlates of this facial trustworthiness detection. A group of adolescents and adults played a series of economic Trust Games with adult trustees of which we had previously recorded the strategy. Results showed that when adult investors were looking at the picture of a trust-abusing trustee, the left amygdala was relatively more activated than when they were looking at a trust-honoring player. Younger adolescents did not show this pattern and responded with a more pronounced deactivation when facing a trust-abusing trustee. An exploratory whole-brain analysis detected a similar age shift for mentalizing regions of the brain. Our results fit with an emerging model suggesting that the amygdala is implicated in an associative learning process that progressively refines a mapping of faces onto trustworthy behavior and may result in avoiding to be exploited by untrustworthy strangers.

International audience; Dual process models of higher cognition have become very influential in the cognitive sciences. The popular Default-Interventionist model has long favored a serial view on the interaction between intuitive and deliberative processing (or System 1 and System 2). Recent work has led to an alternative hybrid model view in which people's intuitive reasoning performance is assumed to be determined by the absolute and relative strength of competing intuitions. In the present study, we tested unique new predictions to validate the hybrid model. We adopted a two-response paradigm with popular base-rate neglect problems in which baserate information and a stereotypical description could cue conflicting responses. By manipulating the extremity of the base-rates in our problems we aimed to affect the strength of the "logical" intuition that is hypothesized to cue selection of the base-rate response. The two-response paradigm-in which people were required to give an initial response under time-pressure and cognitive load-allowed us to identify the presumed intuitively generated response. Consistent with the hybrid model predictions, we observed that experimentally reducing the strength of the logical intuition decreased the number of initial base-rate responses when solving problems in which base-rates and stereotypical information conflicted. Critically, reasoners who gave an initial stereotypical response were less likely to register the intrinsic conflict (as reflected in decreased confidence) in this case, whereas reasoners who gave an initial base-rate response registered more conflict. Implications and remaining challenges for dual process theorizing are discussed.

Since reasoning is often biased by intuitive heuristics, the development of sound reasoning has long been postulated to depend on successful bias monitoring and inhibition. The present fMRI study aimed to identify neural correlates of developmental changes in these processes. A group of adults and young adolescents were presented with ratio-bias problems in which an intuitively cued heuristic response could be incongruent (conflict item) or congruent (no-conflict item) with the correct response. Results showed that successfully avoiding biased responding on conflict items across both age groups was associated with increased activation in Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC) and the right Lateral Prefrontal Cortex (LPFC) regions of interest. Critically, the right LPFC activation decreased with age. Biased responding did not result in right LPFC or ACC modulation and failed to show any developmental activation changes. We discuss implications for ongoing debates on the nature of heuristic bias and its development.

In the last decade conflict detection studies in the reasoning and decision-making field have suggested that biased reasoners who give an intuitive response that conflicts with logico-mathematical principles can often detect that their answer is questionable. In the present studies we introduced a second guess paradigm to test the nature and specificity of this error or conflict signal. Participants solved the bat-and-ball problem and were allowed to make a second guess after they had entered their answer. Three studies in which we used a range of second guess elicitation methods show that biased reasoners predominantly give second guesses that are smaller than the intuitively cued heuristic response ("10 cents"). Findings indicate that although biased reasoners do not know the exact correct answer ("5 cents") they do correctly grasp that the right answer must be smaller than the intuitively cued "10 cents" answer. This suggests that reasoners might be savvier about their errors than traditionally assumed. Implications for the conflict detection and dual process literature are discussed.

International audience; Influential work on reasoning and decision making has popularized the idea that sound reasoning requires correction of fast, intuitive thought processes by slower and more demanding deliberation. We present seven studies that question this corrective view of human thinking. We focused on the very problem that has been widely featured as the paradigmatic illustration of the corrective view, the well-known bat-and-ball problem. A two-response paradigm in which people were required to give an initial response under time-pressure and cognitive load allowed us to identify the presumed intuitive response that preceded the final response given after deliberation. Across our studies we observe that correct final responses are often non-corrective in nature. Many reasoners who manage to answer the bat-and-ball problem correctly after deliberation already solved it correctly when they reasoned under conditions that minimized deliberation in the initial response phase. This suggests that sound bat-and-ball reasoners do not necessarily need to deliberate to correct their intuitions, their intuitions are often already correct. Pace the corrective view, findings suggest that in these cases they deliberate to verify correct intuitive insights.

