Does reflection lead to wise choices?
Open accessAbstract
Does conscious reflection lead to good decision-making? Whereas engaging in reflection is traditionally thought to be the best way to make wise choices, recent psychological evidence undermines the role of reflection in lay and expert judgement. The literature suggests that thinking about reasons does not improve the choices people make, and that experts do not engage in reflection, but base their judgements on intuition, often shaped by extensive previous experience. Can we square the traditional accounts of wisdom with the results of these empirical studies? Should we even attempt to? I shall defend the view that philosophy and cognitive sciences genuinely interact in tackling questions such as whether reflection leads to making wise choices.
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DoT can result from bias and distorted perception, rigidity and resistance to change, and limited external feedback.
“There are various factors (Bortolotti, 2011;Keestra, 2017) that could result in DoT, and we outline three here: (1) Bias and Distorted Perception.”
From Encouraging Divergent Thinking in Large Language Models through Multi-Agent Debate (2024) · cites this paper as Bortolotti, 2011
In “Decision-making and self-knowledge” (page not provided), Bortolotti says reflective deliberation may be manipulated by biased evidence and may overlook factors relevant to a choice, supporting the bias and distorted-perception factor. The passages do not identify rigidity, resistance to change, or limited external feedback as factors. (LLM, conf=0.83)
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Encouraging Divergent Thinking in Large Language Models through Multi-Agent Debate
Liang, T., He, Z., Jiao, W., Wang, X., Wang, Y., Wang, R., Yang, Y., Shi, S., & Tu, Z. (2024) · Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing · doi:10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.992 · Cited by 274 · see citing works
- Authors
- Bortolotti, L.
- Affiliations
- University of Birmingham (GB)
- Corresponding author
- Bortolotti, Lisa
- ORCID
- Bortolotti, Lisa
- Venue
- Philosophical Explorations
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2011-09
- Volume
- 14
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 297-313
- ISSN
- 1386-9795 (ISSN-L)
- 1741-5918
- PMC
- PMC3294721
- OpenAlex
- W2063288340
- Cited by
- 49
- References
- 6
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2024: 2 · 2023: 15 · 2022: 2 · 2021: 4 · 2020: 2 · 2019: 5 · 2018: 4 · 2017: 1 · 2016: 4 · 2015: 6 · 2014: 3
- FWCI
- 0.53
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Philosophical Explorations (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- University of Birmingham Institutional Research Archive (University of Birmingham) (acceptedVersion)
- University of Birmingham Research Portal (University of Birmingham) (submittedVersion)
- Institutional Research Information System University of Ferrara (University of Ferrara) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Wellcome Trust
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › General Decision Sciences › Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Philosophy › Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Philosophy › Philosophical Ethics and Theory
- Keywords
- reflection, decision-making, wisdom, intuition, expert opinion, philosophy of cognitive science
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