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Collection Highlights

The Routledge International Handbook of Clinical Hypnosis

1st Edition Julie H Linden

Handbook of item response theory, volume three:

applications 1st Edition Wim J. Van Der Linden (Editor)

Critical Thinking An Introduction to Reasoning Well

Watson

Reasoning Unbound: Thinking about Morality, Delusion and

Democracy 1st Edition Jean-François Bonnefon (Auth.)
Handbook of Item Response Theory, Three Volume Set - First
Edition Van Der Linden

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Reasoning and Judgement Jonathan St B.T. Evans

On Reasoning and Argument Essays in Informal Logic and on

Critical Thinking 1st Edition David Hitchcock (Auth.)

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The Power of Critical Thinking: Effective Reasoning about

Ordinary and Extraordinary Claims (6th Ed.) 6th Edition
Lewis Vaughn
“If there is any doubt that the field of thinking and reasoning is central to current psychological
science, this Handbook should dispel those doubts. I can’t imagine a young scholar in cognitive
science who wouldn’t find something of interest in this set of up-to-date empirical and theo-
retical chapters.”
—Keith E. Stanovich, University of Toronto, author of The Rationality Quotient

“This book offers authoritative overviews of every major topic in reasoning research, written
by leading scholars from around the world. Its 35 chapters capture the field’s history as well as
its exciting cutting-edge developments, making this Handbook a valuable resource for years
to come.”
—Norbert Schwarz, University of Southern California

“The Routledge International Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning brings together an

impressive collection of highly esteemed experts and represents a comprehensive review of the
psychology of thought. While it may appeal most to academics working in the field, it also rep-
resents a useful resource for anyone interested in the characteristics of the human mind and the
underlying cognitive processes that constitute our reasoning.”
—Gordon Pennycook, Banting Postdoctoral Fellow,Yale University
 THE ROUTLEDGE INTERNATIONAL
HANDBOOK OF THINKING
AND REASONING

The Routledge International Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning is an authoritative reference work
providing a well-balanced overview of current scholarship spanning the full breadth of the
rapidly developing and expanding field of thinking and reasoning. It contains 35 chapters by
leading international researchers, covering foundational issues as well as state-of-the-art devel-
opments, both in relation to empirical evidence and theoretical analyses.
Topics covered range across all sub-areas of thinking and reasoning, including deduction,
induction, abduction, judgment, decision making, argumentation, problem solving, expertise,
creativity and rationality. The contributors engage with cutting-edge debates and pressing con-
ceptual issues such as the status of dual-process theories of thinking, the role of unconscious,
intuitive, emotional and metacognitive processes in thinking and the importance of probabilistic
conceptualisations of thinking and reasoning. In addition, authors examine the importance of
neuroscientific findings in informing theoretical developments, as well as the situated nature of
thinking and reasoning across a range of real-world contexts such as mathematics, medicine and
science.
The Handbook provides a clear sense of the way in which contemporary ideas are chal-
lenging traditional viewpoints in what is now referred to as the “new paradigm psychology
of reasoning”. This paradigm-shifting research is paving the way toward a far richer and more
encompassing understanding of the nature of thinking and reasoning, where important new
questions drive a forward-looking research agenda. It is essential reading for both established
researchers in the field of thinking and reasoning as well as advanced students wishing to learn
more about both the historical foundations and the very latest developments in this rapidly
growing area.

Linden J. Ball is Professor of Cognitive Psychology and Dean of Psychology at the University
of Central Lancashire. He is Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Cognitive Psychology, Associate Editor
of Thinking & Reasoning and Editor of Routledge’s Current Issues in Thinking & Reasoning book
series.

Valerie A. Thompson is Professor of Cognitive Psychology at the University of Saskatchewan.

