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HYPOTHETICAL THINKING
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Hypothetical thought involves the imagination of possibilities and the

exploration of their consequences by a process of mental simulation. Using
a recently developed theoretical framework called Hypothetical Thinking
Theory, Jonathan St B. T. Evans provides an integrated theoretical account of
a wide range of psychological studies on hypothesis testing, reasoning,
judgement and decision making.
Hypothetical thinking theory is built on three key principles, implemented
in a revised and updated version of Evans’ well-known heuristic–analytic
theory of reasoning. The central claim of this book is that this theory can
provide an integrated account of some apparently very diverse phenomena
including confirmation bias in hypothesis testing, acceptance of fallacies in
deductive reasoning, belief biases in reasoning and judgement, biases of
statistical judgement and a number of characteristic findings in the study
of decision making. The author also provides broad ranging discussion of
cognitive biases, human rationality and dual-process theories of higher
cognition.
Hypothetical Thinking draws on and develops arguments first proposed
in Evans’ earlier work from this series, Bias in Human Reasoning. In the
new theory, however, cognitive biases are attributed equally to analytic and
heuristic processing and a much wider range of phenomena are reviewed
and discussed. It will therefore be of great interest to researchers and
post-graduates in psychology and the cognitive sciences, as well as to under-
graduate students looking for a comprehensive review of current work on
reasoning and decision making.
 ESSAYS IN COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

North American Editors:

Henry L. Roediger, III, Washington University in St. Louis
James R. Pomerantz, Rice University

European Editors:
Alan D. Baddeley, University of York
Vicki Bruce, University of Edinburgh
Jonathan Grainger, Université de Provence
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Essays in Cognitive Psychology is designed to meet the need for rapid publication of brief
volumes in cognitive psychology. Primary topics include perception, movement and action,
attention, memory, mental representation, language and problem solving. Furthermore, the
series seeks to define cognitive psychology in its broadest sense, encompassing all topics either
informed by, or informing, the study of mental processes. As such, it covers a wide range of
subjects including computational approaches to cognition, cognitive neuroscience, social cogni-
tion, and cognitive development, as well as areas more traditionally defined as cognitive psycho-
logy. Each volume in the series makes a conceptual contribution to the topic by reviewing and
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Surprenant & Neath: Principles of Memory
Brown: Tip-of-the-tongue Phenomenon

Recently published
Gallo: Associative Illusions of Memory
Sarris: Rational Psychophysics in Humans and Animals
Cowan: Working Memory Capacity
McNamara: Semantic Priming
Brown: The Déjà Vu Experience
Coventry & Garrod: Seeing, Saying, and Acting
Robertson: Space, Objects, Minds, and Brains
Cornoldi & Vecchi: Visuo-spatial Working Memory and Individual Differences
Sternberg et al.: The Creativity Conundrum
Poletiek: Hypothesis-testing Behaviour
Garnham: Mental Models and the Interpretations of Anaphora

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 Hypothetical Thinking
Dual Processes in Reasoning and Judgement
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Jonathan St B. T. Evans
 First published 2007 by Psychology Press
27 Church Road, Hove, East Sussex BN3 2FA
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Psychology Press
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This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007.
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Psychology Press is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business
© 2007 Psychology Press

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

utilized 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.
This publication has been produced with paper manufactured to strict
environmental standards and with pulp derived from sustainable forests.
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
Evans, Jonathan St. B. T., 1948–
Hypothetical thinking: dual processes in reasoning and judgement/
Jonathan St. B. T. Evans. – 1st ed.
p. cm. – (Essays in cognitive psychology)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978–1–84169–660–7 (hard back)
ISBN-10: 1–84169–660–9 (hard back)
1. Reasoning (Psychology) 2. Judgment. 3. Thought and thinking. I. Title.
BF442.E93 2007
153.4 – dc22 2006037166

ISBN 0–203–94748–7 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN: 978–1–84169–660–7 (Print Edition)

 Contents
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Foreword and acknowledgements vii

1. Introduction and theoretical framework 1

2. Hypothesis testing 25

3. Suppositional reasoning: if and or 49

4. The role of knowledge and belief in reasoning 79

5. Dual processes in judgement and decision making 107

6. Thinking about chance and probability 131

7. Broader issues 155

References 177

Author index 197

Subject index 203

v
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 Foreword and acknowledgements
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This book is my third contribution to the Essays in Cognitive Psychology

series, following Bias in Human Reasoning (1989) and Rationality and Reason-
ing (with David Over, 1996a). It has some features in common with these
earlier books, including an attempt to integrate work from the psychology of
reasoning with that on judgement and decision making, and a framing within
dual-process theory. However, the current volume represents, I hope, con-
siderably more than an update of these previous works. Of the three books, it
is the most theoretically ambitious. I present here a recently developed theory
of hypothetical thinking, including a revised and extended version of the
heuristic–analytic theory of reasoning. The claim on which the book is based
is that phenomena on a wide range of apparently diverse cognitive tasks in
the psychological literatures on hypothesis testing, reasoning, statistical
judgement and decision making can be understood with reference to a com-
mon and relatively simple set of principles. In support of this, I present an
extended review and discussion of the relevant studies.
As befits the series, this book is an extended essay and not a textbook. For
this reason, I have given more weight at times to discussion of studies that I
feel are particularly relevant to the theoretical objectives of the book, includ-
ing those run in my own laboratory. However, the book includes a fairly
comprehensive review of the main findings in the fields covered and should
hence prove useful also as a broad introduction to these topics.
I am indebted in this work to my two closest collaborators of recent years,
David Over and Simon Handley. In particular, David and Simon helped

vii
 viii FOREWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

me to develop the three principles of hypothetical thinking that form the

foundation of hypothetical thinking theory. They have also collaborated
with me on a number of experimental investigations of the key phenomena
in the study of hypothetical thinking. In addition, I am grateful to several
colleagues who read and criticized a draft manuscript of this book, including
Keith Stanovich, Valerie Thompson, Shira Elqayam and an anonymous
reviewer. The book was certainly improved in response to their thoughtful
and constructive comments.
Writing books is a time-consuming enterprise and best undertaken with
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the minimum of distraction. For this reason, I am very grateful to the ESRC
who supported this work with the award of an extended research fellowship
(RES–000–27–0184), thus freeing me from all normal university duties.

Jonathan Evans
Plymouth, March 2007
 CHAPTER ONE

Introduction and theoretical framework

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It is evident that the human species is highly intelligent and well adapted.
Some of our intelligence we clearly share with many other animals: we have
well-developed visual and other perceptual systems, complex motor skills and
the ability to learn in many ways to adapt to the environment around us. We
also seem to be smart in ways that other creatures are not: we have a language
system that is complex and sophisticated in its ability both to represent
knowledge and to communicate with other humans; we study and attempt to
understand a multitude of subjects including our own history and that of the
universe; we have devised systems of mathematics and logic; we design and
build a huge range of structures and artifacts; we have constructed and
mostly live our lives within highly complex economic and social structures.
All of these distinctively human things imply an extraordinary ability to
reason, entertain hypotheses and make decisions based upon complex mental
simulations of future possibilities. I will use the term “hypothetical thinking”
as a catch-all phrase for thought of this kind.
It is equally apparent that evidence of human error and fallibility surrounds
us. The world is plagued by wars, famines and diseases that in many cases
appear preventable. Stock markets collapse under panic selling when each
individual acts to bring about the outcome that none of them wants. Doctors
sometimes make disastrous misjudgements that result in the disability or
death of their patients. Experts often fail to agree with each other and may
be shown in hindsight to have made judgements that were both mistaken
and overconfident. At the present time, governments of the world are well

1
 2 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

informed about the likely progress of global warming and its consequences
but seem to be making minimal progress in doing anything to prevent it.
Criminal courts continue to convict the innocent and acquit the guilty, with
alarming regularity. And so on, and so forth.
It seems vital that psychologists should be able to provide understanding
of the mental processes of reasoning and judgements that underlie the
actions and decisions that people take. A fundamental premise of the current
book is that there are two distinct kinds of thought, which for the moment I
will call intuitive and deliberative. Many of our everyday decisions are made
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rapidly and intuitively because they just feel right. Others are made much
more slowly, involving conscious deliberative thinking. Sometimes we have no
time for deliberative thought and just have to react quickly to some situation.
In fact, the great bulk of our everyday cognitive processing is carried out
rapidly and implicitly without conscious thought. Such processes enable
us to accomplish a multitude of necessary tasks, as, for example, when we
recognize a face, extract the meaning from a sentence, keep our car safely on
the road when driving to work (and thinking consciously about something
quite different) or attend to the voice of one person in a room containing the
babble of many conversations.
Much of our judgement and decision making takes place at this level also.
A lot of our behaviour is habitual, so we are not conscious of choosing our
direction at a junction on a familiar drive to work. However, something very
different happens when we drive to a new location in an unfamiliar town,
following verbal directions or trying to read a map. Now we have to engage
conscious and deliberative thinking and reasoning to work out the route,
identify landmarks, turn at the correct places and so on. In general, novel
problems require much more deliberative thought than do familiar ones.
When we have to do this kind of thinking it takes time, it requires effort and it
prevents us from thinking about other things. Conscious, deliberative think-
ing is a singular resource that can only be applied to one task at a time. This is
one reason that we allocate this kind of thought to tasks and decisions that
have great importance for us and make snap intuitive decisions about less
important things. However, there is no guarantee that thinking about our
decisions will necessarily improve them (see Chapter 5).
Folk psychology – the common-sense beliefs that we all hold about our
own behaviour and that of our fellow human beings – involves the idea that
we are consciously in control of our own behaviour – we think, therefore we
do. The opinion polling industry, for example, is built on the common-sense
belief that people have conscious reasons for their actions which they can
accurately report. Psychological research, however, seriously undermines
this idea (Wilson, 2002). Not only is much of our behaviour unconsciously
controlled, but many of our introspections provide us with unreliable infor-
mation about the extent and the ways in which our conscious thinking controls
 1. INTRODUCTION AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 3

our actions. Working out the relative influence of intuitive and deliberative
thinking and the interaction between the two systems is a complex problem
that must be addressed with the methods of experimental psychology. This
enterprise lies at the heart of the current book.
Many of the phenomena to be discussed in this book are described as
cognitive biases. It may appear that the demonstration of bias implies evidence
for irrationality, and it is impossible to study these topics without taking some
view on whether and in what way people are rational. Cognitive psychology
as a whole studies the workings of the mind at a number of levels. Basic
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cognitive processes (still incredibly complex and sophisticated) form the

building blocks for our behaviour and thought. These include such functions
as pattern recognition, language comprehension, memory for events and
the acquisition of conceptual knowledge about the world around us. None
of these topics has generated debate about human rationality. Our visual
systems have limited acuity and our memory systems limited capacity, we
assume, because that is simply the way our brains are designed: the way they
were shaped by evolution to be. The study of higher cognitive processes, on
the other hand – thinking, reasoning, decision making and social cognition –
has been somewhat obsessed by the notions of bias, error and irrationality.
Author after author provide us with evidence of “bad” thinking: illogical
reasoning, inconsequential decision making, prejudice and stereotyping in
our view of people in the social world. The study of cognitive biases is
something of a major industry.
What exactly is a cognitive bias? One definition is that it is systematic (not
random) error of some kind. This then begs the question of what is an error.
Psychologists have largely answered the second question by reference to
normative systems. Thus reasoning is judged by formal logic; judgement
under uncertainty by probability theory; choice behaviour by formal decision
theory and so on. Some authors go further and claim that people who fail
to conform to such normative standards are irrational. Most of the biases
studied in cognitive psychology have been defined in this way, and yet this
notion is today highly controversial. Some authors claim that people’s
behaviour only appears biased or irrational because the wrong normative
theory is being applied. For example, if standard logic requires that proposi-
tions are clearly true or false, then people’s reasoning in an uncertain world
might better be assessed by norms based on probability theory (see Oaksford
& Chater, 2001).
In fact, we do not necessarily need to invoke normative rationality in order
to think about cognitive biases. We have much lower visual acuity than does a
bird of prey, but vision researchers do not accuse us of being biased against
distant objects. Similarly, memory researchers do not accuse us of irrational-
ity if we cannot remember a phone number more than seven or eight digits in
length. Researchers in this area rarely use the term “bias”, but their findings
 4 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

certainly indicate the constraints and limitations of human information pro-

cessing. So we could think about biases of thought and judgement also as
indicators of the design limitations of the brain. This is an approach that
emphasizes what is known as bounded rationality (Simon, 1982). According
to this view, we are not inherently irrational but we are cognitively con-
strained in the way we can reason about the world. For example, it may not be
possible to calculate the best choice of action in a given situation, so we settle
for one that is good enough.
Another concept of cognitive bias is dispositional: for example, people
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have different styles of thinking that may be related to personality or to

culture. A widely cited claim is that Western people have a more analytic style
of thinking, while Eastern people are more holistic or intuitive (Nisbett,
Peng, Choi, & Norenzayan, 2001). One style is not necessarily better than the
other, but each may fare better or worse on different kinds of task. Combin-
ing the dispositional and bounded rationality approaches, we might conclude
that people’s ability to think in particular ways is biased or constrained not
only biologically, in the design of our brains, but also culturally. Either or
both kinds of explanation might be induced, for example, to account for
biases in social cognition. For example, people seem compulsively to employ
stereotypes when thinking about people from an “out-group” with whom they
do not share social membership (Hinton, 2000). This could reflect some
innate form of social intelligence shaped by evolution, learning of cultural
norms passed from one generation to the next, or an interaction of the two.
As we shall see in this book, psychologists studying higher cognitive
processes have discovered and documented a wide range of biases. In most
cases, these biases have been defined as deviation from a normative standard,
leading to a debate about whether or not they should be termed irrational. I
have discussed the rationality issue in detail elsewhere (Evans & Over, 1996a),
and it will not be the main focus of interest in this book. (I will, however,
consider the issue in my final chapter.) The study of cognitive biases should
be seen as important for two reasons, whether or not they are deemed to
provide evidence of irrationality. First, they establish the phenomena that
have to be explained. Second, they may have practical implications for reas-
oning and decision making in the everyday world. Hence, each bias gives rise
both to a theoretical question: “Why do people think in this way?” and to a
practical question: “How will this bias manifest itself in real-world behaviour
and with what consequences?”
As an example, psychologists have accumulated much evidence that
people’s evaluation of logical arguments is biased by whether or not they
believe the conclusions given (Chapter 4). This is regarded as a bias because
logical validity depends only on whether a conclusion follows necessarily
from some assumptions and not on whether assumptions or conclusion are
actually true. I suppose one could try to move directly from this result to its
 1. INTRODUCTION AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 5

practical implications without any real theoretical analysis of the cause of the
bias. Such an analysis might, however, conclude that human reasoning is
automatically contextualized by prior knowledge and belief and that only a
strong effort of deliberative conscious reasoning will overcome this. In my
view, understanding of the likely practical implications of the bias is greatly
assisted by this kind of theorizing.
In this book, I shall be viewing the phenomena discussed within both a
broad and a more specific theoretical framework to be introduced later in this
chapter. The broad framework, generally known as “dual-process” theory, has
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been applied to a wide range of cognitive studies, including learning (Reber,

1993), reasoning (Evans & Over, 1996a; Stanovich, 1999), conceptual thinking
(Sloman, 1996), decision making (Kahneman & Frederick, 2002) and social
cognition (Chaiken & Trope, 1999). Dual-processing approaches assert the
existence of two kinds of mental processes corresponding broadly to the
idea of intuitive and deliberative thinking and to more general distinctions
between implicit and explicit cognitive processes, such as those involved in
learning and memory. Within this general framework, I will, however, present
a more specific dual-process theory of hypothetical thinking that updates and
extends my earlier heuristic–analytic theory of reasoning (Evans, 1989). In
support of this theory, I will discuss phenomena that are drawn mostly (but
not exclusively) from two separate but related literatures: the psychology of
reasoning on the one hand; and the study of judgement and decision making
on the other. Before presenting my general and specific theoretical framework,
I shall outline the nature of these two fields of study, including the methods
and theoretical approaches that have tended to dominate them.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF REASONING

I ought, perhaps, to start with the distinction between implicit and explicit
inference (see also Johnson-Laird, 1983). Any kind of inference involves
going beyond the information given and may technically be regarded as
deductive or inductive. Inductive inferences add new information, whereas
deductive inferences draw out only what was implicit in assumptions or
premises. Both deductive and inductive inferences may be either implicit or
explicit in terms of cognitive processing. I shall illustrate this with some
examples.
Pragmatic inferences are almost always involved in the comprehension of
linguistic statements (see Sperber & Wilson, 1995, for discussion of many
examples). Because they typically add information from prior knowledge
relevant to the context, they are generally inductive as well as implicit. As a
result, such inferences are plausible or probable but not logically sound and
may turn out to be incorrect. In accordance with the communicative principle
of relevance (Sperber & Wilson, 1995), every utterance conveys a guarantee
 6 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

of its own relevance, and this licenses many pragmatic inferences. Consider
the following dialogue between an adult son and his mother:

“I think I am going to be late for work”

“My car keys are in the usual place”
“Thanks, Mum”.

