Development of Judgment, Decision Making, and Rationality

There is a long tradition of studying children’s reasoning and thinking in cognitive development and education. The initial studies in the cognitive development of reasoning were motivated by Piagetian models, and developmental age was thought to bring the gradual onset of logical thinking. The introduction of heuristics and biases tasks in adults and dual process models have provided new perspectives for understanding the development of reasoning, judgment, and decision-making skills. These heuristics and biases tasks provided a way to operationalize the systematic errors that people make in their judgments. Dual process models have advanced our understanding of the basic processes implicated in both optimal and non-optimal responders on several types of paradigms, including heuristics and biases tasks and classic reasoning paradigms. Importantly, these skills and competencies are generally separable from the types of higher cognition assessed on measures of intelligence and executive function task performance. Given the history of the study of reasoning in cognitive development, there is a need to integrate our understanding across these somewhat separate literatures. This is especially true given the opposite predictions that seem to be suggested in these different research traditions. Specifically, there is a focus on increasing logical development in the classic cognitive developmental literature and alternatively, there has been a focus on systematic errors in judgment and decision-making in the study of reasoning in adults. This article provides an integration of the two aforementioned perspectives that are rooted in different empirical and historical traditions. These considerations are addressed by drawing upon their research traditions and by summarizing more recent developmental work that has investigated these paradigms.

(How) Do You Regret Killing One to Save Five? Affective and Cognitive Regret Differ After Utilitarian and Deontological Decisions

Sacrificial moral dilemmas, in which opting to kill one person will save multiple others, are definitionally suboptimal: Someone dies either way. Decision-makers, then, may experience regret about these decisions. Past research distinguishes affective regret, negative feelings about a decision, from cognitive regret, thoughts about how a decision might have gone differently. Classic dual-process models of moral judgment suggest that affective processing drives characteristically deontological decisions to reject outcome-maximizing harm, whereas cognitive deliberation drives characteristically utilitarian decisions to endorse outcome-maximizing harm. Consistent with this model, we found that people who made or imagined making sacrificial utilitarian judgments reliably expressed relatively more affective regret and sometimes expressed relatively less cognitive regret than those who made or imagined making deontological dilemma judgments. In other words, people who endorsed causing harm to save lives generally felt more distressed about their decision, yet less inclined to change it, than people who rejected outcome-maximizing harm.

Rational rationalization and System 2

In this commentary, I highlight the relevance of Cushman's target article for the popular dual-process framework of thinking. I point to the problematic characterization of rationalization in traditional dual-process models and suggest that in line with recent advances, Cushman's rational rationalization account offers a way out of the rationalization paradox.

Electrophysiological Correlates of an Alcohol-Cued Go/NoGo Task: A Dual-Process Approach to Binge Drinking in University Students

Binge drinking is a common pattern of alcohol consumption in adolescence and youth. Neurocognitive dual-process models attribute substance use disorders and risk behaviours during adolescence to an imbalance between an overactivated affective-automatic system (involved in motivational and affective processing) and a reflective system (involved in cognitive inhibitory control). The aim of the present study was to investigate at the electrophysiological level the degree to which the motivational value of alcohol-related stimuli modulates the inhibition of a prepotent response in binge drinkers. First-year university students (n = 151, 54 % females) classified as binge drinkers (n = 71, ≥6 binge drinking episodes, defined as 5/7 standard drinks per occasion in the last 180 days) and controls (n = 80, <6 binge drinking episodes in the last 180 days) performed a beverage Go/NoGo task (pictures of alcoholic and nonalcoholic drinks were presented according to the condition as Go or NoGo stimuli; Go probability = 0.75) during event-related potential recording. In binge drinkers but not controls, the amplitude of the anterior N2-NoGo was larger in response to nonalcohol than in response to alcohol pictures. No behavioural difference in task performance was observed. In terms of dual-process models, binge drinkers may require increased activation to monitor conflict in order to compensate for overactivation of the affective-automatic system caused by alcohol-related bias.

Logic, Fast and Slow: Advances in Dual-Process Theorizing

Studies on human reasoning have long established that intuitions can bias inference and lead to violations of logical norms. Popular dual-process models, which characterize thinking as an interaction between intuitive (System 1) and deliberate (System 2) thought processes, have presented an appealing explanation for this observation. According to this account, logical reasoning is traditionally considered as a prototypical example of a task that requires effortful deliberate thinking. In recent years, however, a number of findings obtained with new experimental paradigms have brought into question the traditional dual-process characterization. A key observation is that people can process logical principles in classic reasoning tasks intuitively and without deliberation. We review the paradigms and sketch how this work is leading to the development of revised dual-process models.

Dual-Process Models in Sociology

In the ongoing quest to find new analytical or methodological tools to explicate social action, cultural sociologists have recently turned to the dual-process models developed by cognitive and social psychologists. Designed to explain the two basic types of cognitive processing—one autonomous and the other requiring controlled attention, dual-process models became a natural partner for sociological theories of action, with their interest in parsing dispositional and deliberative types of action. This chapter offers an analytical review of the sociological literature that engages with dual-process models. It begins with an outline of the fundamentals of dual-process models in cognitive and social psychology, and follows with an examination of the premises that constitute what has come to be called the sociological dual-process model. It then reviews sociological research that applies dual-process models, dividing this literature into two distinct groups that are separated along sharp epistemological, methodological, and analytical lines. The first group is a largely consistent body of work that follows the premises of the sociological dual-process model, emphasizing the primacy of Type 1 processing, and investigating how this form of cognition shapes action. The second group comprises a more diverse body of work, examines Type 1 and Type 2 processing, and attempts to capture the processes that shape cognition and action. The chapter concludes with remarks about the critiques raised against dual-process models, along with their potential contributions to sociological analysis.

Bridging the Vocabularies of Dual-Process Models of Culture and Cognition

Much research has demonstrated that human behavior can never be fully accounted for by deliberate rationality, as much of what happens in the human mind occurs outside of our awareness and beyond conscious control. Contemporary dual-process theories attempt to detail this duality of the human mind by distinguishing between two fundamentally different types of cognitive processes: on the one hand the nonconscious, automatic, and intuitive; and the conscious, deliberate, and rational on the other. These models also attempt to describe how the two types of processes interact with each other, and how various contextual factors influence their relationship. Dual-process models of cognition have proven useful in many fields of study, yet sociological use of these models to understand the micromechanisms of culture have been largely limited until very recently. This chapter aims to provide insight into dual-process models of cognition and their close resemblance with many core cultural theories, which already employ dual-process reasoning without recognizing or integrating their insights with each other or those of the cognitive sciences. It is argued that by developing a more integrated and interdisciplinarily accessible vocabulary, we can readily integrate and make better use of insights from dual-process models of cognition. Finally, important implications for our understanding of culture and for future research are discussed.