Intuition, rationalization, and reflection
In placing the emphasis on how intuition shapes beliefs, B&P seem to conceptualize reflection as merely a by-product of intuitive processes. In their telling, “Reflective representations add information to intuitions, explicate them, extend or restrict their scope, offer a comment on the intuitions or link them to specific sources” (sect. 3.2, para. 1). Although this describes what cognition can do with intuitions, it underestimates the dynamic role that “reflection” plays in refining intuitions.
Stanovich and West (Reference Stanovich and West2000; Stanovich Reference Stanovich2011) offer a better way to conceptualize “reflection.” In their theoretical model, intuitions also provide the starting point for cognition. Intuitions can be thought of as gut feelings about what we should do when we are faced with a decision (e.g., “don't let immigrants in to take our jobs”). At the same time, Stanovich and West put forward a more nuanced description of cognitive processes, in which people can do one of three things: (1) accept the intuitive response with little thought (go with the gut), (2) offer rationalizations for going with the intuitive response (motivated reasoning), or (3) second-guess the intuitive response and, if it is found faulty, override it and make a different choice (reflection). The third pathway is the most difficult and requires the motivation to reach an optimal answer.
People vary in their capacity and willingness to be reflective. Individual differences in reflection are not merely reducible to intelligence (Frederick Reference Frederick2005). Smart people can make the best motivated reasoners, coming up with brilliant (but wrong) rationalizations for their intuitive responses. Extant research shows that people who are motivated to second-guess their intuitive responses make more optimal economic decisions (see Frederick Reference Frederick2005). Research conducted by Ryan Vander Wielen and me (Arceneaux & Vander Wielen Reference Arceneaux and Vander Wielen2017) replicated these results and extended this area of research into the study of political attitudes. We found that people who are less likely to attach strong emotions to their attitudes and who enjoy thinking tend to be more reflective. These individuals, in turn, are more likely to make political decisions that are consistent with their ideological values and are more likely to hold elected officials from their own party accountable for bad decisions. In sum, reflective individuals are more likely to make decisions that are in line with the normative benchmark set by “rational choice” models in economics and politics. Our work and the body of work on which we build shows that even though many people gravitate to evolutionarily informed heuristics, they are not prisoners to them.
Stanovich and West's model also allows reflection to shape downstream intuitions, although it may take time and repetition for top-down processes to retrain bottom-up intuitions. For instance, once learned, it is hard to forget how to ride a bike, because the previously counterintuitive motion becomes intuitive. In a similar way, trained economists think and behave differently than laypeople in the domain of economics because they have retrained their intuitions to be in line with extant micro- and macro-economic theories.
Appreciating humans' capacity for reflection may help explain some of the mismatches we often observe between modern social structures and people's evolved intuitive responses. The codified legal systems that govern markets, for instance, were developed over time and through deliberative processes that draw on the reflective mind. They put in place a complex system that strikes a balance among various legal principles, which inevitably creates situations where what is legal fails to jibe with what feels fair or just. Modern institutions were built, in part, on a collective cognitive effort to tame and manage our intuitive responses.
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By placing common economic folk-beliefs in an evolutionary framework, Boyer & Petersen (B&P) offer a very useful way for making sense of why people rely on particular heuristics and not others. People do not behave in ways that depart from classical economic theory because they are stupid. There is a rhyme and a reason to the departures, and in many cases, these departures helped minimize deadly mistakes that early humans faced (e.g., it is better to be leery than trusting of people from other tribes who are competing for the same scarce resources). It also points to why attempting to “educate” people about complicated economic systems is not a simple fix. After all, politicians can always gain from exploiting people's intuitive, but incorrect, understanding of the macro-economy. B&P's target article offers a helpful place to begin, and in the interest of providing constructive feedback to advance this project, I focus my comments on the role of reflection.
Intuition, rationalization, and reflection
In placing the emphasis on how intuition shapes beliefs, B&P seem to conceptualize reflection as merely a by-product of intuitive processes. In their telling, “Reflective representations add information to intuitions, explicate them, extend or restrict their scope, offer a comment on the intuitions or link them to specific sources” (sect. 3.2, para. 1). Although this describes what cognition can do with intuitions, it underestimates the dynamic role that “reflection” plays in refining intuitions.
Stanovich and West (Reference Stanovich and West2000; Stanovich Reference Stanovich2011) offer a better way to conceptualize “reflection.” In their theoretical model, intuitions also provide the starting point for cognition. Intuitions can be thought of as gut feelings about what we should do when we are faced with a decision (e.g., “don't let immigrants in to take our jobs”). At the same time, Stanovich and West put forward a more nuanced description of cognitive processes, in which people can do one of three things: (1) accept the intuitive response with little thought (go with the gut), (2) offer rationalizations for going with the intuitive response (motivated reasoning), or (3) second-guess the intuitive response and, if it is found faulty, override it and make a different choice (reflection). The third pathway is the most difficult and requires the motivation to reach an optimal answer.
People vary in their capacity and willingness to be reflective. Individual differences in reflection are not merely reducible to intelligence (Frederick Reference Frederick2005). Smart people can make the best motivated reasoners, coming up with brilliant (but wrong) rationalizations for their intuitive responses. Extant research shows that people who are motivated to second-guess their intuitive responses make more optimal economic decisions (see Frederick Reference Frederick2005). Research conducted by Ryan Vander Wielen and me (Arceneaux & Vander Wielen Reference Arceneaux and Vander Wielen2017) replicated these results and extended this area of research into the study of political attitudes. We found that people who are less likely to attach strong emotions to their attitudes and who enjoy thinking tend to be more reflective. These individuals, in turn, are more likely to make political decisions that are consistent with their ideological values and are more likely to hold elected officials from their own party accountable for bad decisions. In sum, reflective individuals are more likely to make decisions that are in line with the normative benchmark set by “rational choice” models in economics and politics. Our work and the body of work on which we build shows that even though many people gravitate to evolutionarily informed heuristics, they are not prisoners to them.
Stanovich and West's model also allows reflection to shape downstream intuitions, although it may take time and repetition for top-down processes to retrain bottom-up intuitions. For instance, once learned, it is hard to forget how to ride a bike, because the previously counterintuitive motion becomes intuitive. In a similar way, trained economists think and behave differently than laypeople in the domain of economics because they have retrained their intuitions to be in line with extant micro- and macro-economic theories.
Appreciating humans' capacity for reflection may help explain some of the mismatches we often observe between modern social structures and people's evolved intuitive responses. The codified legal systems that govern markets, for instance, were developed over time and through deliberative processes that draw on the reflective mind. They put in place a complex system that strikes a balance among various legal principles, which inevitably creates situations where what is legal fails to jibe with what feels fair or just. Modern institutions were built, in part, on a collective cognitive effort to tame and manage our intuitive responses.