Moral dilemmas often force us to decide between deontological (harming others is wrong) and utilitarian (harming others can be acceptable depending on the consequences) considerations. Cognitive scientists have shown that utilitarian responders typically engage demanding deliberate thinking to override a conflicting intuitive deontological response. A key question is whether deontic responders also take utilitarian considerations into account and detect that there are conflicting responses at play. The present study addressed this issue by contrasting people's processing of moral dilemmas in which utilitarian and deontological considerations cued conflicting or non-conflicting decisions. Results showed that deontic responders were slower and less confident about their decision when solving the conflict (vs. no-conflict) dilemmas. This suggests that they are considering both deontic and utilitarian aspects of their decision and indicates that a deontic decision is more informed and less oblivious t...

Popular dual process models have characterized reasoning as an interplay between fast, intuitive (System 1) and slow, deliberate (System 2) processes, but the precise nature of the interaction between the two systems is much debated. Here we relied on the temporal resolution of electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings to decide between different models. We adopted base-rate problems in which an intuitively cued stereotypical response was either congruent or incongruent with the correct response that was cued by the base-rates. Results showed that solving problems in which the base-rates and stereotypical description cued conflicting responses resulted in an increased centro-parietal N2 and frontal P3. This early conflict sensitivity suggests that the critical base-rates can be processed fast without slow and deliberate System 2 reflection. Findings validate prior EEG work and support recent hybrid dual process models in which the fast System 1 is processing both heuristic belief-based responses (e.g., stereotypes) and elementary logico-mathematical principles (e.g., base-rates).

Human reasoning is often biased by heuristic thinking. A key question is whether people detect that their heuristic answer conflicts with logical considerations. Empirical studies suggest that the detection is typically successful but the generality of these findings has been questioned. The present study focuses on this issue. A response confidence measure was used to validate conflict sensitivity findings in the classical ratio bias task and identify individual differences in conflict detection efficiency. Participants were asked to indicate how confident they were after solving problems for which a cued heuristic response could be inconsistent or consistent with the correct response. Results confirmed that most reasoners showed a confidence decrease when they were biased, suggesting that they acknowledge that their intuitive answers are not fully warranted. However, there were also subgroups of reasoners who failed to show a confidence effect. Implications for the debate on conflict detection during th...

Recent findings on error or conflict detection during thinking suggest that individuals often intuitively detect conflicts between heuristics and traditional normative standards. This work has generated results that are especially pertinent to the perspectives discussed in this special issue, potentially bridging certain divides. For example, interpreting these findings casts intuition in an entirely new light: perhaps intuitions are also quasi-logical in an important sense. This renders the naturalistic and heuristics and biases accounts presented in the issue more compatible than they seem otherwise. We summarize the most relevant implications of the conflict detection findings and show how they relate to the dual process account of intuition and decision making more broadly. Furthermore, we suggest that this new view of intuitive processes has important implications in organizational settings, especially as it relates to improving performance in typically biased contexts.

Children and adolescents often make grammatical errors in sentences such as saying “the friend of our neighbors smile” instead of “the friend of our neighbor smiles”. Recent research suggests that these attraction errors arise because they fail to inhibit an automated but inappropriate heuristic strategy that makes them blindly agree the verb with the immediately preceding word. However, it is unclear whether these errors predominantly result from a failure to complete the inhibition or from a failure to detect that the strategy is erroneous and needs to be inhibited in the first place. The present study focuses on a test of the critical error detection sensitivity issue. Children and adolescents were asked to solve grammatical problems and indicated their response confidence. Adolescents showed a clear confidence decrease after having committed an attraction error which was less pronounced in the group of children. This indicates that although children might not detect the inappropriate nature of their answer, adolescents have a better grammatical understanding than their errors seem to suggest.