There will be a context behind this exchange that is mutually manifest to

both parties. For example, the son usually travels to work but his mother
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sometimes lets him borrow her car, which takes 15 minutes off the journey.
Hence, the first statement is interpreted as a request to borrow the car, and
the reply acquiescence to this request. Neither speaker has actually stated that
the car is to be borrowed, so the inferencing is clearly implicit. It is also hardly
deductive and can be incorrect. Suppose the dialogue actually went like this:

“I think I am going to be late for work”

“My car keys are in the usual place”
“I am going for a drink after work. Can’t you drop me off ?”

The son’s reply clearly signals that the mother’s original inference that he
wanted to borrow the car was wrong. This is cancelled by the reply with a
further implicit inference: the son wishes to drink and will therefore not drive
home afterwards. This kind of inferencing occurs all the time in everyday
dialogue, but it is not what the psychology of reasoning is (apparently) con-
cerned with, as we shall see shortly. Note that such implicit inferences can be
deductive in nature, as in:

“I can’t play golf this weekend; my sister is visiting”

“Surely, she can spare her brother for a few hours?”

By the conventions of relationships, it follows logically that if X (male) has a

sister Y, then X is the brother of Y. This inference is included in the riposte
above, but it is most unlikely that either party would have required any con-
scious reasoning to deduce it. Such inferences are also implicit or automatic
but cannot normally be cancelled, unless the premise on which they are based
is withdrawn.
What is described as the psychology of reasoning should really be known
as the psychology of explicit reasoning as it has, at least on the face of it,
nothing to do with these kinds of conversational inferences. Instead, psycho-
logists in this field have concentrated on giving participants in their experi-
ments verbal statements from which explicit conclusions need to be inferred.
Explicit reasoning tasks can in principle be deductive or inductive, but the
field has been generally dominated by the former, using what is known as the
 1. INTRODUCTION AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 7

“deduction paradigm” (Evans, 2002a). This method involves giving people

some premises, asking them to assume that they are true and then asking
them to decide whether some conclusions necessarily follow. This method
allows people’s reasoning to be assessed against the normative framework of
formal logic. For example, people might be presented with a syllogism that
has two premises and a conclusion, such as:

Some of the blue books are geography books 1.1

None of the large books are geography books
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Therefore, some of the blue books are not large.

The logical question to be asked is, does the conclusion of this argument
necessarily follow from its premises? To put it another way, if the premises of
the argument are true, must the conclusion be true as well, no matter what
else we assume about the state of the world? The above argument is valid in
this sense. The first premise establishes that there exists at least one blue
geography book. Since none of the large books are geography books there
exists at least one blue book that is not large. Hence, some (meaning at least
one) of the blue books are not large. Suppose, we reorder the terms of the
conclusion:

Some of the blue books are geography books 1.2

None of the large books are geography books
Therefore, some of the large books are not blue.

Now is Argument 1.2 still valid? The answer now is no. The conclusion would
be false if all of the large books are blue. Although there is at least one blue
geography book (that is not large), it is perfectly possible that all of the large
books are blue. The actual state of affairs, for example, might be:

10 small blue geography books

20 small red geography books
30 large blue history books.

Given this collection of books, both premises of both arguments hold: some
of the blue books are geography books, and none of the large books are
geography books. The conclusion of 1.1 also holds: some of the blue books
are not large. However, the conclusion of 1.2 is demonstrably fallacious
because all of the large books are blue. What this illustrates is the semantic
principle of validity: an argument is valid if there is no counterexample to
it. This principle is favoured by psychologists in the mental model tra-
dition (Johnson-Laird, 1983; Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 1991), who have built
a popular theory of human deductive reasoning around it.
 8 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

In contrast with conversational inferences, which are automatic and effort-

less (though not necessarily logically valid), explicit deductive reasoning tasks
of this kind are slow and difficult to solve for most people. In fact, psycho-
logical experiments on deductive reasoning show that many mistakes occur
with ordinary participants (Evans, Newstead, & Byrne, 1993). In particular,
people make many fallacies: that is, they declare arguments as valid when
their conclusions could be true given the premises, but do not need to be true.
Hence, many people would indicate if asked, that both 1.1 and 1.2 above
are valid arguments. Syllogistic reasoning is also known to be systematically
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biased by several factors as we will see later in this book.

How do ordinary people engage in deductive reasoning? For many years,
the psychology of reasoning was dominated by two apparently contrasting
theories. According to a tradition known as mental logic (Braine & O’Brien,
1998a; Rips, 1994) people have a logic built into their minds comprising a set
of inference rules. In the mental logic account of reasoning it is assumed that
the content of a particular reasoning problem is stripped out so that the
underlying abstract logical form is recovered. Reasoning then proceeds like a
proof in formal logic, by application of standard inferential rules or schemas.
Consider the following argument:

The car is either a Ford or a Mercedes 1.3

If the car was built in the USA then it is not a Mercedes
The car was built in the USA
Therefore, the car is a Ford.

It is quite easy to see that this is a valid argument, but how exactly do we do
this? According to the rule theory we first strip out the content, reducing it to
an abstract form:

1. Either A or B
2. If C then not B
3. C
Therefore, A.

Reasoning now proceeds as a mental proof, citing inference rules and the
assumptions they require:

4. Not B (Modus Ponens, 2, 3)

5. A (disjunction elimination, 1, 4).

According to the rule of Modus Ponens, if we know that “if p then q” and “p”
we can infer “q”. Substituting C for p, and not-B for q, we conclude not-B.
The other step requires this inferred statement to be combined with the first
 1. INTRODUCTION AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 9

premise: “Either A or B”. The rule of disjunction elimination states that if

one component of a disjunctive statement is false, then the other must be
true. This leads us to the conclusion A, which can be restated as “the car
is a Ford”. The theory requires both that people have such logical rules built
in to their minds and that they have a set of effective procedures for apply-
ing such rules to draw inferences (see Rips, 1994, for a full computational
implementation).
According to the rival mental model account, people do not use inference
rules. Rather, they construct what I will call (for reasons that will become
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apparent later) semantic mental models. Such models represent possible

situations in the world. Consider the first premise of 1.3:

The car is either a Ford or a Mercedes.

This disjunctive form is ambiguous as it sometimes is used in an inclusive

sense (both disjuncts are possible) and sometimes is exclusive. Context (which
can influence the construction of mental models) indicates here that the
disjunction is exclusive as cars have only one manufacturer. Hence, the
statement is represented by two models:

Ford
Mercedes

The second premise was:

If the car was built in the USA then it is not a Mercedes.

According to the model theory such conditionals are compatible with three
possibilities (a highly contentious assertion, as we shall see in Chapter 3):

Built in the USA not Mercedes

Not built in the USA Mercedes
Not built in the USA not Mercedes.

However, people represent only one model initially in a short-hand form:

Built in the USA not Mercedes

...

where “. . .” is a “mental footnote” that there are other possibilities in which the
antecedent is false. This makes Modus Ponens a trivial inference, as once it is
asserted that the car is built in the USA it is consistent only with the explicit
model in which it is not a Mercedes. This inference in turn eliminates the
 10 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

second model of the disjunctive premises, leaving only the model in which the
car is a Ford, hence supporting the conclusion as a valid argument.
The debate between mental logic and mental model theorists has been
difficult to resolve on the basis of empirical evidence, even though each side
has made strong claims (Evans & Over, 1996a, 1997). However, it is becoming
more and more apparent that the two camps share a common agenda – which
I term logicism – that is rejected by a number of contemporary researchers,
including myself. They assume that deduction is the primary mode of inference
and that both logical errors and the massive influence of pragmatic factors
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(as I shall refer to the effects of problem content and context) interfere with
this underlying deductive mechanism. Mental logicians, for example, faced
with a mass of evidence of nonlogical influences on deductive reasoning tasks
have argued that there is no singular mechanism of reasoning, and that
mental logic is supplemented by a whole range of mechanisms discussed by
other authors, including pragmatic implicature, pragmatic reasoning schemas
(both discussed in Chapter 4) and even mental models (Braine & O’Brien,
1998a). Johnson-Laird and his colleagues have from the start tried to build
in some principles to explain why reasoning is competent in principle but
defective in practice. For example, it is claimed that working memory limits
constrain the construction of the multiple mental models needed to avoid
fallacious inference, or that beliefs may bias the process of searching for
counterexample models (Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 1991).
Later in this chapter, a dual-process theory of hypothetical thinking will
be described that is applied to a range of cognitive tasks, including the
deduction paradigm. It will be argued that reasoning is by habit and default
pragmatic and not deductive and that only conscious reasoning effort induced
by special instructions can result in an effort at deduction. “Logicism” is
rejected both as a normative standard (the idea that people ought to be
reasoning logically) and as a descriptive approach (describing reasoning as
deductively competent in principle). This will also imply, as we shall see, a
non-normative definition of cognitive bias. If the brain is not designed as a
logical reasoning machine, then it cannot be regarded as malfunctioning
when reasoning does not conform to a logical standard. Before introducing
this framework, however, some introduction is needed to the other main
research paradigm with which this book is concerned.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF JUDGEMENT AND

DECISION MAKING
Decision making is of enormous theoretical interest and practical importance.
We actually make thousands of decisions every day in the sense that we (or,
at an automatic level, our brains) choose one course of action from among
alternatives. How many “decisions” in this sense are involved, say, in a
 1. INTRODUCTION AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 11

20-minute drive from home to work? Traffic and weather conditions are never
identical even in this most routine and boring of tasks. Most of these
decisions (shifting gears, adjusting steering, modifying speed by use of brakes
or accelerator) are automatic, but some may be conscious – for example,
deciding whether to stop at traffic lights that annoyingly start to change just
as we approach them.
Just as the psychology of reasoning has focused on formal and explicit
reasoning problems, rather than the huge number of automatic conver-
sational and pragmatic inferences that we make every day, so the academic
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study of decision making has tended to focus on formally defined decisions

of a particular kind. These decision problems tend to be explicit and well
defined. There is enormous interdisciplinary interest in economic, business
and governmental decision making. Psychologists working in this field have,
however, tended to focus on cognitive and social psychological accounts of
individuals engaged in decision processes (Hastie, 2001; Koehler & Harvey,
2004). Typically, psychological experiments in this area consist of presenting
people with hypothetical scenarios in which they are required to make choices
between proposed alternatives, often imagining themselves to be in a role or
situation described to them.
Like the psychology of reasoning, the psychology of decision making has
a normative theory and a rationality debate. The normative theory, originally
introduced from economics by Ward Edwards (1961), is that of expected util-
ity. Most real-world decisions (certainly most that psychologists are interested
in studying) are risky. They involve consideration of uncertain prospects.
The central normative principle of economic decision theory is that people
should estimate both the probability ( p) of various outcomes and the utility
(U, subjective value) to them. They should then calculate the expected utility
(EU ) of the n outcomes of a decision as follows:

EU = 冱 pU
i=1
i i 1.4

Finally, people should act so as to maximize expected utility – that is, choose
the action (or inaction) that has the greatest expected utility among the
choices present. This model of decision making assumes that people are
essentially selfish and that it is optimal to maximize the gain (or minimize the
loss) to yourself.
As with logic, it is apparently easy to demonstrate violations of normative
decision theory. Consider the case of buying a ticket for the national lottery
or buying insurance against your house burning down. From the viewpoint
of objective probabilities and monetary values each of these everyday activities
involves an expected loss. The lottery collects more in stakes than it gives out
 12 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

in prizes; similarly the insurance company collects more in premiums than it

pays out on losses. Their expected gain is an expected loss to the customer,
so why do people persist in these behaviours? Actually, there are many
explanations that can be given, showing just how weak the normative theory
of decision making really is (see Evans & Over, 1996a, chap. 2). For example,
we can argue that people buy lottery tickets because they overestimate the
chance of winning (subjective probability) or because their utility function
for money undervalues the stake relative to the winnings. Or it can be argued
that they have a utility for gambling based on its intrinsic pleasures and so on.
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Decision theory even allows us another decision rule (maximin) in which

we can prefer an option that has the better security level (least bad outcome).
Hence, we buy fire insurance to avoid the worst outcome of losing our house
even though it gives us an expected loss financially. Then there is the problem
of how far ahead we project the consequences of a decision. Is it rational for
a school leaver to choose a university course on the grounds of: (a) how much
she will enjoy the course, (b) the first job that it will enable her to get or (c) her
career and salary prospects in twenty years’ time? Each analysis could lead
to widely differing expected utility calculations. All of this means that estab-
lishing what constitutes a bias in decision making by reference to such an
elastic and subjective normative framework is far from easy.
From the viewpoint of hypothetical thinking theory, however, decision
making is very interesting. As already indicated, many decisions are made
automatically, perhaps in response to past learning. Consequential decision
making, however, requires hypothetical thinking about future events. We need
somehow to imagine the world (in relevant respects) as it might be following a
particular choice or action under our control and decide how much we
would like to be living in it. Moreover, we need to conduct a set of thought
experiments for each possible action and compare their evaluations. Alleged
biases in decision making will be discussed in Chapter 5.
An important aspect of the mental simulations required for decision
making is the assessment of probability and uncertainty, so much so that the
study of judgement under uncertainty has become a large psychological field
of study in its own right (Gilovich, Griffin, & Kahneman, 2002; Kahneman,
Slovic, & Tversky, 1982). The dominant paradigm has become known as
“heuristics and biases”, originally introduced by Amos Tversky and Danny
Kahneman (1974) over thirty years ago. In this case, the normative theory
that applies is probability theory, with deviations from its prescriptions being
regarded as biases. While biases are observed behaviours, heuristics are
theoretical constructs. Two of the most famous of these are representativeness
(Kahneman & Tversky, 1972; Teigen, 2004) and availability (Reber, 2004;
Tversky & Kahneman, 1973).
The availability heuristic applies when we try to estimate the likelihood or
frequency of some particular event. The claim is that we do this by calling to
 1. INTRODUCTION AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 13

