Intuition and Reasoning: A Dual-Process Perspective
Abstract
A lay definition of intuition holds that it involves immediate apprehension in the absence of reasoning. From a more technical point of view, I argue also that intuition should be seen as the contrastive of reasoning, corresponding roughly to the distinction between Type 1 (intuitive) and Type 2 (reflective) processes in contemporary dual process theories of thinking. From this perspective, we already know a great deal about intuition: It is quick, provides feelings of confidence, can reflect large amounts of information processing, and is most likely to provide accurate judgments when based on relevant experiential learning. Unlike reasoning, intuition is low effort and does not compete for central working memory resources. It provides default responses which may—or often may not—be intervened upon with high effort, reflective reasoning. Intuition has, however, been blamed for a range of cognitive biases in the psychological literatures on reasoning and decision making. The evidence indicates that with novel and abstract problems, not easily linked to previous experience, intervention with effortful reasoning is often required to avoid such biases. Hence, although it seems that intuition dominates reasoning most of the time—both in the laboratory and the real world—it can indeed be a false friend.
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Incorporating diverse reasoning paths is beneficial for deliberate thinking and reasoning.
“Incorporating diverse reasoning paths would be beneficial for deliberate thinking and reasoning (Evans, 2010;Wang et al., 2024b).”
From Graph-constrained Reasoning: Faithful Reasoning on Knowledge Graphs with Large Language Models (2024) · cites this paper as Evans, 2010
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Dual-Process Theories of Higher Cognition: Advancing the Debate
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“The more that deliberate thinking and analysis is required for a problem (Evans, 2010), the greater the diversity of reasoning paths that can recover the answer.”
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Graph-constrained Reasoning: Faithful Reasoning on Knowledge Graphs with Large Language Models
Luo, L., Zhao, Z., Haffari, G., Li, Y.-F., Gong, C., & Pan, S. (2024) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2410.13080 · Cited by 8 · see citing works
- Authors
- Evans, J. S. B. T.
- Affiliations
- University of Plymouth (GB)
- Corresponding author
- Evans, Jonathan St B T
- Venue
- Psychological Inquiry
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2010-11-30
- Volume
- 21
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 313-326
- ISSN
- 1047-840X (ISSN-L)
- 1532-7965
- OpenAlex
- W2089571492
- Cited by
- 385
- References
- 11
- Citations by year
- 2026: 18 · 2025: 26 · 2024: 30 · 2023: 31 · 2022: 31 · 2021: 45 · 2020: 42 · 2019: 30 · 2018: 11 · 2017: 23 · 2016: 17 · 2015: 25 · 2014: 18 · 2013: 16 · 2012: 13
- FWCI
- 8.27
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Psychological Inquiry (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › General Decision Sciences › Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Family Practice › Clinical Reasoning and Diagnostic Skills
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Cognitive Science and Education Research
- Keywords
- intuition, reasoning, dual-process theory, cognitive biases, decision-making, experiential learning, working memory, reflective thinking, judgment accuracy
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