Decades of reasoning and decision-making research have established that human judgment is often biased by intuitive heuristics. Recent “error” or bias detection studies have focused on reasoners’ abilities to detect whether their heuristic answer conflicts with logical or probabilistic principles. A key open question is whether there are individual differences in this bias detection efficiency. Here we present three studies in which co-registration of different error detection measures (confidence, response time and confidence response time) allowed us to assess bias detection sensitivity at the individual participant level in a range of reasoning tasks. The results indicate that although most individuals show robust bias detection, as indexed by increased latencies and decreased confidence, there is a subgroup of reasoners who consistently fail to do so. We discuss theoretical and practical implications for the field.

National audience; Influential dual process models of human thinking posit that reasoners typically produce a fast, intuitive heuristic (i.e., Type-1) response which might subsequently be overridden and corrected by slower, deliberative processing (i.e., Type-2). In this study we directly tested this time course assumption. We used a two response paradigm in which participants have to give an immediate answer and afterwards are allowed extra time before giving a final response. In four experiments we used a range of procedures (e.g., challenging response deadline, concurrent load) to knock out Type 2 processing and make sure that the initial response was intuitive in nature. Our key finding is that we frequently observe correct, logical responses as the first, immediate response. Response confidence and latency analyses indicate that these initial correct responses are given fast, with high confidence, and in the face of conflicting heuristic responses. Findings suggest that fast and automatic Type 1 processing also cues a correct logical response from the start. We sketch a revised dual process model in which the relative strength of different types of intuitions determines reasoning performance.

Abstract. Economic interactions often imply to gauge the trustworthiness of others. Recent studies showed that when making trust decisions in economic games, people have some accuracy in detecting trustworthiness from the facial features of unknown partners. Here we provide evidence that this face-based trustworthiness detection is a fast and intuitive process by testing its performance at split-second levels of exposure. Participants played a Trust game, in which they made decisions whether to trust another player based on their picture. In two studies, we manipulated the exposure time of the picture. We observed that trustworthiness detection remained better than chance for exposure times as short as 100 ms, although it disappeared with an exposure time of 33 ms. We discuss implications for ongoing debates on the use of facial inferences for social and economic decisions.

Recent studies on conflict detection during thinking suggest that reasoners are sensitive to possible conflict between their heuristic judgement and elementary logical or probabilistic principles. I have argued that this conflict sensitivity calls for the postulation of logical intuitions and has implications for the way we conceive the interaction between System-1 and System-2 in dual process theories. In this paper I clarify potential misconceptions about this work, discuss the link with other approaches, and sketch directions for further research.

The human species enjoys uniquely developed capacities for analytical reasoning and rational decision making, but these capacities come with a price: They make us aware of our inevitable physical death. Drawing on terror management theory and dual-process theories of cognition, we investigate the impact of mortality awareness on analytical reasoning. Two experiments show that experimentally induced thoughts of death impair analytical reasoning performance, just as cognitive load would. When made aware of their own mortality, reasoners allocate their executive resources to the suppression of this disturbing thought, therefore impairing their performance on syllogisms that require analytic thought. This finding has consequences for all aspects of rational thinking that draw on executive resources, and calls for an integrated approach to existential psychology and the psychology of rational thought.

Although decisions based on uncertain events are critical in everyday life, people perform remarkably badly when reasoning with probabilistic information. A well-documented example is performance on Bayesian reasoning problems, where people fail to take into account the base-rate. However, framing these problems as frequencies improves performance spectacularly. Popular evolutionary theories have explained this facilitation by positing a specialised module that automatically operates on natural frequencies. Here we test the key prediction from these accounts, namely that the performance of the module functions independently from general-purpose reasoning mechanisms. In three experiments we examined the relationship between cognitive capacity and performance on Bayesian reasoning tasks in various question formats, and experimentally manipulated cognitive resources in a dual task paradigm. Results consistently indicated that performance on classical Bayesian reasoning tasks depends on participants’ availabl...

Dual process theories conceive human thinking as an interplay between heuristic processes that operate automatically and analytic processes that demand cognitive effort. The interaction between these two types of processes is poorly understood. De Neys and Glumicic (2008) recently found that most of the time heuristic processes are successfully monitored. This monitoring, however, would not demand as many cognitive resources as the analytic thinking that is needed to solve reasoning problems. In the present study we tested the crucial assumption about the effortless nature of the monitoring process directly. Participants solved base-rate neglect problems in which heuristic and analytic processes cued a conflicting response or not. Half of the participants reasoned under a secondary task load. A surprise recall task was used as an implicit measure of whether the participants detected the conflict in the problems. Results showed that, even under load, base-rate recall performance was better for conflict pro...