mind examples of the event. The more easily we can generate such examples,
the more frequent we judge the event to be. While this seems reasonable, it
can easily be biased, for example by media coverage. Hence, tourists might be
deterred from visiting a city due to well-publicized acts of terrorism but not
by road traffic accidents, which are a much more probable cause of death and
injury that receive little media attention. The representativeness heuristic is
applied to judging the probability of a sample given a population or an event
given a hypothesis and is based on similarity. Given a thumbnail description of
John, for example, we might judge him likely to be an engineer if the descrip-
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tion fits our stereotype. However, this could lead to a bias if we ignored the
base rate frequency of engineers in the population we are considering.
Examples of biases in this literature will be discussed in Chapter 6.
There is another tradition within the psychology of judgement and deci-
sion making known as social judgement theory or SJT for short. This derives
from the psychology of Egon Brunswick who put great stress on the inter-
action between people and the environment (for a special journal issue on this
topic, see Doherty, 1996). Research in this area normally involves multicue
judgement when people have to make a single holistic judgement in response
to a number of potentially relevant cues. For example, a doctor making a
diagnostic judgement might have to take into account a number of pieces of
information such as patient symptoms, clinical interview, medical history,
demographic variables such as age, gender and occupation, results of diag-
nostic tests and so on. Of course, some of these cues may be more diagnostic
than others.
SJT uses a methodology known as the “lens model” (Cooksey, 1996) in
which multiple regression analysis is used to assess the relationship between
available cues to the criterion that is being judged on one side of the lens, and
the judgements made by individual people on the other side of the lens. This is
a clever technique about which I will have more to say later in the book. From
the viewpoint of research on biases, it is a powerful method since it allows us
to distinguish three different explanations of why people fail to make accurate
judgements about the world. It could be that the world lacks predictability or
that the judgements lack consistency. If neither of these things is true, but
judgements are still poor, then it must be the case that there is a mismatch
between the judge’s model and the “world’s” model. For example, if a person-
nel manager consistently prefers to select young males for positions in which
neither age nor gender are relevant to performance, this will reduce his
performance. Bias of this kind is easily detected with the methods of SJT.

DUAL-PROCESS THEORIES OF THINKING

The general framework for considering explanations of cognitive biases in this
book is that of dual-process or dual-system theories. As mentioned earlier,
 14 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

dual-process accounts are springing up everywhere in the study of cognition

these days. Within the psychology of reasoning, such accounts have a rela-
tively long history, dating from the 1970s (see Evans, 2004). The contempor-
ary dual-process theory of reasoning (Evans, 2003; Evans & Over, 1996a;
Klaczynski, 2000; Osman, 2005; Sloman, 1996; Stanovich, 1999) has been
influenced by dual-process accounts of learning (Berry & Dienes, 1993;
Dienes & Perner, 1999; Reber, 1993) and is currently subject to some
challenging arguments based on neural-imaging techniques (Goel, 2005).
Rather than detail the history of this theory or the precise variants sug-
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gested by different authors, I will describe here a generic version. Strictly

speaking there is a distinction between dual-process and dual-system theories.
Dual-process accounts simply emphasize the idea that two different kinds of
cognitive processing affect inferences and judgements. Thus in my earlier
heuristic–analytic theory (Evans, 1984, 1989) I suggested that we distinguish
between (a) heuristic processes that are preattentive and pragmatic and form
selective representations of problems, and (b) analytic reasoning processes
that are applied to such representations in order to generate inferences
or judgements. Other dual-process notions include the idea that there are
associative and rule-based processes in reasoning (Sloman, 1996) or that
we should distinguish between automatic and controlled processing, as is
popular in dual-process accounts of social judgement (see Chaiken & Trope,
1999; Hassin, Uleman, & Bargh, 2005).
Stronger versions of the theory propose that such attributes and others
reflect the presence of two distinct cognitive systems in the brain with sharply
differing evolutionary histories (Evans & Over, 1996a; Reber, 1993; Stanovich,
1999, 2004). These have been given various names, but for now I will use the
terms System 1 and System 2, following Stanovich (1999), corresponding with
the broad distinction between intuitive and deliberative thinking. According
to this view, System 1 is the older system with ancient origins, sharing many of
its features with other animals. Among the attributes identified for System 1
cognition are the following:

• Unconscious, automatic
• Rapid, computationally powerful, massively parallel
• Associative
• Pragmatic (contextualizing problems in the light of prior knowledge
and belief)
• Does not require the resources of central working memory
• Functioning not related to individual differences in general intelligence
• Low effort.

System 2, described as unique to humans (perhaps anatomically modern

humans, see below), has a number of contrasting attributes including:
 1. INTRODUCTION AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 15

• Linked with language and reflective consciousness

• Slow and sequential
• Linked to working memory and general intelligence
• Capable of abstract and hypothetical thinking
• Volitional or controlled – responsive to instructions and stated
intentions
• High effort.

If System 2 is indeed evolutionarily recent and unique to humans (a somewhat

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contentious claim) then it is interesting to consider when it may have evolved.

Evidence from cognitive archaeology identifies a qualitative change in human
thinking c. 60–50,000 years ago, a “big bang” of human culture that saw the
emergence of art, religious imagery and the ability rapidly to adapt the design
of artifacts, hunting methods and so on to changes in the environment
(Mithen, 1996). This seems to have given modern humans a big advantage
over early humans with their relatively “modular” minds and may explain why
we are the only hominids that survive to the present day. Was this the birth of
System 2? It certainly seems to have coincided with a period of major brain
development and the evolution of language. It is also difficult to see how
reflective consciousness – a central construct in the theory of System 2 –
could be possible without language.
Dual-system theories are coming under some pressure from neuropsy-
chological research, which shows, for example, that some cognitive biases
– normally attributed to System 1 – are associated with frontal brain areas,
indicating a modern human evolution (Goel & Dolan, 2003). I believe the
problem stems from treating System 1 as though it were a single system with a
single evolutionary history. This is almost certainly wrong. We know that
some forms of implicit cognition are indeed ancient and shared with other
animals, especially associative learning and conditioning. Pragmatic processes
on the other hand – which serve to contextualize problems with relevant
knowledge – require access to a human belief system, which unsurprisingly
resides in the modern areas of the human brain. Perhaps, as evolutionary
psychologists argue (Cosmides & Tooby, 1992; Pinker, 1997), there are also
domain-specific cognitive modules that evolved to perform specific kinds of
reasoning and continue to influence modern humans. According to Mithen
(1996) these would have evolved at some intermediate stage – much more
recent than the general learning system, but prior to the development of
modern flexible intelligence.
Interesting though these broader dual system issues are, the present book
is not the place to explore them. I will focus in this book on a revised version
of the heuristic–analytic theory (Evans, 2006b) that deliberately minimizes
reference to the controversial aspects of dual-system theories concerning
such matters as consciousness and evolution. (Links with other dual-process
 16 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

theories will be considered in Chapter 7.) Essentially it is a theory of

hypothetical thinking designed to give dual-processing accounts of the kinds
of reasoning and judgement tasks that have been studied by psychologists.
Such tasks always involve analytic thought processes to some degree (if
only to interpret and apply the experimental instructions) but are subject
to a variety of heuristic processes. It does not address the question of
whether there are multiple sources of implicit processes, but in practice the
heuristic processes I discuss will be largely pragmatic related to language,
context and relevant prior belief. In contrast with much previous writing
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by myself and others, I will show in this book that the source of cognitive
biases is not exclusive to heuristic processes but can arise from analytic
processing as well.

HYPOTHETICAL THINKING THEORY AND THE

REVISED HEURISTIC–ANALYTIC MODEL
In my 1989 book on biases, I used a rather simple form of dual-process
account in which I distinguished between heuristic and analytic processes
(corresponding to Systems 1 and 2 in more recent accounts). Heuristic
processes, according to this account, were essentially pragmatic and pre-
conscious, and they acted to form selective mental representations of the
problems presented to participants in a laboratory. This happened in two
ways: (a) by selective representation of problem features, and (b) by con-
textualization – that is, by retrieval and application of relevant prior know-
ledge from long-term memory. What was represented was what was perceived
as relevant. Analytic thought processes, assumed to be capable of abstract
hypothetical thinking and logic reasoning, were then applied to these selective
representations.
In this theory, cognitive biases were explained on the basis of heuristic
processes. It was argued that if logically relevant features were excluded at the
heuristic stage, or normatively irrelevant features included, then biases would
inevitably result, no matter how good the analytic reasoning. In this way,
people could be shown to understand a logical principle on one task and then
completely fail to apply it on another. It is important to understand that
although heuristic processes are associated with biases in this account, these
proposals did not fall within the mainstream “heuristics and biases” research
programme of Kahneman and Tversky. Their use of the term “heuristic” was
as a rule of thumb, a short cut that could often work in everyday life but also
lead to error. They did not specify at that time that heuristics operated
unconsciously or that they might compete with analytic reasoning applied to
the same task. It is only recently that Kahneman has brought the discussion
of heuristics and biases within the dual-process framework (Kahneman &
Frederick, 2002).
 1. INTRODUCTION AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 17

There is a potential confusion in using the adjective heuristic to describe

such processes in a somewhat different manner from the notion of a heur-
istic, as popularized by Kahneman and Tversky. However, many authors
interested in the dual-processing approach to reasoning seem to like the
heuristic–analytic terminology (for recent examples, see Ball, Lucas, Miles, &
Gale, 2003; Klaczynski, 2001; Kokis, MacPherson, Toplak, West, & Stanov-
ich, 2002; Roberts & Newton, 2002; Schroyens, Schaeken, Fias, & d’Ydewalle,
2000), and so it will be retained in the present book. The heuristic–analytic
theory to be used here, however, is considerably revised and extended from
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that of Evans (1989) and incorporates much of the new thinking about dual
processes that has developed since that work was written (see also Evans,
2006b). Although I believe that some cognitive biases can still be correctly
accounted for in terms of the earlier theory, it has too many limitations. Most
importantly, in the present book it is now proposed that both heuristic and
analytic processes are involved in the production of cognitive biases.
This book is concerned with hypothetical thinking – that is, thought that
requires imagination of possible states of the world. Examples include
hypothesis testing, forecasting, decision making, counterfactual thinking,
deductive reasoning and suppositional reasoning. By definition, hypothetical
thinking always involves a supposition or hypothesis of some kind (for
example, an action available to us as a choice) although the evaluation process
may be shallow or deep, the latter often involving a mental simulation (see
also Kahneman & Tversky, 1982b). The relevant literatures are discussed
within a theoretical framework that I shall call hypothetical thinking theory.
The theory comes in three parts: (a) a set of three principles that aim to
describe the general characteristics of hypothetical thought; (b) a proposal
that thinking involves manipulation of mental representations in the form of
epistemic mental models; and (c) a processing model that extends and revises
my earlier heuristic–analytic theory of reasoning. The three principles were
originally described by Evans, Over, and Handley (2003c), and the rest of
the theory that has been recently developed by Evans (2006b) will be further
elaborated in this book.
We start with consideration of the three principles – see Table 1.1. The
singularity principle claims that when we think hypothetically we consider
only one possibility or mental model at a time. This is due to the fact that
hypothetical thinking requires use of the analytic system (System 2), which is
sharply limited in working memory capacity and inherently sequential in
nature. This idea is not novel in itself as related ideas have been proposed by
other authors. For example, it has been argued that people can consider only
one hypothesis at a time (Mynatt, Doherty, & Dragan, 1993) and that people
focus on only one explicit option when engaged in decision making (Legrenzi,
Girotto, & Johnson-Laird, 1993). Note the qualifying phrase “at a time”.
People may of course consider more than one possibility but can only
 18 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

Table 1.1
The three principles of hypothetical thinking proposed by Evans
et al. (2003c)

The singularity principle People consider a single hypothetical possibility, or mental

model, at one time
The relevance principle People consider the model that is most relevant (generally the
most plausible or probable) in the current context
The satisficing principle Models are evaluated with reference to the current goals and
accepted if satisfactory
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Note: This table was previously published in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review (Evans, 2006b) and is
reproduced by permission of the Psychonomic Society.

evaluate or simulate them singly, needing to store results in memory for com-
parison. Due to its combination with the satisficing principle (see below),
people will rarely give full consideration to alternatives, however, and may
never process more than the first that comes to mind.
The relevance principle uses the term “relevance” in much the same way as
Evans (1989). It is not the famous (communicative) principle of relevance
advanced by Sperber and Wilson (1995) but more akin to their cognitive
principle of relevance. Basically, it asserts that mental models are generated by
heuristic or pragmatic processes that are designed to maximize relevance in a
particular context, given the current goals of the reasoner. By default, what is
most relevant is what is most probable or plausible but this default can easily
be reset. Thus when we consider a risky prospect we will normally focus first
on the most likely outcome. However, a good insurance salesperson can easily
get us to focus on an improbable but costly outcome such as our house burn-
ing down by setting a context and activating goals that ensure its relevance.
The satisficing principle is derived from the bounded rationality tradition
of Herb Simon (see, for example, Simon, 1982). Satisficing is a term that is
contrasted with optimizing: it is settling for what is good enough. What I
mean by it here is that the (single) mental model that we consider in our
hypothetical thinking is evaluated by the analytic system and is accepted
unless there is good reason to reject, modify or replace it. This evaluation may
be either casual or more effortful, involving active reasoning or mental simu-
lation. Only if the first hypothesis (possible action etc.) is considered unsatis-
factory will another be considered. True “rational” decision making, with full
deliberation of alternatives, requires a conscious effort to accept no single
model without consideration of others. This may sometimes occur in every-
day decision making, but is probably rare unless required by a formal operat-
ing procedure (see Klein, 1999). Much more common is a process by which
possibilities are considered in turn until one is found that satisfies.
We can imagine a relevance hierarchy of prospects that occur to us in a
 1. INTRODUCTION AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 19

particular order. For example, I take a day working at home. It occurs to me

first to work on the final draft of a journal article, but then I recall that I am
waiting for comments on the previous draft by one of my co-authors. The
prospect does not satisfy, so I (or my heuristic system) generate(s) another. I
then recall that there is a paper that I promised to review for a journal that is
well overdue and decide to work on this. Unfortunately, a search of my
briefcase reveals that I left the manuscript at work. I sit at my desk and notice
another paper that I was meaning to review poking out of the mess. So I work
on that one.
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Readers may wonder at my use of the term “mental model”. Is this some
variant of the famous theory of Johnson-Laird and colleagues? Not so, in
fact. As pointed out earlier, his models are largely described as semantic
devices. This means that they can only represent possible states of the world.
The term here refers to epistemic mental models that encode not just possi-
bilities but our beliefs about them and attitudes towards them. In decision
making, for example, when we consider a possible action we may construct a
mental model by mentally simulating the consequences of that action. Such a
model (if it is epistemic) can incorporate any relevant beliefs such as how
likely this consequence is to occur and how much we would like it if it
did. With this kind of representation we could use our analytic processes to
estimate its expected utility. The distinction between epistemic and semantic
mental models is at the core of our theory of conditional sentences and its
fundamental incompatibility with the model theory of Johnson-Laird and
Byrne (2002) – see Evans and Over (2004; Evans, Over, & Handley, 2005b)
and Chapter 3 of the present book.
Hypothetical thinking theory needs a processing model, and this is what
the revised heuristic–analytic theory provides (Figure 1.1). This revised theory
helps to resolve an apparent conflict between the original, sequential stage
model of Evans (1989) and a critical feature of dual-process research: heuristic
and analytic processes often seem to compete for control of our behaviour.
For example, when people assess the logical validity of syllogisms whose
conclusions conform to or conflict with prior belief, logic and belief bias set
up an apparent with-participant conflict, with sometimes one and sometimes
the other determining the judgement made (see Evans, Barston, & Pollard,
1983, and Chapter 4 of this book). How could this be if heuristic processes
precede analytic ones?
It would be a mistake to think of heuristic and analytic systems as
competitors of equal standing and a still worse mistake to think of them as
thinking styles under strategic control (as implied by some dual-process
theorists, such as Epstein, 1994). In the revised dual-processing model (Evans,
2006b) it is specifically proposed that heuristic processes set up default
responses that will occur unless the analytic system intervenes to alter
them. In common with the theory of Kahneman and Frederick (2002, see
 20 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING
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Figure 1.1 The revised heuristic–analytic theory.

