Useful lies: The twisted rationality of denial

He who increases knowledge increases sorrow.

Ecclesiastes 1:18

The truth will set you free.

John 8:32

Denial, or the habit of treating a real problem as if it were a nonissue, has both rational and irrational features. The interplay between these is best captured by a utilitarian-rationalist framework stretched to its limits. When in denial, people follow what they feel to be in their best interest by minimizing the psychosocial cost of acknowledging their problems. At its core, denial is thus based on a self-interested rationale of pain avoidance and harm minimization. Depending on the characteristics of the issue at hand, some of the effects are deeply ironic. I demonstrate this by starting from the simplest and most beneficial form of denial, before moving on to cases that are more complex and harmful. I also show how people can be liberated from denial when the practice has become counterproductive. Most of the mystery surrounding denial disappears when we accept that it is premised on a twisted kind of rationality.     

Conflict detection,dual processes,and logical intuitions: Some clarifications

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.     

Reasoning about evidence

Bayesians understand the notion of evidential support in terms of probability raising. Little is known about the logic of the evidential support relation, thus understood. We investigate a number of prima facie plausible candidate logical principles for the evidential support relation and show which of these principles the Bayesian evidential support relation does and which it does not obey. We also consider the question which of these principles hold for a stronger notion of evidential support.     

Highly reflective reasoners show no signs of belief inhibition

The processes underlying individual differences in reasoning performance are not entirely understood. What do people who do well on reasoning tasks where beliefs and logic conflict do differently from other people? Because abundant evidence shows that even poorer reasoners detect these conflicts, it has been suggested that individual differences in reasoning performance arise from inhibition failures later in the reasoning process. The present paper argues that a minority of highly skilled reasoners may deviate from this general reasoning process from an early stage. Two studies investigated signs of belief inhibition using a lexical access paradigm (Study 1) and a negative priming paradigm (Study 2). Study 1 showed that while other people exhibited signs of belief inhibition following a belief–logic conflict, people with the highest disposition for cognitive reflection did not. In Study 2, this finding was replicated and similar results were also obtained when comparing groups with higher and lower general cognitive ability. Two possible explanations are discussed.     

Prolegomena to Concise Theories of Action

A new methodology for developing theories of action has recently emerged which provides means for formally evaluating the correctness of such theories. Yet, for a theory of action to qualify as a solution to the frame problem, not only does it need to produce correct inferences, but moreover, it needs to derive these inferences from a concise representation of the domain at hand. The new methodology however offers no means for assessing conciseness. Such a formal account of conciseness is developed in this paper. Combined with the existing criterion for correctness, our account of conciseness offers a framework where proposed solutions to the frame problem can be formally evaluated.     

On the short horizon of spontaneous iterative reasoning in logical puzzles and games

A reasoning strategy is iterative when the initial conclusion suggested by a set of premises is integrated into that set of premises in order to yield additional conclusions. Previous experimental studies on game theory-based strategic games (such as the beauty contest game) observed difficulty in reasoning iteratively, which has been partly attributed to bounded individual rationality. However, this difficulty has also been attributed to problems in adequately representing the beliefs, actions, and goals of other agents involved in the games. In four experiments, we observed similar difficulties in iterative reasoning in a variety of puzzles and games that did not involve social interactions with other agents, where they can only be caused by individual cognitive boundaries. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that an intrinsic difficulty in iterative reasoning originates from a tendency not to revise our initial mental representation of a problem in light of the initial conclusions that it implies.     

The impact of anxiety on analogical reasoning

The effect of state anxiety on analogical reasoning was investigated by examining qualitative differences in mapping performance between anxious and non-anxious individuals reasoning about pictorial analogies. The working-memory restriction theory of anxiety, coupled with theories of analogy that link complexity of mapping with working-memory capacity, predicts that high anxiety will impair the ability to find correspondences based on relations between multiple objects relative to correspondences based on overlap of attributes between individual objects. Anxiety was induced in one condition by a stressful speeded subtraction task administered prior to the analogy task. Anxious participants produced fewer relational responses and more attribute responses than did non-anxious participants, both in the absence of explicit instructions to find relational mappings (Experiment 1) and after receiving such instructions (Experiment 2). The findings support the postulated links among anxiety, working memory, and the ability to perform complex analogical mapping.     

The psychological puzzle of Sudoku

Sudoku puzzles, which are popular worldwide, require individuals to infer the missing digits in a 9 × 9 array according to the general rule that every digit from 1 to 9 must occur once in each row, in each column, and in each of the 3-by-3 boxes in the array. We present a theory of how individuals solve these puzzles. It postulates that they rely solely on pure deductions, and that they spontaneously acquire various deductive tactics, which differ in their difficulty depending on their “relational complexity”, i.e., the number of constraints on which they depend. A major strategic shift is necessary to acquire tactics for more difficult puzzles: solvers have to keep track of possible digits in a cell. We report three experiments corroborating this theory. We also discuss their implications for theories of reasoning that downplay the role of deduction in everyday reasoning.     

Power of the desired self: Influence of induced perceptions of the self on reasoning

This research shows that the motivation to posses a desired characteristic (or to avoid an undesired one) results in self-perceptions that guide people’s use of base rate in the Lawyer–Engineer problem (Kahneman & Tversky, 1973). In four studies, participants induced to believe (or recall, Exp. 2) that a rational cognitive style is success-conducive (or an intuitive cognitive style failure-conducive) subsequently viewed themselves as more rational and relied more on base rate in their probability estimates than those induced to believe that a rational cognitive style is failure-conducive (or an intuitive cognitive style success-conducive). These findings show that the desired self had an influence on reasoning in the self-unrelated lawyer–engineer task, since the use of base rates was mediated by changes in participants’ perceptions of their own rationality. These findings therefore show that the desired self, through the working self-concept that it entails, constitutes another factor influencing people’s use of distinct modes of reasoning.