She is Past President of the Canadian Society of Brain, Behaviour, and Cognitive Science, and is
currently Editor-in-Chief of Thinking & Reasoning.
THE ROUTLEDGE INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK SERIES

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 THE ROUTLEDGE
INTERNATIONAL
HANDBOOK OF THINKING
AND REASONING

Edited by Linden J. Ball

and Valerie A. Thompson
 First published 2018
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2018 selection and editorial matter, Linden J. Ball and Valerie A.
Thompson; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Linden J. Ball and Valerie A. Thompson to be identified as the
authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual
chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-138-84930-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-72569-7 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
We would like to dedicate this Handbook to our academic advisors, who mentored and
inspired us:

Linden to Jonathan St. B.T. Evans, who helped to set me off down the fascinating
path of thinking and reasoning research and who was always an exemplar of what it
means to be an exceptional cognitive scientist.

Valerie to the memory of Allan Paivio, who was a model of experimental rigour,
theoretical precision, and integrity in and out of the laboratory. I constantly aspire to
meet the stellar standard he set.
 CONTENTS

Contributorsxii
Prefacexix

1 Meta-Reasoning: shedding metacognitive light on reasoning research 1

Rakefet Ackerman and Valerie A.Thompson

2 Belief bias and reasoning 16

Linden J. Ball and Valerie A.Thompson

3 Intuitive thinking 37
Tilmann Betsch and Pablina Roth

4 Emotion and reasoning 57

Isabelle Blanchette, Serge Caparos, and Bastien Trémolière

5 Counterfactual reasoning and imagination 71

Ruth M.J. Byrne

6 Fallacies of argumentation 88
Peter J. Collins and Ulrike Hahn

7 Medical decision making 109

Pat Croskerry

8 The new paradigm in psychology of reasoning 130

Shira Elqayam

ix
 Contents

9 Dual-process theories 151

Jonathan St. B.T. Evans

10 Forty years of progress on category-based inductive reasoning 167

Aidan Feeney

11 Analogical reasoning 186

Dedre Gentner and Francisco Maravilla

12 Incubation, problem solving and creativity 204

Kenneth J. Gilhooly

13 Inductive and deductive reasoning: integrating insights from

philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience 218
Vinod Goel and Randall Waechter

14 Scientific thinking 248

Michael E. Gorman

15 Working memory, thinking, and expertise 268

David Z. Hambrick, Alexander P. Burgoyne, Guillermo Campitelli,
and Brooke N. Macnamara

16 Expert decision making: a fuzzy-trace theory perspective 289

Rebecca K. Helm, Michael J. McCormick, and Valerie F. Reyna

17 Conversational inference and human reasoning 304

Denis J. Hilton, Bart Geurts, and Peter Sedlmeier

18 The fast-and-frugal heuristics program 325

Ulrich Hoffrage, Sebastian Hafenbrädl, and Julian N. Marewski

19 Mental models and reasoning 346

Philip N. Johnson-Laird, Geoffrey P. Goodwin, and Sangeet S. Khemlani

20 Abductive reasoning and explanation 366

Barbara Koslowski

21 The development of logical reasoning 383

Henry Markovits

22 Reasoning and argumentation 401

Hugo Mercier

x
 Contents

23 Probabilities and Bayesian rationality 415

Mike Oaksford and Nick Chater

24 Probabilistic accounts of conditional reasoning 434

David E. Over and Nicole Cruz

25 Judgement heuristics 451

Tim Rakow and William J. Skylark

26 Creative thinking 472

Mark A. Runco

27 Naturalistic decision making 487

Jan Maarten Schraagen

28 Decision making under risk: an experience-based perspective 502

Christin Schulze and Ben R. Newell

29 Several logics for the many things that people do in reasoning 523
Keith Stenning and Alexandra Varga

30 The development of rational thinking: insights from the heuristics and

biases literature and dual process models 542
Maggie E.Toplak

31 The sense of coherence: how intuition guides reasoning and thinking 559
Sascha Topolinski

32 Reasoning and moral judgment: a common experimental toolbox 575

Bastien Trémolière,Wim De Neys, and Jean-François Bonnefon

33 Contemporary perspectives on mathematical thinking and learning 590

Keith Weber and Kevin C. Moore

34 Problem solving 607

Robert W.Weisberg

35 Thinking and reasoning across cultures 624

Hiroshi Yama

Index639

xi
 CONTRIBUTORS

Rakefet Ackerman
Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management
Technion – Israel Institute of Technology
Haifa, Israel