Note: This figure was previously published in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review (Evans, 2006b)
and is reproduced by permission of the Psychonomic Society.

Chapter 5), however, these analytic processes are said always to have at least a
minimal involvement, if only to approve (perhaps without reflection) the
default response suggested by heuristically derived mental models. As an
example, consider belief bias, which is a tendency to accept or reject an argu-
ment on the basis of whether you agree with its conclusions (see Chapter 4).
Suppose that heuristic processes prompt the belief based response by default,
and that this will be given unless analytic reasoning overrides it. Under what
circumstances will the analytic system intervene and change this default?
The main factors (as much research to be reviewed in this book will indi-
cate) are shown in Figure 1.1. First, the use of strong deductive reasoning
instructions (assume the premises are true, draw necessary conclusions) will
increase logical responding and reduce belief bias as people are less satisfied
with the default, unreflective response. Second, people with high IQ or
working memory capacity may be more able to inhibit belief biases. Finally,
a requirement to respond very quickly (or when working memory is occupied
by another task) will increase belief bias and reduce the opportunity for
analytic system intervention. Note that these methods imply several of the
key constructs of System 2 thinking described earlier.
In terms of the three principles, what is happening here is that the heuristic
 1. INTRODUCTION AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 21

system is cueing as most relevant a model of the problem that favours prior
belief. Shallow processing by the analytic system will allow this to be converted
into a validity judgement that is belief based (belief bias). Under strong
deductive reasoning instructions, however, people of higher ability may reject
this model since with this motivation it does not satisfy. These instructions
motivate a deeper and more effortful evaluation of the default model. What
is generally thought of by dual-process theorists as no intervention of the
analytic system is strictly incorrect. The analytic system is always involved to
some degree in that the experimental tasks use verbal instructions. Some
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analytic processing of epistemic mental models is required to generate a

response that is appropriate to these instructions. What is normally meant by
analytic system intervention, however, is rejecting or revising the default
model generated by the heuristic system. Many examples of such heuristic–
analytic interactions will be discussed in this book.
The heuristic system operates in this revised theory in much the same way
as proposed in the original (Evans, 1984, 1989). Its function is to deliver
relevant content into consciousness on a continuous basis. What is relevant
depends upon the attentional characteristics of the problem presented, the
current goals that are being pursued and relevant prior knowledge evoked
by the context. The analytic system – or System 2 – has, however, functions
that go beyond what can be captured in the simple diagram of Figure 1.1. It
adds a capacity for strategic and abstract thinking that is not possible at the
heuristic level, and it has a major role in confabulation, rationalization and
self-deception that I will discuss in Chapter 7. It is sequential and constrained
by working memory capacity. It is not, however, a form of thinking that can
operate without the heuristic system. The locus of attention and the content
of analytic thinking are subject to continuous influence of rapid and parallel
processing within the heuristic system.
This revised framework allows for cognitive biases to operate in two main
ways. First, the heuristic system may bias reasoning through selective repre-
sentation and contextualization as argued by Evans (1989) and Stanovich
(1999). Second, however, singularity and satisficing principles imply that
biases will arise in analytic processing also. This is because essentially one
model is considered and accepted if there is no good reason to reject it. The
evaluation process may be inadequate due to low processing effort, low cogni-
tive capacity or lack of appropriate cognitive tools (see also Stanovich, 2004,
2006). The singularity principle also ensures that any kind of disjunctive
thinking will be difficult, where alternative possibilities need to be compared.
It will also interfere with deductive reasoning, as satisficing on a single model
of the premise of an argument can easily lead to acceptance of fallacies –
conclusions that are not logically necessary. I will illustrate in this book that
each of these cognitive constraints plays a significant part in generating what
are observed as cognitive biases on a wide range of tasks.
 22 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

Table 1.2
Fundamental biases of the heuristic and analytic systems

Fundamental heuristic bias People focus selectively on information that is

preconsciously cued as relevant
Fundamental analytic bias People maintain the current mental model with insufficient
evaluation and/or consideration of alternatives

Stanovich (1999) argues for a “fundamental computational bias” being

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the tendency to contextualize all problems in the light of prior knowledge

and belief. This will lead to cognitive biases, such as belief bias, when such
contextualization is irrelevant to a formal or abstract problem. I will refer
here instead to a more broadly defined fundamental heuristic bias (in System 1),
which is essentially that on which the Evans (1989) account was based.
The definition shown in Table 1.2 allows for influence of linguistic and atten-
tional factors, as well as contextualization effects. Essentially, we tend to
focus selectively on information that is preconsciously cued as “relevant” (rele-
vance principle). The second bias in System 2 I shall call the fundamental
analytic bias (see Table 1.2). This is the tendency to accept the current model
(hypothesis, possibility) as the basis of inference, decision or action without
either sufficient evaluation or consideration of alternatives (singularity and
satisficing principles).
Both of these are biases only in the sense of the disposition of our cognitive
systems to operate in particular ways, rather than in a pejorative sense
implying irrationality. Nevertheless, I will show in this book that these two
fundamental biases in the way our cognitive systems work account for very
many of the cognitive biases demonstrated in the literatures on reasoning and
judgement.

FORM OF THE BOOK

Chapters 2 to 6 of this book review a range of experimental evidence on
how people reason and make judgements and attempt to show in the pro-
cess how these provide evidence for the distinction between heuristic and
analytic processing and the three principles of hypothetical thinking described
above. The chapters are organized thematically and correspond roughly
(but by no means precisely) to distinct research traditions and their associ-
ated literatures. Chapter 2, for example, focuses on the issue of hypothesis
testing drawing on several research traditions. This chapter also introduces
the Wason selection task, which requires hypothesis testing but is tradition-
ally studied by researchers in the deductive reasoning area. Chapters 3 and 4
also draw heavily on the reasoning literature but are distinguished by their
focus on issues concerning suppositional thinking and mental simulation
 1. INTRODUCTION AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 23

(Chapter 3) and on the role of knowledge and belief in reasoning processes

(Chapter 4). Chapters 5 and 6 draw largely on the literatures on judgement
and decision making, including the rather separate tradition of work on
social judgement theory. Chapter 5 is focused primarily on decision making
and Chapter 6 on studies of how people think about statistical infor-
mation and make judgements under uncertainty. While best kept in pairs,
the ordering of these four chapters is somewhat arbitrary. Hence Chapters 5
and 6 could be read prior to 3 and 4 without loss of continuity. The final
chapter (7) is focused on several broader theoretical issues arising from
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these literatures and bearing closely upon the more general concerns of
dual-process theory.
Downloaded by [Felipe Orejuela] at 17:53 18 February 2015
 CHAPTER TWO

Hypothesis testing
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This book is concerned with hypothetical thinking, which involves the

imagination of possibilities and the simulation of their consequences. It is
evident that hypothesis-testing behaviour must be of direct relevance to this
enterprise. However, hypothesis-testing tasks differ from others considered
in this book (for example, decision making) in that evaluation of imagined
possibilities does not rest simply on the ability to simulate mentally their
characteristics and consequences, although this may be involved in generat-
ing predictions. Hypothesis testing also involves observation of and frequently
experimentation with the actual world, gathering evidence relevant to the
hypothesis under consideration. As a result, hypotheses may be supported or
refuted, and retained, revised or abandoned by the hypothesis tester. What
I will attempt to demonstrate in this chapter is that this interactive process
conforms with the same principles that describe other kinds of hypothetical
thinking. In particular, hypothesis-testing behaviour is subject to the funda-
mental analytic bias (Table 1.2) in that there is a tendency to consider just one
hypothesis at a time (singularity principle) and to retain it unless evidence is
discovered that provides a strong reason to give it up (satisficing principle).
The tasks that psychologists have used to study how people test hypo-
theses fall somewhat outside the two main research paradigms introduced in
Chapter 1, although they are closely related. While most research on human
reasoning has used the deduction paradigm, hypothesis testing is normally
associated with inductive reasoning tasks. Such tasks involve trying to dis-
cover a general rule or concept from specific forms of evidence. In contrast

25
 26 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

with deductive reasoning, inductive reasoning is not logically valid because

the conclusions add information to the premises. Thus inductive inferences
sometimes take the form of inductive generalizations, such as:

All the psychology books I have read are boring; therefore, all psychology
books are boring.

Clearly, the next psychology book you read (or hopefully this one) may not be
boring, so this inference can never be valid. What makes this particularly
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interesting is that a traditional view of science is that empirical observations

are undertaken in order to discover general scientific laws. How could this be
achieved? A solution might be an inductive generalization such as:

All electrons that have been observed carry a negative charge; therefore all
electrons carry a negative charge.

If science does consist of such inferences then it is logically unsound, hardly a

satisfactory state of affairs. This is known to philosophers of science as the
problem of induction (Howson & Urbach, 1993). I will come shortly to some
proposed solutions to this problem. Now, where does hypothesis testing come
in? Whether you are an empirical scientist working in cutting-edge research,
or a child trying to understand the world it is growing up in, or anyone
exposed to new and unfamiliar circumstances, you are likely to hypothesize.
Suppose, for example, that an American sports fan unfamiliar with the pre-
cise laws of cricket finds himself watching a cricket game on a holiday in
England. He knows that a batsman can be given out in various ways, one of
which is “leg before wicket” or LBW. This rule is there to prevent batsmen
blocking the ball from hitting the stumps (or wickets) with their legs or any
other part of the body. As he watches the game, the American fan sees the
fielding team appeal to the umpires in a number of cases where the ball strikes
the batsman’s body without appearing to hit his bat. Some are given out, but
many are not. Why? The actual rule is quite complex – see Figure 2.1.
With no one to explain the rules, he hypothesizes initially that if the
umpire judges that the ball will hit the stumps then he is given out. However,
it becomes clear that this is not always the case: in fact there are many
counterexamples in the game watched. After a while, he notices that appeals
are never successful if the ball pitches wide of the leg stump (the right-hand
side of the wickets as seen by the bowler for a right-handed batsman). He
decides this cannot be due to careless umpiring and there must be a rule,
so he refines his hypothesis: the batsman is LBW if the ball pitches in line
with the wickets and will hit them. This new hypothesis is confirmed by the
observation that on several occasions a batsman struck outside the line of
the off stump was also not given out. Content that he understands the rule
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Figure 2.1 The leg before wicket (LBW) law in cricket.

Note: The batsman defends three stumps (or wickets). The off stump for a right-handed batsman is to his left as viewed by the bowler and the leg stump to
his right. The reverse relationships hold for a left-handed batsman.
 28 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

he settles down to enjoy the game. Several hours later a batsman is struck by
a ball well outside the off stump, but which looks as though it will hit the
wickets. Much to his surprise, the umpire gives the batsman out.
What does our confused American sports fan now do? His repeatedly
confirmed LBW hypothesis is suddenly falsified. He may or may not observe
what was different in this particular case: the batsman stuck his leg in the way
of the ball without attempting to play a shot. The LBW rule is actually rather
more complex than it might at first appear. The thought process described in
this example is one of passive hypothesis testing. The observer here has no
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control over the events but nonetheless can observe and reason about them.
Forming a hypothesis that is then abandoned or revised when disconfirmed is
a pretty natural way of doing this. In fact, a tradition of study of concept
learning or concept identification in the psychological laboratory has shown
that with such passive tasks most people will form a particular hypothesis
and stick with it unless there is a reason to give it up (disconfirming evidence).
Then they will form a new hypothesis that they try to make consistent with
evidence that they have already encountered (Bruner, Goodnow, & Austin,
1956; Levine, 1966).
Note that the evidence from such passive rule-learning tasks is entirely
consistent with the principles of hypothetical thinking theory set out in
Chapter 1. According to the singularity principle, we generally consider one
mental model at a time, in this case representing a hypothesis. According to
the satisficing principle we will maintain this model unless it fails to satisfy.
Hence, maintaining the current hypothesis unless it is disproved is what we
would expect people to do from the viewpoint of this theory. It conforms also
with the general principle of bounded rationality. Constructing all possible
hypotheses and keeping them in mind simultaneously would exceed our com-
putational capacity. Proving a hypothesis to be true is a logical impossibility
as indicated earlier, so keeping it until there is good reason to change it seems
pretty sensible. Any hypothesis that avoids refutation for a long period of
time is likely to be at least a useful approximation of the truth for practical
purposes.
In this chapter, I will mostly consider tasks that involve active hypothesis
testing. In this case, the individual is in charge of the procedure by which evi-
dence is gathered. This is the type of task where confirmation bias (Klayman,
1995; Oswald & Grosjean, 2004; Wason, 1960) becomes an issue. To start
with a real-world example, consider the case of police investigating a criminal
offence. Where miscarriages of justice occur, or are believed to have occurred,
a common accusation is that the police identified a suspect, often early in the
investigation, and formed a strong belief that he or she was the perpetrator.
From that point on, it may be argued, they looked only for evidence that
could help to convict the suspect and ignored other lines of enquiry. This is
what confirmation bias is: bias in the way in which we go about gathering
 2. HYPOTHESIS TESTING 29

evidence to test a favoured – sometime referred to as focal – hypothesis. It is

distinct from biased evaluation of evidence, which is more akin to belief bias
(see Chapter 4).
Psychologists’ interest in active hypothesis testing and whether or not it
involves a confirmation bias has mostly been based on the implications for
the practice of science (Evans, 2002c). In the experimental sciences, including
psychology, scientists can design true experiments to test hypotheses of the
form: A causes B. Such experiments ideally involve controlled comparisons
of situations in which A is present or absent, with no other variables differing,
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and allowing observation of whether or not B occurs. The question is whether

or not their thinking about the design of such experiments is constrained
by belief in a focal hypothesis and a desire to prove it true. This concern
about confirmation bias in science arises from issues in the philosophy of
science, which requires some discussion prior to examination of the empirical
evidence.