Popular dual process theories have characterized human thinking as an interplay between an intuitive-heuristic and demanding-analytic reasoning process. Although monitoring the output of the two systems for conflict is crucial to avoid decision making errors there are some widely different views on the efficiency of the process. Kahneman [Kahneman, D. (2002). Maps of bounded rationality: A perspective on intuitive judgement and choice. Nobel Prize Lecture. Retrieved January 11, 2006, from: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2002/kahnemann-lecture.pdf] and Evans [Evans, J. St. B. T. (1984). Heuristic and analytic processing in reasoning. British Journal of Psychology, 75, 451-468], for example, claim that the monitoring of the heuristic system is typically quite lax whereas others such as Sloman [Sloman, S. A. (1996). The empirical case for two systems of reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 119, 3-22] and Epstein [Epstein, S. (1994). Integration of the cognitive and psychodynamic unconscious. American Psychologists, 49, 709-724] claim it is flawless and people typically experience a struggle between what they "know" and "feel" in case of a conflict. The present study contrasted these views. Participants solved classic base rate neglect problems while thinking aloud. In these problems a stereotypical description cues a response that conflicts with the response based on the analytic base rate information. Verbal protocols showed no direct evidence for an explicitly experienced conflict. As Kahneman and Evans predicted, participants hardly ever mentioned the base rates and seemed to base their judgment exclusively on heuristic reasoning. However, more implicit measures of conflict detection such as participants' retrieval of the base rate information in an unannounced recall test, decision making latencies, and the tendency to review the base rates indicated that the base rates had been thoroughly processed. On control problems where base rates and description did not conflict this was not the case. Results suggest that whereas the popular characterization of conflict detection as an actively experienced struggle can be questioned there is nevertheless evidence for Sloman's and Epstein's basic claim about the flawless operation of the monitoring. Whenever the base rates and description disagree people will detect this conflict and consequently redirect attention towards a deeper processing of the base rates. Implications for the dual process framework and the rationality debate are discussed.

A long prevailing view of human reasoning suggests severe limits on our ability to adhere to simple logical or mathematical prescriptions. A key position assumes these failures arise from insufficient monitoring of rapidly produced intuitions. These faulty intuitions are thought to arise from a proposed substitution process, by which reasoners unknowingly interpret more difficult questions as easier ones. Recent work, however, suggests that reasoners are not blind to this substitution process, but in fact detect that their erroneous responses are not warranted. Using the popular bat-and-ball problem, we investigated whether this substitution sensitivity arises out of an automatic System 1 process or whether it depends on the operation of an executive resource demanding System 2 process. Results showed that accuracy on the bat-and-ball problem clearly declined under cognitive load. However, both reduced response confidence and increased response latencies indicated that biased reasoners remained sensitive to their faulty responses under load. Results suggest that a crucial substitution monitoring process is not only successfully engaged, but that it automatically operates as an autonomous System 1 process. By signaling its doubt along with a biased intuition, it appears System 1 is "smarter" than traditionally assumed.

Human reasoning has been shown to overly rely on intuitive, heuristic processing instead of a more demanding analytic inference process. Four experiments tested the central claim of current dual-process theories that analytic operations involve time-consuming executive processing whereas the heuristic system would operate automatically. Participants solved conjunction fallacy problems and indicative and deontic selection tasks. Experiment 1 established that making correct analytic inferences demanded more processing time than did making heuristic inferences. Experiment 2 showed that burdening the executive resources with an attention-demanding secondary task decreased correct, analytic responding and boosted the rate of conjunction fallacies and indicative matching card selections. Results were replicated in Experiments 3 and 4 with a different secondary-task procedure. Involvement of executive resources for the deontic selection task was less clear. Findings validate basic processing assumptions of the dual-process framework and complete the correlational research programme of K. E. Stanovich and R. F. West (2000).