Linden J. Ball
School of Psychology
University of Central Lancashire
Preston, UK

Tilmann Betsch
Department of Psychology
University of Erfurt
Erfurt, Germany

Isabelle Blanchette
Département de Psychologie
Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières
Trois-Rivières, Québec, Canada

Jean-François Bonnefon
Center for Research in Management
Université Toulouse 1 Capitole
Toulouse, France

Alexander P. Burgoyne
Department of Psychology
Michigan State University
East Lansing, Michigan, USA

xii
 Contributors

Ruth M. J. Byrne
School of Psychology and Institute of Neuroscience
Trinity College Dublin
University of Dublin
Dublin, Ireland

Guillermo Campitelli
School of Arts and Humanities
Edith Cowan University
Joondalup, Western Australia, Australia

Serge Caparos
Psychology, Literature, Language, and History
Université de Nîmes
Nîmes, France

Nick Chater
Behavioural Science Group
Warwick Business School
University of Warwick
Coventry, UK

Peter J. Collins
Department of Psychological Sciences
Birkbeck, University of London
London, UK

Pat Croskerry
Department of Emergency Medicine
Dalhousie University
Halifax Infirmary
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

Nicole Cruz
Department of Psychological Sciences
Birkbeck, University of London
London, UK

Wim De Neys
Laboratory for the Psychology of Child Development and Education Sorbonne
Paris Descartes University
Paris, France

Shira Elqayam
School of Applied Social Sciences
De Montfort University
Leicester, UK

xiii
 Contributors

Jonathan St. B. T. Evans

School of Psychology
University of Plymouth
Plymouth, UK

Aidan Feeney
School of Psychology
Queen’s University Belfast
Belfast, UK

Dedre Gentner
Department of Psychology
Northwestern University
Evanston, Illinois, USA

Bart Geurts
Department of Philosophy
Radboud University
Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Kenneth J. Gilhooly
Psychology Department
University of Hertfordshire
Hatfield, UK

Vinod Goel
Department of Psychology
York University
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Geoffrey P. Goodwin
Department of Psychology
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

Michael E. Gorman
Department of Science, Technology and Society
University of Virginia
Charlottesville,Virginia, USA

Sebastian Hafenbrädl
IESE Business School
University of Navarra
Barcelona, Spain [Current Address]
and
School of Management
Yale University
New Haven, Connecticut, USA

xiv
 Contributors

and
Faculty of Business and Economics
University of Lausanne
Lausanne, Switzerland

Ulrike Hahn
Department of Psychological Sciences
Birkbeck, University of London
London, UK

David Z. Hambrick
Department of Psychology
Michigan State University
East Lansing, Michigan, USA

Rebecca K. Helm
School of Law
University of Exeter
Exeter, UK [Current Affiliation]
and
Department of Human Development
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York, USA

Denis J. Hilton
Laboratoire Cognition, Langage, Langues, Ergonomie
Université de Toulouse Le Mirail
Toulouse, France

Ulrich Hoffrage
Faculty of Business and Economics
University of Lausanne
Lausanne, Switzerland

Philip N. Johnson-Laird
Psychology Department
Princeton University
Princeton, New Jersey, USA
and
Department of Psychology
New York University
New York, New York, USA

Sangeet S. Khemlani
Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence
Naval Research Laboratory
Washington, District of Columbia, USA

xv
 Contributors

Barbara Koslowski
Department of Human Development
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York, USA

Brooke N. Macnamara
Department of Psychological Sciences
Case Western Reserve University
Cleveland, Ohio, USA

Francisco Maravilla
Department of Psychology
Northwestern University
Evanston, Illinois, USA

Julian N. Marewski
Faculty of Business and Economics
University of Lausanne
Lausanne, Switzerland

Henry Markovits
Département de Psychologie
Université du Québec à Montréal
Montréal, Québec, Canada

Michael J. McCormick
Department of Psychology
Auburn University
Auburn, Alabama, USA

Hugo Mercier
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod—UMR5304
Bron, France

Kevin C. Moore
Department of Mathematics & Science Education
University of Georgia
Athens, Georgia, USA