POPPERIAN VERSUS BAYESIAN SOLUTIONS TO

THE PROBLEM OF INDUCTION
The philosopher Karl Popper (Popper, 1959, 1962) proposed a famous
solution to the problem of induction. The following argument is not logically
valid:

If the theory is correct then the predicted effect should occur 2.1
The predicted effect occurs
Therefore the theory is correct.

However, this argument is logically valid:

If the theory is correct then the predicted effect should occur 2.2
The predicted effect does not occur
Therefore the theory is incorrect.

In the study of conditional reasoning (Evans & Over, 2004), 2.1 has a form
known as Affirmation of the Consequent and is a fallacy: that is, the premises
can be true and the conclusion false. The theory might be wrong even though
it generates a correct prediction in some particular experiment. Example 2.2,
however, is a valid argument known as Modus Tollens. Hence, we cannot
logically confirm a theory but we can logically disconfirm or falsify it. On
this basis, essentially, Popper built his philosophy of science and his solution
to the problem of induction. The purpose of science is to falsify, not verify.
This philosophy prescribes consequences such as: (a) theories, if they are to
be called scientific, must be capable of falsification; they achieve this by
 30 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

assuming little and predicting much; and (b) scientists must devise ways of
testing their theory that maximize the possibility of falsification: for example,
they should make “risky predictions” that would not normally be made for
reasons other than holding the theory.
Popper’s falsificationism was unequivocally adopted as a normative stan-
dard by Peter Wason in his pioneering studies of human hypothesis testing
and reasoning (Wason, 1960, 1966; Wason & Johnson-Laird, 1972). Wason
was convinced by his own research that people have a confirmation bias (or
verification bias as he preferred to call it) and that they were consequently
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irrational. He wrote of this research on the 2 4 6 problem, described below,

that “the fixated, obsessional behaviour of some of the subjects would be
analogous to that of a person who is thinking within a closed system – a
system which defies refutation, e.g. existentialism and the majority of reli-
gions. These experiments demonstrate . . . how dogmatic thinking and the
refusal to entertain the possibility of alternatives can easily result in error”
(Wason, 1968, p. 174). Popperian philosophy continues to be popular among
psychologists and other experimental scientists, with the widespread notion
that falsification is the correct strategy of science.
In fact, as is the case with many of the biases to be discussed in this book,
confirmation bias is set relative to a highly questionable normative standard.
The logical argument (2.2) on which Popper’s philosophy is based is fraught
with difficulty (Howson & Urbach, 1993). Two major problems are those of
probability and evidence. Let us return to the concept of experimentation in a
statistical science such as psychology. We do indeed set up experiments to test
hypotheses of the form A causes B, by checking for B under conditions where
A is present and absent. However, we could not paraphrase the major premise
2.2 in the following way:

If the theory is correct, then we should observe B in the presence 2.3

of A and not in the absence of A.

The reason is simply that ours is statistical science and that our notion of
causation is probabilistic, as are most contemporary normative accounts of
causality (Pearl, 2000; Sloman, 2005). Our statistical methodology means
that we are really testing claims of the following form:

If the theory is correct, then the probability of B will be greater in 2.4

the presence of A than in the absence of A.

Statistical significance testing, itself a highly dubious methodology (Evans,

2005; Gigerenzer & Murray, 1987), is designed to deal with this kind of
question. We confirm our hypotheses in psychology by showing statistically
significant differences between measures taken under experimental and con-
 2. HYPOTHESIS TESTING 31

trol conditions. So do many other sciences. Statistical evaluations are used,

for example, to test the effectiveness of medical interventions – new drugs or
other kinds of treatments – in controlling diseases and symptoms. But what
constitutes confirmation or disconfirmation in such a case? For example, if
the predicted effect is not statistically significant then the theory is not con-
firmed, but it can hardly be argued that it is logically falsified as Popperianism
requires. The effect may have been present but insufficient statistical power
was available to detect it.
This brings us to the problem of evidence. Logical falsification of a
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hypothesis requires that the evidence is certain. A theory can be assumed

true for the sake of a logical argument (that might disprove it) but can the
evidence of a failed prediction be accorded the same epistemic status? How
can evidence be certain when errors are possible in the conceptual design
of experiments, in the recording and transcription of data, in the computer
software that is used for data analysis? All of these have nonzero prob-
abilities in addition to other less likely possibilities, such as dishonest experi-
menters faking their data. Theoretical physicists, for example, are not in the
habit of revising their theories in the light of inconsistent experimental
findings, until those findings have been thoroughly checked for possible
experimental error (Feynman, 1985). The same has been shown for molecular
biologists in a study I will describe later (Fugelsang, Stein, Green, & Dunbar,
2004).
Poletiek (2001) has demonstrated some paradoxical aspects of Popperian
theory that seem to undermine the notion of confirmation bias. As men-
tioned earlier, Popper claimed that scientists should test risky predictions:
formally these are predictions whose probability given the hypothesis plus
background beliefs is much higher than those given background beliefs alone.
In other words, the hypothesis must substantially raise the probability of the
event. Formally, the severity of the test is given by the ratio:

P(x | H + b)
2.5
P(x | b)

where H is the focal hypothesis, b background beliefs, and x the predicted

observation. When the prediction is unlikely to occur for reasons other than
the hypothesis, Popper argued that this made the test more severe, more open
to falsification. What is paradoxical about this, as Poletiek (2001, chap. 1)
demonstrates is that exactly the same kind of test maximizes relevance from
the viewpoint of confirmation. In other words, a disconfirmatory attitude, as
recommended by Popper, leads to the same kind of testing behaviour as a
confirmatory attitude!
The reason for this can be seen intuitively. Consider the case of Einstein’s
 32 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

general theory of relativity. Some of the predictions made were very severe
in Popper’s sense: for example, rays of light should bend in the region of
the sun’s massive gravitational field, and atomic clocks should run faster
at the north pole than at the equator. What background beliefs, held without
the theory, would lead to such predictions? However, the eventual confirm-
ation of these predictions strongly increased belief in the theory: the findings
were seen as very strong confirmatory evidence precisely because there was no
other basis for making these predictions. But if a confirmatory attitude can
produce severe tests, is there any such thing as a confirmation bias?
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Popper held the classical objectivist theory of probability, which can only
represent relative frequencies and is hence inapplicable to events that do not
form part of frequency distributions. This includes scientific theories and
hypotheses, which therefore cannot be assigned a probability. In his view,
positive results could only “corroborate” and not confirm a theory – that is,
their probability was not raised by such results, as it was meaningless to
talk of a probability in this sense. This view stands in stark contrast to the
Bayesian approach, which has been developed from a theory of subjective
probability and belief revision into a full-blown philosophy of science (How-
son & Urbach, 1993). To a Bayesian, probability – while conforming to the
mathematics of the probability calculus – is subjective. A probability is a degree
of belief – no more, no less. Hence, probability can be assigned to any object
of belief, including a scientific hypothesis or theory.
The Bayesian method prescribes that belief change is a gradual process.
We hold a degree of belief in some hypothesis that is subject to revision
when new evidence is encountered. The posterior belief we have – that is,
what we believe after viewing the evidence – is a multiplicative function of our
prior belief in the hypothesis and the diagnosticity of the evidence. Evidence
(D) is diagnostic to the extent that it distinguishes the focal hypothesis from
alternatives. In the “odds” form of Bayes theorem, in which two alternative
hypothesis H1 and H2 are compared, the formula can be written as:

P(H1/D) P(H1) P(D/H1)

= × . 2.6
P(H2/D) P(H2) P(D/H2)

This formula can be read verbally as

Posterior odds = Prior odds × Likelihood ratio.

The mathematics of Bayesian revision are simple. The extent to which you
believe in a hypothesis after viewing some evidence will depend both on your
degree of prior belief in it and on the strength (or diagnosticity) of the evidence.
The likelihood ratio expresses the probability of the evidence given the one
 2. HYPOTHESIS TESTING 33

hypothesis to its probability given the other. This is also known as the
diagnosticity of the evidence. Note that in the case where H1 and H2 exhaust
the possibilities – that is, when H1 is some specific hypothesis and H2 is any
alternative to it – the diagnosticity of the test becomes equivalent to Popper’s
severity measure (2.5). Thus a good test of a hypothesis is the same from a
confirmatory, disconfirmatory or Bayesian perspective!
What is very different in the Bayesian philosophy of science is that belief
in theories can be raised or lowered in a gradual manner as evidence is
encountered for and against them. This idea naturally maps on to the notion
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that people represent hypotheses in epistemic mental models that include the
current degree of belief in them. Naturally, when this belief falls below a
satisfactory level, the analytic system will reject the hypotheses, and another
will be generated. Because Bayesian theory is intrinsically probabilistic,
rather than logical, it does not fall prey to the problems for the Popperian
approach mentioned earlier. The probabilistic nature of data in many sci-
ences creates no difficulties. Bayesian revision can also be extended quite
naturally to deal with the probability of evidence, rather than treating it as
certain. The Bayesian philosophy does not require scientists to display either
a confirmatory or disconfirmatory attitude – it merely recommends the use of
diagnostic hypothesis testing. In my view, it also provides a much more cred-
ible descriptive model for how scientists – and for that matter ordinary people
– behave when testing hypotheses and revising theoretical beliefs.
What do real scientists do when they encounter disconfirmation? A recent
study by Fugelsang et al. (2004) involved observation of a number of research
groups in the field of molecular biology. Of 417 original experiments covered
by the study more than half (223) failed to conform to theoretical expecta-
tions! However, in only 31 per cent of these cases did the scientists concerned
blame the theory; in other cases they questioned the experimentation. Sub-
sequently, 154 new experiments were designed to follow up these discrepant
results, with improved methodology. The majority of these (84) replicated the
unexpected finding. In the majority of these cases (58 per cent), the scientists
questioned their theoretical assumptions, although a substantial minority did
not. This extensive and thorough study is of great interest. It shows first that
experimental evidence is uncertain in the minds of the scientists, even in a
relatively hard science. They clearly are not behaving like Popperians as they
mostly hold on to their theory in the light of single disconfirmation. They are
also more likely to give up their theory when a second disconfirmation is
observed. The tendency to hold on to hypotheses is consistent with the fun-
damental analytic bias but that is not to say that they are wrong to behave as
they do. Theories and hypotheses are expensive in time and effort to develop,
and experiments can be flawed and misleading. Thus, while the less charitable
view of these findings is that the scientists are bad Popperians, I prefer the
interpretation that they are behaving like good Bayesians.
 34 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

WASON’S 2 4 6 PROBLEM
One of the main reasons that confirmation bias became an issue in the
psychology of reasoning was the results of a simple and elegant experiment
presented by Wason (1960). Participants were told that the experimenter had
a rule in mind which classifies sets of three integers (whole numbers). I will
refer to such groups of three numbers as “triples” in this discussion. In the
original form of the task, subjects were told that the triple “2 4 6” conformed
to the rule. They were then asked to try to discover the rule by generating
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triples of their own. For each triple, the experimenter told the participant
whether or not it conformed to his rule. They were required to keep a written
record of their triples, the experimenter’s responses and their current hypoth-
eses about the rule. They were also told not to announce the rule until they
were sure of its correctness. If they announced a wrong rule then they were
told so and were asked to continue testing triples.
The example “2 4 6” was deliberately chosen by Wason to suggest a specific
sort of rule to the subject such as “Ascending with equal intervals”, whereas
the actual rule held by the experimenter was “Any ascending sequence”.
Participants found the task surprisingly difficult. The majority announced at
least one incorrect hypothesis, and a substantial minority failed to solve it at
all. What created particular interest in this task, however, was the pattern
of hypothesis-testing behaviour that emerged. In general, participants tested
their hypotheses by generating only positive examples, with the consequence
that they failed to receive disconfirming evidence. If, for example, they held
the hypothesis that the rule was “Ascending with equal intervals” and tested
triples such as 10 12 14, 10 20 30, 1 2 3, and 100 500 900, the experimenter
would, of course, in each case respond that the triple conformed to his
rule. Participants thus received consistent evidence for their hypothesis,
became convinced of its correctness and were very puzzled when told that
it was wrong. What they generally did not do was to test examples such as
100 200 500 that did not conform to the hypothesis. Such negative predictions
could lead to falsification of the hypothesis since the experimenter would still
say that they conformed to his rule.
On the basis of this experiment, Wason claimed that people have a verifi-
cation or confirmation bias. In other words, contrary to Popperian dogma,
they were attempting to find evidence that could confirm rather than falsify
their current hypothesis. This claim was subject to immediate criticism by
Wetherick (1962) on very good grounds but with little impact at the time.
Based on both the 2 4 6 task and early findings on his other famous problem,
the selection task (Wason, 1966), Wason spread the view that people were bad
Popperians in possession of an irrational and damaging confirmation bias
(Wason & Johnson-Laird, 1972). While the verification bias account of the
selection task was effectively challenged soon after (Evans & Lynch, 1973),
 2. HYPOTHESIS TESTING 35

support for Wason’s view of the 2 4 6 problem was built in a series of replica-
tion studies reviewed by Evans (1989). Only after the criticisms published by
Klayman and Ha (1987) and Evans (1989) did psychologists seriously ques-
tion Wason’s original conclusions. Recent reviewers now generally agree that
it is very hard to interpret the 2 4 6 tasks and related experimental problems
as indicating any intentional attitude of confirmation on the part of the
participants (Oswald & Grosjean, 2004; Poletiek, 2001).
There is no question that participants on the 2 4 6 task are demonstrating
confirmatory behaviour, in the sense that they hold on to an incorrect
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hypothesis in the light of repeated confirmations. What is at issue is whether

they are trying to confirm their hypotheses. What they clearly are doing is
repeatedly testing positive cases of their hypotheses and rarely generating
negative tests. The difficulty for Wason’s argument is that both positive and
negative testing can lead – in principle – to either confirming or disconfirm-
ing results. Suppose a pharmaceutical company devises an experimental
drug X. It is similar to one tested and discarded earlier – an effective appe-
tite depressant – that was discovered in clinical trials to have the unfortunate
side effect of raising blood pressure. This time the researchers are confident
that the new drug will work without side effects, but they need clinical
trials to prove this. They have thus devised both a positive and a negative
hypothesis:

A. Drug X will suppress appetite

B. Drug X will not raise blood pressure

In the research, they follow both a positive test strategy for Hypothesis A and
a negative strategy for Hypothesis B. But, of course, each hypothesis may be
confirmed or disconfirmed by the results as follows:

Hypothesis A
Predict suppression of appetite Appetite suppressed
(positive confirmation)
Appetite not suppressed
(positive disconfirmation)
Hypothesis B
Predict blood pressure not raised No rise in blood pressure
(negative confirmation)
Rise in blood pressure
(negative disconfirmation)

