ABSTRACT
One of the most striking findings of cognitive reasoning research over recent decades is that human judgment frequently violates traditional normative standards: In a wide range of reasoning tasks, people often do not give the answer that is correct according to logic or probability theory (e.g., Evans, 2002; Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982). Influential dual process theories of thinking have explained this “rational thinking failure” by positing two different human reasoning systems (e.g., Epstein, 1994; Evans, 2003; Goel, 1995; Kahneman, 2002; Sloman, 1996; Stanovich & West, 2000). The common failure to provide the correct answer on reasoning tasks has been attributed to the pervasiveness of the heuristic system. It is argued that human thinking typically relies on the operation of intuitive heuristics instead of a deliberate, controlled reasoning process. Whereas the fast and undemanding heuristics provide us with useful responses in many situations, they may also bias reasoning in tasks that require more elaborate, analytic processing. That is, both systems will sometimes cue different responses. In these cases the logical, analytic system will need to override the intuitive belief-based response generated by the heuristic system (De Neys, 2006; Stanovich & West, 2000). Since the analytic operations heavily burden our limited executive resources, the analytic override will frequently fail and the heuristic system will dominate our thinking.
