INSTINCT VS REASON: HOW METACOGNITIVE EXPERIENCES CONTROL ANALYTIC THINKING

Often when making decisions, one or more of the potential choices is suggested by automatic, fast acting heuristic processes.  Advertisers, for example, rely on a sense of familiarity to increase the appeal of their products.  Even complex judgments made by experts can be delivered by heuristic processes.  These initial, intuitive judgments can, in theory, be overturned by recourse to more reasoned analysis.  However, as the extensive heuristics and biases literature demonstrates, reasoners often give responses that are consistent with the initial intuition, even though this leads them to neglect relevant principles of probability and logic.  This phenomenon motivates Dual Process Theories of reasoning, which posit that automatic Type 1 processes give rise to a highly contextualised representation of the problem and attendant judgments that may or may not be analysed extensively by more deliberate, decontextualised Type 2 processes. A critical, but unanswered question  concerns the issue of monitoring and control: When do reasoners rely on the first, intuitive output and when do they engage more effortful thinking?  In this talk, I will present data to support the hypothesis that the compellingness of these intuitions can be attributed to a second-order metacognitive judgment, which I will call the Feeling of Rightness.  In other words, the initial intuition has two distinct aspects: the content of the choice delivered to working memory and a judgment about how right that decision feels. It is this latter judgment that determines the probability that more deliberate, analytic processes are engaged.