Ben R. Newell
School of Psychology
University of New South Wales
Sydney, Australia

Mike Oaksford
Department of Psychological Sciences
Birkbeck, University of London
London, UK

xvi
 Contributors

David E. Over
Department of Psychology
Durham University
Durham, UK

Tim Rakow
Department of Psychology
Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience
King’s College London
London, UK

Valerie F. Reyna
Human Neuroscience Institute
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York, USA

Pablina Roth
Institut für Sport und Sportwissenschaft
University of Heidelberg
Heidelberg, Germany

Mark A. Runco
American Institute of Behavioral Research and Technology
Leucadia, California, USA
and
University of Georgia
Athens, Georgia, USA

Jan Maarten Schraagen

Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research TNO
University of Twente
Soesterberg/Enschede, The Netherlands

Christin Schulze
Center for Adaptive Rationality Max Planck Institute for Human Development
Berlin, Germany

Peter Sedlmeier
Institut für Psychologie
Technische Universität Chemnitz
Chemnitz, Germany

William J. Skylark
Department of Psychology
University of Cambridge
Cambridge, UK

Keith Stenning
School of Informatics
University of Edinburgh
Edinburgh, UK

xvii
 Contributors

Valerie A. Thompson
Department of Psychology
University of Saskatchewan
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada

Maggie E. Toplak
LaMarsh Centre for Child and Youth Research
Department of Psychology
York University
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Sascha Topolinski
Department of Psychology
Social and Economic Cognition
University of Cologne
Cologne, Germany

Bastien Trémolière
Département de Psychologie
Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières
Trois-Rivières, Québec, Canada

Alexandra Varga
Titu Maiorescu University
Bucharest, Romania

Randall Waechter
School of Medicine
School of Veterinary Medicine
Windward Islands Research and Education Foundation
St. George’s University
Grenada, West Indies

Keith Weber
Graduate School of Education
Rutgers University
New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA

Robert W. Weisberg
Department of Psychology
Temple University
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

Hiroshi Yama
School of Literature and Human Sciences
Osaka City University
Osaka, Japan

xviii
 PREFACE

What is the goal of a handbook? Clearly one goal must be to cover a wide overview of a disci-
pline. It should be thorough and authoritative and provide both researchers and students with a
well-balanced synopsis of contemporary scholarship across the full breadth of an area of enquiry.
To this end, our Handbook surveys the current state of the art in the rapidly developing and
expanding field of thinking and reasoning research, in relation to both empirical evidence and
theoretical analyses.
Having said that, we also believe that it is insufficient for a handbook merely to provide an
overview of the current state of affairs and the history leading up to it. We also wanted our
Handbook to capture the incredible momentum that is apparent in the field of thinking and
reasoning research at the moment. As such, we sought to provide the reader with a strong sense
of where the field is going by addressing the new questions that researchers are attempting to
answer – and with which tools: what do researchers perceive to be profitable avenues for future
research? What are the latest conceptual challenges? Thus, our second goal was to cover emerg-
ing trends and cutting-edge debates and to position these in relation to established findings and
theories so as to give a clear impression of the way in which new ideas are challenging tradi-
tional viewpoints and charting new territory.
Within this context, a discerning reader might note that many of our chapter titles are
similar to those that appeared in the first Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning that was edited
by Keith Holyoak and Robert Morrison back in 2005 and published by Cambridge Univer-
sity Press. Indeed, had there been a handbook put together even 20 years ago, chapters on the
­topics of deduction, induction, problem solving and decision making would certainly have been
included, as they are staples in our field. Many of the same themes that permeate the present
­volume have permeated the field for over 20 years, including debates about the nature of ration-
ality and the standards by which it should be evaluated. Less clear from a surface glance, however,
is that the content of the current chapters would be novel to readers of an earlier generation,
with the new emphasis on probability (versus deductive logic), multimodal and multidiscipli-
nary approaches to theorising and the application of mathematical modelling and neuroimaging
techniques. Researchers today also rely extensively on eye-movement tracking, mouse track-
ing, reaction-time data, confidence measures and data that derive from other process-tracing
methods. The use of multiple, converging evidence in understanding reasoning phenomena
represents possibly one of the largest single transformations of our field as we move away from

