ABSTRACT
We are honoured to contribute to this volume because Jonathan Evans’ work has been a key inspiration to us since even before we began contributing to the thinking and reasoning literature. Richard and Keith had been admirers of the heuristics and biases tradition from its inception in the early 1970s. However, their first research contributions were in the psychology of reading and this occupied them for 15 years (see Stanovich, 2000; Stanovich, Cunningham, & West, 1998). By the late 1980s though, we had decided to make a contribution to the literature on thinking and reasoning that we had admired so much for so long. Keith set off to Cambridge in early 1991 on a sabbatical with reading colleague Usha Goswami, and Rich visited for an important brainstorming week. The sabbatical really ended up being about reasoning and rationality rather than reading, however, and there were two books that we took to England to study in detail: Stich’s The Fragmentation of Reason (1990) and Jonathan’s Biases in Human Reasoning (1989). The former was obviously to bone up on the philosophical issues surrounding the concept of rational thought. However, the latter really became our bible on that sabbatical. In an amazingly few pages Jonathan zeroed in on the key issues surrounding the important biases and also gave the relative novice an introduction to the central tasks in the literature. That book, his insights as one of the first dual-process theorists, and almost four decades of continuous creative work in the area have made Jonathan one of our most important intellectual guideposts throughout our careers in this field.