Abstract. The Monty Hall Dilemma (MHD) is an intriguing example of the discrepancy between people’s intuitions and normative reasoning. This study examines whether the notorious difficulty of the MHD is associated with limitations in working memory resources. Experiment 1 and 2 examined the link between MHD reasoning and working memory capacity. Experiment 3 tested the role of working memory experimentally by burdening the executive resources with a secondary task. Results showed that participants who solved the MHD correctly had a significantly higher working memory capacity than erroneous responders. Correct responding also decreased under secondary task load. Findings indicate that working memory capacity plays a key role in overcoming salient intuitions and selecting the correct switching response during MHD reasoning.

Two experiments examined the contribution of working memory (WM) to the retrieval and inhibition of background knowledge about counterexamples (alternatives and disablers, Cummins, 1995) during conditional reasoning. Experiment 1 presented a conditional reasoning task with everyday, causal conditionals to a group of people with high and low WM spans. High spans rejected the logically invalid AC and DA inferences to a greater extent than low spans, whereas low spans accepted the logically valid MP and MT inferences less frequently than high spans. In Experiment 2, an executive-attention-demanding secondary task was imposed during the reasoning task. Findings corroborate that WM resources are used for retrieval of stored counterexamples and that people with high WM spans will use WM resources to inhibit the counterexample activation when the type of counterexample conflicts with the logical validity of the reasoning problem.

The present study is part of recent attempts to specify the characteristics of the counterexample retrieval process during causal conditional reasoning. The study tried to pinpoint whether the retrieval of stored counterexamples (alternative causes and disabling conditions) for a causal conditional is completely automatic in nature or whether the search process also demands executive working memory (WM) resources. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with a counterexample generation task and a measure of WM capacity. We found a positive relation between search efficiency, as measured by the number of generated counterexamples in limited time, and WM capacity. Experiment 2 examined the effects of a secondary WM load on the retrieval performance. As predicted, burdening WM with an attention-demanding secondary task decreased the retrieval efficiency. Both low and high spans were affected by the WM load but load effects were less pronounced for the most strongly associated counterexamples. Findings e...

Reasoning with conditionals involving causal content is known to be affected by retrieval of counterexamples from semantic memory. In this study we examined the characteristics of this search process in everyday conditional reasoning. In Experiment 1 we manipulated the number (zero to four) of explicitly presented counterexamples (alternative causes or disabling conditions) for causal conditionals. In Experiment 2, using a generation pretest, we measured the number of counterexamples participants could retrieve for a set of causal conditionals. One month after the pretest, participants were presented a reasoning task with the same conditionals. The experiments indicated that acceptance of modus ponens linearly decreased with every additionally retrieved disabler, whereas affirmation of the consequent acceptance linearly decreased as a function of the number of retrieved alternatives. Results for denial of the antecedent and modus tollens were less clear. The findings show that the search process does not necessarily stop after retrieval of a single counterexample and that every additional counterexample has an impact on the inference acceptance.

Cummins (1995) has shown that reasoning with conditionals involving causal content is affected by the relative number of available alternative and disabling conditions. More recent evidence (Quinn & Markovits, 1998) indicates that, beside the number of stored conditions, the relative strength of association of the alternative conditions with the consequent term is another important factor that affects causal conditional reasoning. In this study we examined the effect of the strength of association for the disabling conditions. We identified causal conditionals for which there exists only one highly associated disabler. With these conditionals we constructed conditional inference problems in which the minor premise was expanded with the negation of a strongly or weakly associated disabler. Results of two experiments indicate that strength of association of stored disabling conditions is affecting reasoning performance: Acceptance of Modus Ponens and Modus Tollens increased when there was no strongly associ...

This study tested and refined a framework that proposes a mechanism for retrieving alternative causes and disabling conditions (Cummins, 1995) during reasoning. Experiment 1 examined the relation between different factors affecting retrieval. The test revealed high correlations between the number of possible alternative causes or disabling conditions and their strength of association and plausibility. Experiment 2 explored the hypothesis that due to a more extended search process, conditional inferences would last longer when many alternative causes or disabling conditions were available. Affirmation of the consequent (AC) and modus ponens (MP) latencies showed the hypothesized pattern. Denial of the antecedent (DA) and modus tollens (MT) inferences did not show latency effects. The experiment also identified an effect of the number of disabling conditions on AC and DA acceptance. Experiment 3 measured efficiency of disabler retrieval by a limited time, disabler generation task. As predicted, better disabler retrieval was related to lower acceptance of the MP and MT inferences.