xix
 Preface

established approaches in which the primary (and usually only) measurement of interest has
been a single outcome measure: the answer. Thus, instead of having to infer backwards from the
answer to the processes that produced the answer, we now have access to a variety of techniques
to examine those processes as they unfold over the time-course of thinking and reasoning.
We have also emphasised situated reasoning in our Handbook, with several chapters explic-
itly dedicated to studying reasoning in context. These chapters include, but are not limited to,
approaches emphasising the role of fast-and-frugal heuristics and naturalistic decision-making
strategies in everyday reasoning, but also extend to chapters discussing informal inference, rea-
soning by argumentation, conversational inference, expert reasoning, abductive reasoning, ana-
logical reasoning and cultural and emotional influences on reasoning. As our field has grown
more sophisticated in its theoretical and empirical approaches, we are very glad to see research-
ers expanding their vision to move from the laboratory to the real world.
In addition, we have included a large number of chapters that address emerging issues and
paradigms in reasoning research, again with an emphasis on both informal as well as formal rea-
soning.This emphasis is in keeping with the larger movement of the field away from formalisms
(or at least a single formalism) towards capturing reasoning that is nonmonotonic and probabil-
istic, and that is guided by emotion and is culturally situated. The role of intuition in thinking is
another pervasive theme in the current volume. Again, the origins of this work are historical in
nature, dating back to the original work on judgment, decision making and problem solving by
the likes of Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, Herbert Simon and Janet Metcalfe, but it is clear
that intuition now plays a pervasive role in many different applications, ranging from creativity
and innovation to medical practice and metacognition. There appears to be a growing recog-
nition that thinking and reasoning, as is the case with most other cognitive activities, requires
at least as much attention to the vast cognitive underground of implicit processes as to more
explicit ones. Given that both thinking and reasoning are traditionally defined with reference to
consciousness, this represents a significant shift in the way that we think about thinking.
Note that, rather than trying to assemble the chapters into themes, we have organised them
alphabetically by author.The reason for this is that we were more or less defeated in our attempts
at other organisational structures given that many chapters could legitimately be classified in
multiple categories. In this respect our final observation on the state of thinking and reasoning
research is that the issues common to various areas of inquiry seem nowadays to be far greater
than the issues that separate these areas. Consider, for a moment, what differentiates the field of
problem solving from the field of reasoning, other than the paradigms being used to investigate
them. Both involve a combination of implicit and explicit processes and require the reasoner to
have a goal and a plan to carry out that goal; both require the transformation of a representation
from one state to another; and both may rely on stored knowledge, insight, logical reasoning,
probabilistic reasoning and the like. One runs into similar difficulties when trying to separate
the topics of reasoning and decision making, or when trying to carve up the various subtypes
of reasoning. The interconnectedness of theories, explanatory constructs and conceptual issues
makes it difficult to sort things into silos. In our view, an important step forward for the future
of our discipline is to continue to work our way out of the silos towards a more integrated view
of the processes that contribute to thinking and reasoning, broadly defined.
We were very fortunate in this endeavour to have had cooperation and contributions from
such a wide range of authors. Many are established experts in their fields and others are midca-
reer researchers with a reputation for excellent work, whilst a few are “rising stars” who are still
at an early career stage but who are nevertheless already being recognised for producing out-
standing research. It has been a genuine pleasure to interact with such an exceptional group of
authors, and the quality of the current Handbook is, of course, entirely due to the high-quality,

xx
 Preface

accessible chapters that they have produced. We are also grateful to our authors for serving as
each other’s peer reviewers so as to enable further enhancements to the research presented in
this volume. We also thank four external reviewers – Jamie Campbell, Niall Galbraith, Ed Stup-
ple and Dries Trippas – who graciously gave up their time to provide additional expert reviews
of certain chapters. Finally, we thank Ceri Griffiths, our wonderful editor at Routledge, who was
instrumental in initiating this Handbook and who has provided us with considerable support
and encouragement throughout the whole project. We are now happy to bring this endeavour
to its fruition and very much hope that you will enjoy the experience of reading these chapters
as much as we did.
Valerie A. Thompson
University of Saskatchewan
Saskatoon, Canada

