ABSTRACT
Evans and Over (1996) made a seminal contribution to the cognitive sciences by describing two different routes humans take to reason toward their goals, one associated with intuition, the other with deliberation. We show how knowledge provided by our communities influences both routes. Many methods of outsourcing cognitive effort – taking advantage of information that one does not know but assumes that someone else can supply – show the hallmarks of intuitive reasoning. Effective outsourcing requires fast and efficient ways of identifying what must be outsourced, and which individual or group of people is most likely to have the relevant expertise. Research has identified several fallible heuristics like the degree of entrenchment of a term in a community of use that help people figure out what needs to be outsourced (content heuristics), and a different group of heuristics that allow us to find experts, for instance, through associations with certain environments and disciplines (expertise heuristics). In contrast, deliberation is primarily concerned with facilitating intentional collaboration with others toward joint goals, often using natural language. This division of labor between two interacting but distinct systems allows humans to leverage the representational and computational capacities of their communities to achieve ever more sophisticated goals.