Wason’s participants made only positive predictions (what should happen

if their hypothesis was true) and not negative predictions (what should not
happen if their hypothesis was true). Thus in principle they were open to
 36 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

positive confirmation or disconfirmation. What Wetherick (1962) was the

first to point out was that the fact that they could not receive positive
disconfirmation was, in effect, a trick of the experiment. Because they were
induced to adopt a hypothesis that was more specific than the actual rule (in
fact a subset of it), any positive test of their hypothesis would always conform
to the experimenter’s rule. However, does this mean that positive testing
would normally lead to confirmation in science and other real-world settings?
The general view is that this is not the case and that there is good reason
to think that a positive test strategy would normally be effective (Klayman
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& Ha, 1987). My example above also shows that where negative testing is
pragmatically cued as relevant (in this case concerns about side effects on
similar drugs) it should quite naturally be adopted.
In view of the earlier general discussion, it is of interest to see whether
inducing a falsificationist attitude in participants, by use of experimental
instructions, actually changes the hypothesis-testing behaviour. Results of
relevant studies are somewhat equivocal depending mostly on the tasks used,
which are in some cases the 2 4 6 problem and in others minor or major
variants on Wason’s original task (Gorman & Gorman, 1984; Gorman,
Stafford, & Gorman, 1987; Mynatt, Doherty, & Tweney, 1977, 1978; Poletiek,
1996; Tweney et al., 1980). In general, simply exhorting people to falsify their
hypotheses has not been very successful. However, it has been claimed both to
modify expectations of falsification without improving performance (Tweney
et al., 1980) and conversely to induce more negative testing on the 2 4 6
problem, but without any greater expectation among the participants that
these would lead to a falsifying outcome (Poletiek, 1996, Exp. 1). In a variant
on the 2 4 6 problem (using number triples but different rules and more
example triples) Poletiek (1996, Exp. 2) found that the main determinant of
falsifications being obtained was whether or not the correct hypothesis was
guessed initially, rather than an attitude of falsification.
A recent study by Spellman, Lopez, and Smith (1999) did succeed in
inducing negative testing, albeit with substantially modified methodology.
They did this by cueing participants to think of the task as either generaliz-
ing or restricting a hypothesis. Here is an example (p. 76) of two of their
problems:

Suppose you know for a fact that:

The ordered triad of numbers 2–4–6 conforms to an unknown rule about
number triads called alpha.
What triad would you examine to test whether or not:
(All condition) All triads ascending by two conform to the alpha rule
(Only condition) Only triads ascending by two conform to the alpha rule

Choose one of the following triads (circle to answer)

 2. HYPOTHESIS TESTING 37

(a) 8–10–12 (positive test – similar triad)

(b) 9–11–13 (positive test – dissimilar triad)
(c) 1–2–3 (negative test).

In the “all” condition, only 10 per cent of participants chose the negative test
option, but in the “only” condition this rose dramatically to 68 per cent (data
from their Experiment 1). This finding was generalized to different content
and replicated in a second experiment. This suggests that participants under
standard instructions assume by default that they are to try to generalize the
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hypothesis rather than restrict it. I will return to this study shortly.
What do all these findings imply for hypothetical thinking theory? As
pointed out earlier, the fact that people stick with a hypothesis until it is
disconfirmed is entirely to be expected. Testing multiple hypotheses is not
consistent with the singularity principle. However, positive testing bias, if I
can call it that, needs to be accounted for. Is it a bias in the heuristic or
analytic system? The arguments of Evans (1989) imply the former, a general
positivity bias that is also manifest as a “matching bias” on other reasoning
tasks (see next section). On the other hand the description of the effect as a
positive test strategy (Klayman & Ha, 1987) might suggest a role for the
analytic thinking system. I personally reserve the term “strategy” for con-
scious, volitional processes that involve the analytic system, although I have
noticed that not all other authors do the same (see the collection of essays
edited by Schaeken, DeVooght, Vandierendonck, & d’Ydewalle, 2000).
In principle, we are capable of following conscious hypothesis-testing
strategies; otherwise we would not bother teaching research methods to our
students. However, I think it is very likely that the positive testing bias
observed in Wason’s 2 4 6 problem and related tasks is a heuristic relevance
effect. We tend to form singular mental models filled with relevant content,
which by default is what is most plausible or probable. So once we have
simulated a possibility it will be natural to model the consequences that are
likely to follow. We would not normally think about what will not be the case,
as that would involve simulating a different possibility. Thus the production
of positive tests to the exclusion of negative ones is a manifestation of the
fundamental heuristic bias. However, the confirmatory behaviour that is
observed on the 2 4 6 and related tasks is also a function of the fundamental
analytic bias. That is to say, having generated positive tests that are repeat-
edly confirmed (given the task structure), people will develop strong belief
in the focal hypothesis and fail to consider alternatives to it. The reason
that this should not be considered an intentional-level confirmation bias is
simply that people are not generating positive tests in order to confirm their
hypotheses.
In general, our analytic thinking system will naturally focus on the (heuri-
stically delivered) positive consequences of hypotheses and construct tests
 38 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

around them. A natural exception to this, however, arises when we wish

to deny a presupposition. In the case of the drug research example, the possi-
bility of a side effect increasing blood pressure would come to mind as this
had been associated with research on a related drug. Hence, there is a specific
reason to test that this will not be the case with the new drug. We should also
recall that the analytic system is responsive to verbal instructions and not
always satisfied by default mental models. In the study of Spellman et al.
(1999), described above, the use of the quantifiers “all” and “only” introduce
significant changes to the logic of the task. In fact, neither correspond to
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Wason’s original task in which people had to discover what the experi-
menter’s rule was. The “all” rule can only be falsified by a positive test now. The
hypothesis “All triads ascending by two conform to the alpha rule” is not
the same as the hypothesis “The alpha rule is all triads ascending by two”,
although it may be that people are pragmatically cued to think about the
standard task as though they were equivalent. The “only rule”: “Only triads
ascending by two conform to the alpha rule” can similarly only be falsified by
the negative test. It is not surprising that university students are able to
distinguish the logic of these two problems. The presentation of a negative
test item for evaluation (as opposed to the standard request to generate all
items) probably helps as well.
From a dual-process point of view, the protocols published by Wason
are extremely interesting. Consider the following, from Wason (1960, rule
announcements shown in italics):

No. 4. Female, aged 19, 1st year undergraduate

8 10 12: two added each time; 14 16 18: even numbers in order of
magnitude; 20 22 24: same reason; 1 3 5: two added to preceding number.
The rule is that by starting with any number two is added each time to form
the next number.
2 6 10: middle number is the arithmetic mean of the other two; 1 50 99:
same reason.
The rule is that the middle number is the arithmetic mean of the other two.
3 10 17: same number, seven, added each time; 0 3 6: three added each time.
The rule is that the difference between two numbers next to each other is the
same.
12 8 4: the same number subtracted each time to form the next number.
The rule is adding a number, always the same one, to form the next number.
1 4 9: any three numbers in order of magnitude.
The rule is any three numbers in order of magnitude.
(17 minutes)

What is remarkable about this case (far from unique, according to Wason)
is that the middle three rules announced are logically exactly the same,
 2. HYPOTHESIS TESTING 39

just formulated in different words. This participant (in common with others)
becomes fixated on a hypothesis that is repeatedly confirmed and never
falsified by the tests made. As we might expect from the viewpoint of the
Bayesian model, this induces strong belief in the hypothesis. This is then
contradicted by verbal instruction as the experimenter tells her that the rule
she has announced is wrong. As we shall see in Chapter 3, when experience-
based belief conflicts with verbal instructions, belief often dominates people’s
inferences. A major role of the analytic system seems also to be that of
rationalization and confabulation (see Chapter 7). The repeated verbalization
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of the same hypothesis seems to be a dramatic example of this.

THE WASON SELECTION TASK

Wason (1966) presented a new reasoning problem that has since become
one of the most investigated tasks in the history of research into human
reasoning (for a recent review, see Evans & Over, 2004, chap. 5). It is the main
task used in the psychology of reasoning that falls outside the strict definition
of the deduction paradigm as given in Chapter 1, although it tends to be
investigated by researchers within the deductive reasoning tradition. The
task is deceptively simple, for in its standard form the great majority of
participants fail to give the correct solution to it. In a typical version of the
task the participant will be told that the problem concerns cards that have
capital letters on one side and single-figure numbers on the other. Sometimes
they are given a pack of such cards to inspect. Originally, they were shown
four cards lying on a table whose exposed sides showed two letters and two
numbers. Most recent research has used a representation of this situation
presented either on a sheet of paper or on a computer screen. A typical
version is shown in Figure 2.2.
The problem is to decide which cards would logically need to be turned
over in order to find out whether the stated rule “If there is an A on one side
of the card then there is a 3 on the other side of the card” is true or false. The
great majority of participants tested say either that the A card would be
sufficient or else that the A and the 3 need to be turned over (Evans et al.,
1993; Wason & Johnson-Laird, 1972). It is generally agreed (but see Oaksford
& Chater, 1994) that one should turn over the A and the 7 or else all four
cards if the statement is interpreted as a biconditional. Like the 2 4 6 prob-
lem, the four-card selection task requires people to seek evidence actively
rather than simply to evaluate it. The task differs in that the hypothesis to
be tested (the rule) is supplied by the experimenter. The participants can,
however, choose to examine evidence that could confirm or disconfirm the
rule according to the cards that they specify for turning over. Let us consider
each of the cards in turn:
 40 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING
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Figure 2.2 A standard abstract version of the Wason selection task.

1. The A card. If this were turned over there could be either a number
that is a 3 or a number that is not a 3 on the back. The former would
be consistent with the rule but the latter would clearly violate the rule
– that is, show it to be false.
2. The D card. The rule does not specify any condition about letters that
are not As so whatever number is discovered on the back could not
disprove the rule.
3. The 3 card. The 3 could have a letter that is an A or that is not an A on
the back. Either would be consistent with the rule since it is required
only that As have 3s on the back and not vice versa.
4. The 7 card. If this were turned over and there were not an A on the
back it would be consistent with the rule. However, if an A were found
on the back the card would have an A on one side and a number that is
not a 3 on the other, thus violating the rule.

In order to solve this task one needs apparently to appreciate only: (a) that
the rule would be false if an A were paired with a number other than 3; and
(b) that it is logically necessary to turn over any card that could reveal such
a falsifying condition. On this basis clearly the A and the 7 must be chosen
while the D and the 3 should not, since whatever they have on the other
side cannot disprove the rule. In more general terms, for a statement of the
 2. HYPOTHESIS TESTING 41

form “if p then q”, the common erroneous choices are p alone or p and q,
and the correct response is the p and not-q cards, actually made by about
10–20 per cent of university students in typical experiments.
Why is the selection task so difficult? One explanation that we should
dismiss straight away is that it is due to ambiguity of the conditional state-
ment. Although the conditional states that an A must have a 3 on the back,
the participant might well read it to mean that a 3 must also have an A on the
back. In this case they would be reading the statements as an equivalence or
biconditional. Would that not justify the selection of A and 3? The answer is
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no. If the rule is taken to read both ways then the correct solution is to choose
all four cards, which people rarely do. The A and 7 must be chosen for the
reasons already given. Since it is now assumed that a 3 must have an A on
the back, then one must choose 3 and D as well since either could lead to the
falsifying combination of a 3 on one side without an A on the other.
Another explanation that is sometimes proposed is that it shows a failure
of Modus Tollens reasoning – that is, that people do not understand that a
card without a 3 on one side must not have an A on the other. However, if we
present an argument like this:

If there is an A on one side of the card, then there is a 3 on the other side
of the card; there is not a 3 on the other side; what follows?

Most people (around 60–70 per cent in typical experiments) will say that
there is not an A on the card. Competence in Modus Tollens reasoning
appears much higher than the ability to pick out the 7 (not-3) card on this
task. However, an explanation for this discrepancy has emerged in recent
research, which I will describe below.
Wason’s (1966) original explanation was that participants were exhibiting
a verification or confirmation bias. Together with the 2 4 6 problem, this
was the main foundation for the claim of a general confirmation bias in
human reasoning (Wason & Johnson-Laird, 1972). As with the 2 4 6 problem
it was assumed that people were motivated to find confirming evidence and
therefore only looked at the cards that had A and 3 that could lead to the
confirming combination of A3. Also as with the 2 4 6 problem, we have
good reason to doubt that this explanation is correct. The main reason was
discovery in 1973 of an effect called matching bias (Evans, 1998; Evans &
Lynch, 1973), which we now consider in some detail.

Matching bias and the heuristic–analytic account of

the selection task
Matching bias is a tendency to focus on (or perceive as relevant) cases that
match the lexical content in the conditional statement. The effect can be
 42 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

demonstrated by using the negations paradigm, in which negated components

are introduced into either component of the conditional statement. As
an example, consider the variant on the standard abstract task shown in
Figure 2.3. Apart from the actual letters and numbers used it differs from the
version in Figure 2.2 by the addition of a negative consequent, so that the
rule to be tested is: “If there is a G on one side of the card, then there is NOT
a 4 on the other side of the card.” For this rule, the matching choice is G and 4,
but, because of the addition of the negation, this is now also the logically
correct choice. This version is strongly facilitatory, as a majority of partici-
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pants give the correct (and matching answer) – a finding first shown by Evans
and Lynch (1973) and replicated many times since (see Evans, 1998).
By varying the presence of negations in both antecedent and consequent
parts of the rule, it is possible to determine the impact of both the logical and
the matching status of each card independently. If we define cards on the task
by their logical status as follows:

True Antecedent (TA)

False Antecedent (FA)
True Consequent (TC)
False Consequent (FC)

Figure 2.3 A variant on the standard abstract version of the Wason selection task with a
negated consequent.
 2. HYPOTHESIS TESTING 43

then we can see that on the standard affirmative rule these correspond to
p, not-p, q and not-q: the matching cases are also the true cases. The nega-
tions paradigm allows us to separate these out with the result shown in
Figure 2.4. Note first that for all four logical choices, TA, FA, TC and FC,
cards are chosen more often if they match than if they mismatch. Second,
it can be seen that there is no verification bias, because, with matching
controlled, TC and FC cards are chosen with roughly equal frequency.
Third, with matching controlled, there is still a strong preference for TA over
FA selections.
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The dual-process account of the selection task (Evans, 1995; Evans &
Over, 2004) proposes that on the standard abstract selection task described
here, card choices are dominated by heuristic processes. It is not that analytic
reasoning is not engaged, it is just that it (mostly) accepts the default selection
of cards that are cued by heuristic processes. There seem to be two attentional
heuristics that influence the perceived relevance of cards on the selection
task: the if- and matching-heuristics (Evans, 1998). These account for the
two trends that are evident in Figure 2.4. The if-heuristic, which we now link
to our suppositional theory of conditionals (see Evans & Over, 2004, and
Chapter 3), makes cases where the antecedent is true appear much more
relevant than those where it is false. This seems to combine in additive fashion
with the matching-heuristic, which cues matching over mismatching cards.

Figure 2.4 Frequency of card selections on the selection task in four experiments employing the
negations paradigm (from Evans et al., 1993).
 44 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

How can we relate this analysis to the hypothetical thinking theory?