Linden J. Ball
University of Central Lancashire
Preston, UK
April 2017

xxi
 1
META-REASONING
Shedding metacognitive light on
reasoning research

Rakefet Ackerman and Valerie A. Thompson

In this chapter, we argue that understanding the processes that underlie reasoning, problem
­solving, and decision-making1 can be informed by understanding the metacognitive processes
that monitor and control them. Our goal is to show that a metacognitive analysis applies to
a wide range of reasoning tasks and theoretical perspectives, including Dual Process Theo-
ries, Mental Models Theory (Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 1991), Fast and Frugal Heuristics (e.g.,
­Gigerenzer, Todd, & the ABC Group, 1999), probabilistic models of reasoning (Oaksford &
Chater, 2007), and a wide variety of problem-solving paradigms. We hope that the range of
examples that we provide will allow the reader to usefully extend these principles even further,
to theories of analogy, induction, causal inference, and so on.
Metacognition is often defined as “thinking about thinking”, which implies a reflective,
introspective set of processes by which we evaluate and alter our approach to the world. In
contrast, most theorists conceive of metacognitive processes as those that are responsible for
monitoring and controlling our ongoing cognitive processes (Nelson & Narens, 1990). They
are thought to be running in the background and monitoring the success of ongoing cogni-
tive processes (such as reading, remembering, reasoning) in much the same way as a thermostat
monitors the temperature of the air. Like the thermostat, which can send a signal to the furnace
to start or terminate functioning, metacognitive processes are assumed to have an analogous
control function over the initiation or cessation of mental effort.
From the point of view of reasoning research, understanding these processes is important
because there is compelling evidence from other domains (e.g., memorisation by Metcalfe &
Finn, 2011 and reading comprehension by Thiede, Anderson, & Therriault, 2003) that these
monitoring processes are the input to control processes, which then allocate attentional and
working memory resources. By extension, therefore, we would expect analogous control
processes in reasoning, problem-solving, and decision-making tasks. Equally important is the
evidence that the processes that monitor performance are often based on aspects of said per-
formance that may be irrelevant to achieving good outcomes. Thus, control processes may
misdirect or prematurely terminate processing based on poorly calibrated input cues. We
argue that understanding the factors that inform these monitoring processes is necessary to
understanding the outcome of any reasoning endeavor and for improving reasoners’ allocation
of resources.