Intuitions are often considered suboptimal because they can bias people's thinking. The bat-and-ball problem is a celebrated example of this potentially detrimental aspect of intuitions since it elicits a very appealing and prepotent intuitive but incorrect response. We propose to show that certain kinds of intuitions (i.e., prior beliefs) can help people to reason better on this task. In two experiments, participants answered either a classic congruent version of the bat-and-ball problem in which the intuitively cued response fitted with prior knowledge (i.e., was believable) or a modified incongruent version in which the intuitively cued response conflicted with prior knowledge (i.e., was unbelievable). Results indicate that participants who solved the modified unbelievable version performed better than participants who solved the classic believable version. Our data highlight that prior beliefs, even in the bat-and-ball problem, can accidentally make people perform better, probably because they encoura...

Research on moral judgement traditionally deals with scenarios involving trade-offs between saving lives and causing harm or death. In the field of moral psychology and philosophy, these specific scenarios are regularly used jointly, regardless of the severity of harm. We predicted that the confounding between distinct phrasings involving different degrees of harm will have an impact on the frequency of utilitarian judgements regardless of the mere moral value of the action (as usually investigated in the moral judgement field). In line with this prediction, a first experiment showed that utilitarian responses were less frequent for conflicting moral scenarios that involved death, as compared to scenarios that involved non-lethal harm. A second experiment showed that participants' utilitarian responses decreased as the severity of harm increased. Experimental studies on moral reasoning should take greater care to avoid potential confounds associated with this content factor.

International audience; In a recent article in the Science & Society section of this journal [1], Olivola and colleagues delivered a powerful argument about fighting the phenomenon that they called ‘face-ism’.

Influential work on human thinking suggests that our judgment is often biased because we minimize cognitive effort and intuitively substitute hard questions by easier ones. A key question is whether or not people realize that they are doing this and notice their mistake. Here, we test this claim with one of the most publicized examples of the substitution bias, the bat-and-ball problem. We designed an isomorphic control version in which reasoners experience no intuitive pull to substitute. Results show that people are less confident in their substituted, erroneous bat-and-ball answer than in their answer on the control version that does not give rise to the substitution. Contrary to popular belief, this basic finding indicates that biased reasoners are not completely oblivious to the substitution and sense that their answer is questionable. This calls into question the characterization of the human reasoner as a happy fool who blindly answers erroneous questions without realizing it.

Although human thinking is often biased, some individuals are less susceptible to biases than others. These individual differences have been at the forefront of thinking research for more than a decade. We organize the literature in three key accounts (storage, monitoring, and inhibition failure) and propose that a critical but overlooked question concerns the time point at which individual variance arises: do biased and unbiased reasoners take different paths early on in the reasoning process or is the observed variance late to arise? We discuss how this focus on the 'whens' suggests that individual differences in thinking biases are less profound than traditionally assumed, in the sense that they might typically arise at a later stage of the reasoning process.

The capacity to trust wisely is a critical facilitator of success and prosperity, and it has been conjectured that people of higher intelligence were better able to detect signs of untrustworthiness from potential partners. In contrast, this article reports five Trust Game studies suggesting that reading trustworthiness on the faces of strangers is a modular process. Trustworthiness detection from faces is independent of general intelligence (Study 1) and effortless (Study 2). Pictures that include non-facial features such as hair and clothing impair trustworthiness detection (Study 3) by increasing reliance on conscious judgments (Study 4), but people largely prefer to make decisions from this sort of pictures (Study 5). In sum, trustworthiness detection in an economic interaction is a genuine and effortless ability, possessed in equal amount by people of all cognitive capacities, but whose impenetrability leads to inaccurate conscious judgments and inappropriate informational preferences.

Adult reasoning has been shown as mediated by the inhibition of intuitive beliefs that are in conflict with logic. The current study introduces a classic procedure from the memory field to investigate belief inhibition in 12- to 17-year-old reasoners. A lexical decision task was used to probe the memory accessibility of beliefs that were cued during thinking on syllogistic reasoning problems. Results indicated an impaired memory access for words associated with misleading beliefs that were cued during reasoning if syllogisms had been solved correctly. This finding supports the claim that even for younger reasoners, correct reasoning is mediated by inhibitory processing as soon as intuitive beliefs conflict with logical considerations.