First, it indicates that attention is probably restricted to the cards cued as
relevant by the if- and matching-heuristics, an example of the fundamental
heuristic bias. Second, it implies that cards that are considered are generally
chosen and not rejected by the analytic system, a manifestation of the
fundamental analytic bias. It will be recalled that analytic system failures
occur due to lack of appropriate motivation or cognitive resources, which
cause people to be satisfied when they should not be. One reason that the
selection task appears so much more difficult than most reasoning tasks
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studied in the literature is that analytic intervention either does not occur or
is ineffective. (I will argue below that the latter explanation is correct.) If
asked to point the mouse at cards they are “thinking of choosing”, people
spend very little time considering cards that they will not end up selecting
(Evans, 1996), confirming the importance of preconscious attentional cue-
ing on the selection task. Although this methodology has been criticized
(Roberts, 1998), all of the predictions of Evans (1996) have been confirmed
in a recent study using the improved method of eye-movement tracking
(Ball et al., 2003). So that leaves us with two further questions: (a) why
do people focus attention on matching cards; and (b) why does analytic
reasoning fail to reject cards selected by the heuristic system? I will answer
each in turn.
The cause of matching bias, in my view, is linked directly to the problem of
implicit negation. Let us return to an issue discussed earlier, the discrepancy
between rates of selection of the not-q card and rates of Modus Tollens
inference in studies of conditional reasoning. A critical difference is that
selection task research has traditionally used implicit negation while con-
ditional inference research has used explicit negation. Thus Modus Tollens is
normally presented like this:

If there is an A then there is a 3 2.7

There is not a 3
Therefore, there is not an A.

In this case the negation of 3 is explicitly not 3. But in the selection task
example discussed earlier the negation of 3 is 7. People have to process the
instruction that cards always have a letter on one side and a number on
the other in order to infer that if a 7 is visible that card cannot have an
A. Now what happens if we change the normal practice and use implicit
negation in the conditional inference task, or explicit negation in the selection
task? Happily, the relevant experiments have been run and the results are
decisive. We can slightly amend the wording of the conditional inference
task to produce implicit negation versions of inference such as Modus
Tollens:
 2. HYPOTHESIS TESTING 45

If the letter is an A then the number is a 3

The number is 7 (Implicit negation condition)
The number is not 3 (Explicit negation condition)
Therefore, the letter is not an A.

The results of experiments on this are very clear (Evans & Handley, 1999;
Schroyens, Schaeken, Verschueren, & d’Ydewalle, 1999). When the minor
premise of a conditional argument depends upon the processing of an
implicit negation for its logical effect, there is a large and significant drop in
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rates of endorsement of the inference concerned. In effect, we have matching

bias on the inference task once implicit negations are used. Conversely, we
can introduce explicit negations into the selection task (Evans, Clibbens, &
Rood, 1996a). The cards can bear descriptions of a letter–number pair, rather
than the letters and numbers directly. In this case the four cards can read:

Implicit negation condition

The letter A The letter D The number 3 The number 7

Explicit negation condition

The letter A A letter that is The number 3 A number
not A that is not 3

When this is done, matching bias disappears completely in the explicit nega-
tion condition (Evans et al., 1996a). However, logical performance does not
improve! When matching bias is released, so that all cards are seen as equally
relevant, people simply select more cards of all kinds, regardless of logical
status. In spite of this strong evidence that matching bias reflects difficulty
with implicit negation, however, there is a rival account of the phenom-
enon (Oaksford, 2002). Oaksford’s account (first presented by Oaksford &
Stenning, 1992) is based on the idea that negated propositions generally refer
to contrast classes (what the proposition is not) that are very much bigger
than the class of objects referred to by an affirmative proposition and hence
much less informative. Recently, Yama (2001; see also a discussion of this paper
by Evans, 2002b) designed experiments to separate these two accounts of
matching bias and found evidence supportive of both. The debate continues,
but will not detain us any further here.
Whatever the exact cause of the effect, it does seem clear that participants’
attention becomes focused on the matching cards and on the true antecedent
cards. The if-heuristic reflects the fact that conditional statements appear
only relevant to situations where their antecedents hold in line with what is
called the “defective truth table” (see Chapter 3 for discussion of this and the
suppositional theory of conditionals). However, this does not explain why
analytic reasoning seems to have so little effect on the selection task and
 46 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

contrasts with the general finding in the deductive reasoning literature that
logical reasoning competes quite strongly with biases (see Chapters 3 and 4).
The key to understanding this is to realize that analytic reasoning is not the
same thing as logical reasoning. It is a conscious and deliberative attempt to
reason according to the instructions, but in the case of the abstract selection
task, only those of very high cognitive ability have the key insight that allows
them to find the logically correct solution (Stanovich & West, 1998). Others
simply end up rationalizing choice of the cards that appear relevant, just as
Wason and Evans (1975) proposed many years ago.
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The standard instructions on the task ask people to choose cards that help
to decide whether the rule is true or false. We know from verbal protocol
evidence that participants do in fact reason about the hidden sides of cards
before making their selections (Evans, 1995; Lucas & Ball, 2005) and that
selected cards are considered for some time before being chosen (Ball et al.,
2003; Evans, 1996). Most people will, however, happily justify their card
choices in terms of either verification or falsification (Wason & Evans, 1975).
With the exception of participants of very high cognitive ability, people
simply do not appreciate the asymmetry between the two concepts: namely
that statements can be proved false but not proved true. And why should
they, if they are not students of logic? If anything, the standard instructions
suggest that the rule could be proved true as well as false. Finally, even though
analytic reasoning does not normally inhibit card choices on the selection
task there is evidence that it can do so. Feeney and Handley (2000; Handley,
Feeney, & Harper, 2002) have found a manipulation that suppresses q card
choices that can only be plausibly explained in terms of analytic reasoning
(see Evans & Over, 2004, p. 79).
There has been extensive discussion of the selection task as a hypothesis-
testing or decision-making task in the literature, which is beyond the scope of
the present volume to consider in any detail (Evans & Over, 1996a; Kirby,
1994; Nickerson, 1996; Oaksford & Chater, 1994; Over & Manktelow, 1993;
Poletiek, 2001). Some of these discussions relate to forms of the selection task
that involve realistic content, which will be considered later in the book
(Chapter 4). In such cases, people may be considered to be choosing cards in
order to maximize expected utility. With abstract forms of the selection task,
however, any such analysis can be framed only in terms of what people could
expect to learn, the expected information gain (Oaksford & Chater, 1994) or
“epistemic utility” (Evans & Over, 1996b) of card choices. Some analyses also
assume effectively that the conditional statement applies more generally than
to the four cards presented (Nickerson, 1996; Oaksford & Chater, 1994) in
spite of the standard instruction introduced by Wason to explicitly restrict the
scope of the rule. In my mind, it is allowable to assume that people’s responses
are insensitive to such instructional details, provided that the account given is
in terms of default heuristics rather than explicit analytic reasoning processes.
 2. HYPOTHESIS TESTING 47

CONCLUSIONS
This chapter has introduced the topic of hypothesis testing – a key type of
hypothetical thinking. The major cognitive bias that is claimed in this area is
that of “confirmation bias”, the tendency to seek evidence to support rather
than refute one’s current hypothesis. However, we have seen that the norma-
tive system that originally inspired talk of such a bias – Popperian philosophy
of science – is questionable for a number of reasons. For example, it relies on
a form of logical argument that makes it inapplicable to any science dealing
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in uncertainty and probability, and it also assumes the certainty of evidence.

Moreover, a falsificationist attitude will not in general lead to search for a
different kind of evidence than will an approach based upon confirmation or
Bayesian principles. Evidence from studies of real scientists suggests that
they do not behave like Popperians: when experimental results conflict with
theoretical expectations, scientists first question and check the methodology
before revising or abandoning theory.
The principles of hypothetical thinking introduced in Chapter 1 support
some aspects of the notion of confirmation bias. For example, we would
expect people to consider one hypothesis at a time and maintain it until
evidence against it is encountered. However, there is nothing in this theory
that implies the attitude of confirmation implied by Wason and other writers
in this area. The claim, especially based on Wason’s famous 2 4 6 problem,
that people are trying to confirm their hypotheses is one that no recent
reviewer of this field has been able to support in the light of the evidence.
Even in social psychological studies where people may have strong emotional
commitment to a favoured hypothesis, confirmatory behaviour seems to
occur only when the cost of maintaining a false belief is low (Oswald &
Grosjean, 2004).
All in all, I see no reason to change my earlier assessment (Evans, 1989)
that any bias observed in hypothesis-testing behaviour is cognitive rather
than motivational. In general, people will test positive predictions but if
such predictions fail then they will abandon or revise the hypotheses on
which they are based. It is questionable whether positive testing should be
viewed as “bias” at all from a normative standpoint, even though it will fail
to solve Wason’s particular task. From the viewpoint of the hypothetical
thinking theory it is a natural consequence of the relevance principle. When
we mentally simulate a possibility, we naturally fill out our mental model with
plausible content: what is likely to be the case if the supposition holds. This
leads to positive expectations of what should occur and the formulation of
positive predictions.
In this chapter, I have also introduced the Wason selection task, originally
claimed also by Wason to show evidence of confirmation bias. I have discussed
only the abstract form of the selection task here and will return to realistic
 48 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

versions later. This task is mostly of interest for the cognitive bias that it does
reliably demonstrate – matching bias. With abstract conditional statements,
people have a strong tendency to focus on the named lexical items, regardless
of the presence of negations. This powerful pragmatic influence of negation
is generally restricted to tasks lacking any realistic materials that evoke real-
world beliefs (Evans, 1998) and illustrates that the relevance principle in the
revised heuristic–analytic account can operate linguistically as well as through
the belief system. Figure 2.2 clearly shows that, in the case of the abstract
selection task, it is not the true consequent cases but the matching consequent
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cases that appear relevant to participants. Thus people represent what is

relevant rather than what is true. The preference for plausible or probable
cases is only a default that can be overridden – in this case by matching bias.
I will have more to say about hypothesis testing in this book, especially in
relation to the “pseudodiagnosticity” effect (Doherty, Mynatt, Tweney, &
Schiavo, 1979) reviewed in Chapter 6, which has also been claimed as
evidence of confirmation bias. Apart from the collection of evidence, all
that really distinguish hypothesis testing from other kinds of hypothetical
thinking are the goals pursued by the analytic system. In decision making,
for example, we simulate the relevant consequences of some action, and in
hypothesis testing we model the likely consequences of some hypothesis. In
both cases epistemic mental models are formed, filled with relevant content
generating plausible consequences. If the explicit goal is decision making,
then the analytic system evaluates the expected utility of the outcome; if
hypothesis testing, then the analytic system derives a relevant prediction. If
it is a reasoning task, in which we are asked whether a conclusion follows
from some premises, then we attempt to build a mental model linking prem-
ises to conclusion in some plausible arrangement. And so on. I will attempt
to show throughout this book that broadly the same principles of thinking
underlie all these tasks and can account for most of the cognitive biases that
are claimed to be associated with them.
 CHAPTER THREE

Suppositional reasoning: if and or

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Hypothetical thinking involves the imagination of possibilities and, according

to the theory advanced here, typically consists of singular mental simulations.
In this chapter, I will focus on the thinking in which a person introduces a
temporary belief or supposition as the foundation of such a mental simu-
lation. Such suppositional reasoning is most often stimulated in natural
language exchanges by conditional statements (or conditionals for short) that
have the form “if p then q”. For example, a statement such as “if you want
to impress the boss you should arrive early in the mornings” is intended to
make the listener reflect upon their behaviour and consider the benefits (and
costs) of changing it. Such conditional thinking based on a single supposition
is very natural, according to hypothetical thinking theory. Much more dif-
ficult are tasks requiring more than one simulation based upon different
suppositions as some use of the disjunctive form “p or q” require. Hence,
psychological studies of reasoning with both “if” and “or” will be examined in
this chapter.
Conditional thinking, in a basic form, is perhaps not unique to human
beings. In studies of discrimination learning, for example, pigeons can learn
to peck at red keys but not green ones if only red keys lead to the reinforcement
of a food pellet. There is no reason, however, to suppose the language-less
pigeon could formulate a thought equivalent to “if the key is red then pecking
will produce food”. The ancient learning system is still part of our System 1
cognition, and so we can also acquire automatic and implicit conditional
responses. For example, even though we have explicit knowledge that we need

49
 50 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

to stop at red traffic lights and not green ones, this is almost certainly encoded
at an implicit level as well, so that we will react to traffic lights even if our
conscious thought and attention are elsewhere.
What I think must be unique to human (System 2) cognition is the ability
to think and reason in a suppositional manner. Humans have explicit know-
ledge organized in a belief system, which is distinct from knowledge acquired
implicitly through associative learning and conditioning. The latter may
be encoded simply as weightings in neural networks, while the former have
some sort of propositional format. Explicit knowledge is not the tiny amount
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that we are aware of at a given time, but that which can potentially reach
awareness. In the heuristic–analytic theory, a major function of rapid and
automatic heuristic processes is to retrieve relevant knowledge and belief
and deliver it for conscious analytic processing. What makes this process
particularly complex is the role of supposition.
On the face of it, all reasoning about our beliefs involves supposition. For
example, following the 2004 US Presidential election, one might have asked
an American friend: “Now that Bush has been elected, what chance is there
that the US budget deficit will be reduced?” At this point, Bush has been
elected so no supposition of possibilities is apparently required. Had one
asked him, prior to the elections, “If Bush is elected, what chance is there that
the US budget deficit will be reduced?” he would have had to introduce the
supposition that Bush was elected to add to other relevant beliefs in order
to answer my question. However, a complex process of reasoning about his
existing beliefs may be required for our American friend to give a reply even
to the question asked after the result is known. He would still need to
run mental simulations of possible events (calculating, for example, whether
Bush is likely to increase taxes or reduce expenditure) that would themselves
introduce suppositions. In fact, any act of hypothetical thinking will need
to do so.
Suppositional thinking and reasoning is a fairly extraordinary facility
that human beings have developed. However, the scope for cognitive biases
to enter into such thinking is apparent. Mental simulations will almost
certainly be selective in their nature and subject to heuristics that will prune
out many branches (Kahneman & Tversky, 1982b). From a dual-process
standpoint, suppositional reasoning requires the involvement of the explicit
analytic system (System 2) as it is essential that we know that we are simulat-
ing a hypothetical possibility so as not to confuse it with reality (Evans &
Over, 1999). However, this system is highly constrained by working memory
capacity and subject to both satisficing and the singularity principles. Thus
we will try to construct a single mental simulation of the given supposition
that is good enough for our purposes. For example, it is well known that
people tend to fall into the “planning fallacy” when imagining complex projects
(Bueler, Griffin, & Ross, 2002) in which they chronically underestimate
 3. SUPPOSITIONAL REASONING 51

the time that a future task will take to complete, despite their experience
of previous projects. This seems to be due to the use of idealized mental
simulations that fail to anticipate the many problems that can impede progress
with a task.
As indicated above, two little words in our everyday language, “if ” and
“or”, are critically linked to suppositional reasoning. As we shall see, in
standard logic, “if ” and “or” can be used to express equivalent logical
relationships but I believe that this shows the failure of standard logic to
capture the everyday meaning of these terms. “If ” is the primary linguistic
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device that we use as speakers to try to engage our listeners in acts of hypo-
thetical thinking. Like “if ”, “or” can be used in various ways, but generally
conveys to listeners that they need to consider alternative possibilities, often
requiring them to perform not one but two mental simulations. Both “if ” and
“or” are associated with cognitive biases, as we shall see.