1
 Rakefet Ackerman and Valerie A. Thompson

Metacognition and reasoning theories

Implicit to most reasoning theories is the inclusion of a metacognitive component, namely the
assumption that reasoners terminate their work on a problem either because they don’t know
the answer or they are satisfied with the solution (see Evans, 2006 for a discussion of satisficing).
This, of course, then raises the question of when and on what basis reasoners become satisfied
with their answer or decide that they don’t know the answer, which is the goal of the current
chapter. Stanovich (2009) was more explicit than most theorists in his argument regarding the
need to separate reasoning per se from monitoring and control processes; the latter, he argued,
form part of the “reflective mind”, which represents individual dispositions to engage analytic
thinking. Our analysis, whilst in the same spirit, aims to offer a detailed theoretical framework
of the metacognitive mechanisms that continuously monitor and control ongoing cognitive
processes.
An initial framework for understanding monitoring and control processes was developed in
the context of dual process theories (Thompson, 2009; Thompson, Prowse Turner, & ­Pennycook,
2011). This family of theories assumes that reasoning and decision-making are mediated by two
qualitatively different sets of processes: autonomous Type 1 processes and working-memory
demanding Type 2 processes (Evans, this volume; see Evans & Stanovich, 2013 for a review).
The dual process explanation for many of the classic heuristics and biases derives from the fact
that the former processes are faster and form a default response based on heuristic cues such as
availability, representativeness, belief, and so on; more deliberate, effortful, time consuming, and
working memory demanding Type 2 processes may or may not be engaged to find an alternative
solution (Kahneman, 2011). A crucial issue for this view is to explain when and why these more
effortful processes are or are not engaged.
Thompson (2009) argued that this was essentially a metacognitive question and provided an
analysis that was grounded in the rich metacognitive literature (for a similar view, see Fletcher &
Carruthers, 2012). According to her framework, Type 1 processes have two outputs: the cogni-
tive output derived from Type 1 processes and the metacognitive output in the form of a Feeling
of Rightness (FOR) that accompanies that answer. In this view, the FOR is a monitoring pro-
cess that mediates the probability of Type 2 engagement: low FORs are a signal that the answer
needs further analysis, whereas a strong FOR is a signal that this is not needed (Thompson et al.,
2011; Thompson, Evans, & Campbell, 2013; Thompson & Johnson, 2014).
However, there have been challenges to the processing assumptions of dual process theories,
which might lead some researchers to think that the metacognitive analysis proposed above has
limited scope. One such challenge is to the serial processing assumption implied by the default-
interventionist architecture described above (Evans, 2007). For example, De Neys (2014) and
others (Sloman, 2002) argue that belief-based and logical processes are engaged simultaneously.
When they produce conflicting outputs, analytic processes may or may not be engaged to
resolve the conflict (De Neys & Bonnefon, 2013). However, regardless of whether one assumes
sequential or parallel processes, one must still be able to explain how the conflict is detected
and under what circumstances analytic processes are engaged to resolve it; this is an essentially
metacognitive question.
A second challenge concerns the distinction between Type 1 and Type 2 processes
­(Kruglanski & Gigerenzer, 2011), with many theorists arguing that there is only a single type
of process that exists on a continuum of speed and complexity (Osman, 2004). We argue that
regardless of whether one assumes that Type 1 and Type 2 processes are qualitatively different, the
fact that some answers are produced more quickly than others (Evans & Curtis Holmes, 2005;
­Finucane, Alhakami, Slovic, & Johnson, 2000; Markovits, Brunet, Thompson, & Brisson, 2013)

2
 Meta-Reasoning

means that there is potential for a reasoner to change their initial answer via deliberate analy-
sis. It does not matter whether one assumes that the fast and the slow answer are delivered by
qualitatively different processes – the fact that the initial answer may be changed invites the
question of when and under what circumstances the answer is changed or kept. It also invites an
explanation for the length of time the reasoner spends deliberating as well as the variables that
determine how satisfied she is with the final answer. Again, these are fundamentally metacogni-
tive questions.
A case in point is the well-known Mental Models theory (Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 2002;
Johnson-Laird, Goodwin, & Khemlani, this volume). This is a theory of how people represent
information in a problem space, and how those representations afford inferences about that
information. A key assumption of the theory is that people often form an incomplete represen-
tation of the problem space, which can be, but which is not always, fleshed out. For example,
consider the following pair of premises:

Some of the artists are beekeepers.

All of the chemists are artists.

What follows?
According to Mental Model theory, reasoners construct a model that integrates the premise
information and then draw a conclusion from it. For example, the following notation describes
a mental representation of the premises that support the conclusion that all of the beekeepers
are chemists:

chemist artist beekeeper

chemist artist beekeeper
chemist artist

There is, however, another way to represent the premises that undermines that conclusion:

beekeeper
chemist artist beekeeper
chemist artist beekeeper
chemist artist

Consequently, the conclusions that reasoners draw are determined, at least in part, by whether
they are content with their initial answer or whether they search for an alternative. Thus, moni-
toring and control processes are key for understanding why and when reasoners are content
with their initial representations, and the conditions that lead them to expend the necessary
effort to supplement it.
Similarly, several theories of reasoning posit that the search for counter-examples to a puta-
tive conclusion plays a crucial role in reasoning outcomes (e.g., Cummins, Lubart, Alksnis, &
Rist, 1991; Markovits, 1986; Thompson, 2000); again, the goal is to understand when and why
reasoners initiate or fail to initiate such a search. Across a wide spectrum of tasks and para-
digms, therefore, a complete understanding of the processes that operate therein requires us to

3
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