According to the dual-process model of moral judgment, utilitarian responses to moral conflict draw on limited cognitive resources. Terror Management Theory, in parallel, postulates that mortality salience mobilizes these resources to suppress thoughts of death out of focal attention. Consequently, we predicted that individuals under mortality salience would be less likely to give utilitarian responses to moral conflicts. Two experiments corroborated this hypothesis. Experiment 1 showed that utilitarian responses to non-lethal harm conflicts were less frequent when participants were reminded of their mortality. Experiment 2 showed that the detrimental effect of mortality salience on utilitarian conflict judgments was comparable to that of an extreme concurrent cognitive load. These findings raise the question of whether private judgment and public debate about controversial moral issues might be shaped by mortality salience effects, since these issues (e.g., assisted suicide) often involve matters of life and death.

Human thinking is often biased by intuitive beliefs. Inhibition of these tempting beliefs is considered a key component of human thinking, but the process is poorly understood. In the present study we clarify the nature of an inhibition failure and the resulting belief bias by probing the accessibility of cued beliefs after people reasoned. Results indicated that even the poorest reasoners showed an impaired memory access to words that were associated with cued beliefs after solving reasoning problems in which the beliefs conflicted with normative considerations (Experiment 1 and 2). The study further established that the impairment was only temporary in nature (Experiment 3) and did not occur when people were explicitly instructed to give mere intuitive judgments (Experiment 4). Findings present solid evidence for the postulation of an inhibition process and imply that belief bias does not result from a failure to recognize the need to inhibit inappropriate beliefs, but from a failure to complete the inhibition process. This indicates that people are far more logical than hitherto believed.

Two experiments examined developmental patterns in children’s conditional reasoning with everyday causal conditionals. In Experiment 1, a group of pre-, early, young, and late adolescents generated counterexamples for a set of conditionals to validate developmental claims about the counterexample retrieval capacity. In Experiment 2, participants in the same age range were presented with a conditional reasoning task with similar conditionals. Experiment 1 established that counterexample retrieval increased from preadolescence to late adolescence. Experiment 2 showed that acceptance rates of the invalid affirmation of the consequent inference gradually decreased in the same age range. Acceptance rates of the valid modus ponens inference showed a U-shaped pattern. After an initial drop from preadolescence to early adolescence, modus ponens acceptance ratings increased again after the onset of adolescence. Findings support the claim that the development of everyday conditional reasoning can be characterized as an interplay between the development of a counterexample retrieval and inhibition process.

Abstract. The present study introduces dual task methodology to test opposing psychological processing predictions concerning the nature of implicatures in pragmatic theories. Implicatures routinely arise in human communication when hearers interpret utterances pragmatically and go beyond the logical meaning of the terms. The neo-Gricean view (e.g., Levinson, 2000 ) assumes that implicatures are generated automatically whereas relevance theory ( Sperber & Wilson, 1986/1995 ) assumes that implicatures are effortful and not automatic. Participants were presented a sentence verification task with underinformative sentences that have the potential to produce scalar implicatures like Some oaks are trees. Depending on the nature of the interpretation of Some (logical or pragmatic) the sentence is judged true or false. Executive cognitive resources were experimentally burdened by the concurrent memorization of complex dot patterns during the interpretation process. Results showed that participants made more logical and fewer pragmatic interpretations under load. Findings provide direct support for the relevance theory view.

The aim of this article is to provide insight into the types of long-term knowledge that are used for solving causal conditional inferences. Two taxonomies were constructed to map the types of counterexample. The available counterexamples are traditionally probed via a counterexample generation task. We observed that there are some significant differences in the types of counterexample retrieved in the reasoning task versus the generation task. The generation task can be used for predicting answers that sprout from a reasoning process that takes counterexample into account, but some participants use a different reasoning process in which the available semantic information is not used as contrasting evidence. Nonetheless, we found that the results of the generation task validly predicted the proportion of inferences accepted as well as the number of counterexamples used during reasoning.