THE MEANING OF “IF”

Psychologists studying human reasoning have for far too long based their
normative theory of reasoning on the kind of standard formal logic to be
found in elementary textbooks. In the case of conditional reasoning, they
have looked for the meaning of “if” in what is called the propositional calcu-
lus. Propositional logic, as its names implies, deals in propositions, atomic
statements that must always be true or false: a principle known as bivalence. It
has been the unfortunate habit of the authors of textbooks on standard logic
to associate the ordinary English statement of the form “if p then q” with an
operator known as material implication, often written as “p ⊃ q” or “p → q”.
A conditional that is interpreted in this way may be termed the material
conditional. It has exactly the same meaning as “not p or q”. This is because
the material conditional is false only when we have the state of the world
“p and not-q” and is otherwise true. This also is the only state of affairs that
the assertion “not p or q” rules out.
Consider the following example:

If the cat is happy then she purrs. 3.1

If this statement is a material conditional, then it means exactly the same as:

Either the cat is not happy or she purrs. 3.2

Truth table analysis, a technique used in propositional logic, assigns a truth

value for each logical case. In standard logic, with two propositions p and q
there are four logical possibilities to consider in which each proposition is
either true (T) or false (F), as follows:
 52 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

TT (pq) Cat is happy; cat purrs

TF (p¬q) Cat is happy; cat does not purr
FT (¬pq) Cat is not happy; cat purrs
FF (¬p¬q) Cat is not happy; cat does not purr.

In the case of 3.1, if this is a material conditional, then the only false case
(TF) is when we have a happy cat that does not purr. In all other situations, the
material conditional is deemed to be true. Now consider the disjunctive
statement 3.2. This is true if either or both its disjuncts are true – that is, when
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the cat is not happy and does not purr (FF), when she is happy and does purr
(TT); or when she is not happy and purrs (FT) – and is only false when neither
disjunct is true: the cat is happy and does not purr (TF). In other words, the
truth tables for 3.1 and 3.2 are identical. Hence, in standard propositional
logic 3.1 and 3.2 mean the same thing and support the same inferences.
The material conditional supports some paradoxical inferences that have
led most contemporary philosophers to reject it as a representation of the
ordinary conditional of everyday language (Bennett, 2003; Edgington, 1995).
Because “if p then q” means the same thing as “either not p or q”, it must be
true whenever we know “not-p” or “q” to be true. As applied to our example,
the paradoxes are:

P1 The cat is not happy, therefore if the cat is happy then she purrs.
P2 The cat purrs, therefore if the cat is happy then she purrs.

If these inferences seem odd, consider another example. It would follow as

a valid inference from your belief that it is not raining today, that “if it
is raining today then it is sunny”. The same conditional could be inferred
from your belief that today is sunny. Such inferences are evidently absurd.
This leads to an alternative view that the ordinary conditional of everyday
language is not the material conditional, so that “if p then q” does not mean
the same as “either not p or q”. The view that I favour is that the conditional is
suppositional (Edgington, 2003; Evans & Over, 2004). In order for us to intro-
duce an ordinary (suppositional) conditional into our belief system, we need
to believe that there is some plausible link between p and q and that q is at
least a probable consequence of supposing p. Conditionals are naturally
introduced as result of hypothetical thinking. Hence, a school-leaver choos-
ing a university after researching the options might say, “If I go to university
X then the course is better. However, if I go to university Y the night-life
will be better.” Such conditionals may, of course, be used to support decision
making.
The suppositional conditional is based on what philosophers call the
Ramsey test (Ramsey, 1931). Ramsey suggested that in order to decide whether
or not you believe a conditional statement you can add p hypothetically to
 3. SUPPOSITIONAL REASONING 53

your stock of beliefs and then evaluate q. Instead of introducing our own
conditionals by an act of hypothetical thinking, we may assess those that are
asserted to us in similar fashion. Thus a driver given some advice such as: “if
you take this detour, then you will avoid most of the traffic lights and arrive
earlier” might well perform a mental simulation based on her knowledge of
the city to decide whether the advice is good. Perhaps she decides that while
the suggested route has fewer traffic lights it also encounters a bottle-neck
and hence she rejects the advice. What has happened here is that the ante-
cedent (p) has been assumed for the sake of the thought experiment, and the
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likelihood of the consequent (q) assessed by mental simulation. In effect, the

listener believes the conditional statement to the extent that she ends up
believing the consequent (arriving earlier) given the antecedent (taking the
detour). For this reason, the Ramsey test naturally suggests that belief in a
conditional statement, if p then q, will be equal to the conditional prob-
ability, P(q|p).
There is, however, a difficulty with Ramsey’s suggestion that this is done
simply by adding p temporarily to one’s stock of beliefs. The problem arises
in the case of past-tense counterfactual conditionals referring to events that
are no longer possible. Suppose someone said to the driver, “If you had taken
this detour then you would have arrived earlier”. How does she now evaluate
the conditional? If she simply adds the belief that she took the detour (when
she did not) then she will have a contradiction. This is a very bad thing for a
logician, as you can infer anything at all from a contradiction! To deal with
such cases, Stalnaker (1968) proposed an extended form of the Ramsey test in
which people add the supposition of the antecedent while the least possible
change is made to their belief systems to accommodate it. In the example
given this may be quite straightforward but with other counterfactuals the
need to change beliefs to accommodate a supposition might be much more
complex. For example, to evaluate the conditional, “if terrorists had not
attacked New York, the USA would not have invaded Iraq” requires mental
undoing of the belief that the world-changing 9/11 attacks occurred and all
that followed from it.
While the Ramsey test is in essence a psychological hypothesis, the psycho-
logical nature of it has not been developed by philosophers (but see Evans &
Over, 2004). It should be apparent that it can be viewed as an application of
hypothetical thinking which in this case involves a mental simulation whose
purpose is to test the connection between p and q. For example, we might
suppose that establishing belief in a conditional could occur in one of two
ways: (a) retrieval of a belief in the link between p and q from memory; or
(b) mental simulation of the q possibility under the supposition of p. In the
case of happy cats purring most people have relevant beliefs already stored in
their memory. However, more novel conditionals such as “if Queen Elizabeth
dies than Prince Charles will become King” (Over, Hadjichristidis, Evans,
 54 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

Handley, & Sloman, in press) would require an active mental simulation or

thought experiment in order to establish the likelihood of p leading to q. A
person reflecting on this conditional will know that under the rules of succes-
sion, Charles – as heir to the throne – will succeed. However, as the question
is posed, they will also consider possible ways in which this might not come
about, the most likely of which is that Charles dies before Elizabeth. This
is relatively unlikely, however, so participants are likely to assign a high (but
not certain) subjective probability to this conditional. Such a belief relation
can be represented in an epistemic mental model of the conditional of the
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following form:

Queen Elizabeth dies → .95 Prince Charles becomes King.

Note that the → symbol here represents a conditional belief relation (s) and
not, of course, material implication. The .95 indicates a very high degree of
subjective belief in this case, where 1 would represent certainty.
The notion that the ordinary conditional is suppositional is supported in
the writings of advocates of the mental logic approach to reasoning (Braine
& O’Brien, 1991; Rips & Marcus, 1977). However, there is much in both the
broad approach and the fine detail of these theories with which my colleagues
and I disagree (see Evans & Over, 2004). For example, we do not agree that
different mental processes underlie logically valid and fallacious inferences.
Nor do we believe that people have an inherent set of logical inference rules
built in. However, our theory has brought us into direct conflict with authors
of the mental model theory of conditionals (Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 2002)
as addressed in some of our recent publications (Evans & Over, 2004; Evans
et al., 2005b).
There is insufficient space here to re-run our debate with mental model
theorists in any detail, However, the essence of the issue can be indicated.
Johnson-Laird and Byrne (2002) argue that the core meaning of a conditional
is that it “allows” three possibilities: pq (TT), ¬pq (FT) and ¬p¬q (FF). These
are the same as those for “either not p or q”, which immediately suggests that
their conditional is material. However, if their argument is simply that these
cases are compatible with the conditional statement, then this is a very weak
claim that follows from the suppositional as well as the material conditional
(and indeed all major theories of conditionals, as discussed by Edgington,
1995). Consider again:

If the cat is happy then she purrs. (3.1)

All theories of the conditional agree that the only state of affairs that contra-
dicts 3.1 is a happy cat not purring (TF), and so all other cases are possible.
The key issue is whether these other cases are accorded the same epistemic
 3. SUPPOSITIONAL REASONING 55

status. The model theory accords special status to the TT case in one sense
by proposing that only this is included in the initial representation of the
conditional statement:

cat is happy cat is purring

...

Anyone reasoning with this representation will not be treating the conditional
as material. For example, as it stands, they could not make the valid Modus
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Tollens inference: the cat is not purring, therefore the cat is not happy.
However, the three dots “. . .” represent what is known as an implicit mental
model or a mental footnote to the effect that there may be possible situa-
tions where the cat is not happy. According to Johnson-Laird and Byrne
(2002) people may also succeed in fleshing out a fully explicit set of models
(possibilities) as follows:

cat is happy cat is purring

cat is not happy cat is purring
cat is not happy cat is not purring.

These full possibilities are the TT, FT and FF cases. Anyone fleshing these
out could make Modus Tollens, as the minor premise (cat is not purring)
eliminates the first two possibilities and leaves only the last, thus licensing the
conclusions that the cat is not happy. However, this still is not sufficient for us
to tell whether the conditional is material. The suppositional theory agrees
that these cases are possible and that Modus Tollens is a valid inference. The
key issue is whether the last two possibilities (false antecedent cases) make the
conditional statement true (material conditional) or have a truth value gap as
advocates of the suppositional theory allow (Adams, 1975; Edgington, 2003).1
The gap occurs for the suppositional theory because of the Ramsey test. This
conditional is not truth-functional, meaning that you cannot tell whether it is
true simply by knowing the truth value of p and q. Whenever the antecedent
is not known to be true (future indicative conditionals) or known to be false
(counterfactual conditionals), people perform the Ramsey test to determine
its subjective probability as described above. Hence, the suppositional con-
ditional has believability – or subjective probability – when the antecedent is
false, but this is not the same thing as a logician’s meaning of truth.

1
Edgington (2003) and Evans and Over (2004) actually discuss two alternatives to the material
conditional (T1), which are referred to as T2 (Stalnakaer conditional) and T3 (Adams con-
ditional). In this book, I will use the logic of the T3 conditional as the basis for my discussion of
the suppositional conditional. However, there may be psychological applications for which the
T2 logic should be considered (see Evans & Over, 2004).
 56 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

There is much potential for confusion about “truth” and “belief ”,

especially since ordinary people may say of a statement “that’s true” when all
they mean is that it is believable (highly probable). As an example, Johnson-
Laird (2005) argues against suppositional conditional on the mistaken view
that it can only be asserted when true in the sense used by logicians. For
example, he says that to assert that “if Phil gets his next grant application
funded, Phil will be happy” implies that Phil has already got the grant
because TT is the only true case in the truth table for this conditional.
However, the assertability conditions for the suppositional conditional only
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require that the speaker finds it believable. I can assert the above conditional
if in a mental simulation of Phil getting his grant funded, I can feel reason-
ably confident that it will make him happy. Pragmatically, in fact, I could not
assert the conditional if I already knew that he had the grant, as the con-
ditional nature of the assertion would violate Gricean principles.
So, is the Johnson-Laird and Byrne (2002) conditional material in its core
meaning, even if it has to be fully fleshed out for this to be apparent? It seems
to us that several arguments put forward by these authors support the
material conditional while being incompatible with the suppositional con-
ditional. First, a fundamental axiom of the theory is the principle of truth:
“mental models represent true possibilities” (Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 2002,
p. 654, italics mine). Second, they state that the paradoxes of the material
conditional (discussed earlier) are valid inferences. They are valid only for the
material conditional. Third, they deny the psychological reality of what is
known as the “defective truth table” (Wason, 1966) in which people regard TT
cases as true, but FT and FF cases as irrelevant (see next section). Describing
false antecedent cases as irrelevant seems to correspond to the logical notion
of a truth value gap and is a key finding for the suppositional conditional.
Confusingly, however, Johnson-Laird and Byrne (2002) also say that the con-
ditional is not “truth functional”, which is logically equivalent to saying that it
is not material (see also Schroyens & Schaeken, 2004, for a denial that mental
model theory is committed to the material conditional).

Empirical evidence for the suppositional

conditional
In our view, there are two main pieces of evidence in favour of the supposi-
tional theory of conditionals, when abstract conditionals of the type dis-
cussed here so far are considered. First, and in spite of the arguments of
Johnson-Laird and Byrne (2002, see below) it seems that people do have
“defective” truth tables for the conditional statement. That is, they have a strong
tendency to think that the conditional is neither true nor false when the ante-
cedent is false. This links with the “if-heuristic” discussed in Chapter 2 with
regard to the Wason selection task. It will be recalled that with the abstract
 3. SUPPOSITIONAL REASONING 57

Table 3.1
An example of the conditional truth table task completed in accordance with the
defective truth table

Below is shown a statement that applies to letter–number pairs, followed by four such pairings.
In each case, you need to decide whether the pair makes the statement true, makes it false or is
irrelevant to it.

If the letter is D then the number is 6

T/F/?
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D6 T
D9 F
B6 ?
B1 ?

selection task people are much more likely to select true than false antecedent
cards, as well as being more likely to choose cards that match the lexical
items in the rule.
The conditional truth table task involves asking people to judge whether
the four truth table cases (TT, TF, FT and FF) make the conditional state-
ment true or false or are irrelevant to it. An example of the task for an
affirmative conditional is shown in Table 3.1, completed in accordance with
the defective truth table. The first study to show evidence for this defective
pattern was that of Johnson-Laird and Tagart (1969) and there have been
many replications since (see Evans et al., 1993). However, the story is some-
what complicated since matching bias affects the truth table task in a similar
manner to the Wason selection task (see Chapter 2). There are close parallels
between the two tasks when the negations are introduced. Consistent with the
if-heuristic (Chapter 2) is the defective truth table pattern: people are much
more likely to see cases as relevant (true or false) when the antecedent is true.
Consistent with the matching-heuristic, however, people are also more likely
to classify cases as relevant if they match the items named in the conditional
statement.
In discussing the selection task in Chapter 2, it was pointed out that
matching bias could be inhibited by use of explicit negations in the cases
presented, so that lexical content always matches. However, when this hap-
pens, people do not improve their logical performance on the selection task as
a result (Evans et al., 1996a). The same study, however, showed that when
matching bias is released from the truth table task by using explicit nega-
tions, a marked improvement in logical performance results. Inspection of
Figure 3.1 reveals the reason why. Cards heuristically cued as relevant on the
selection task will be selected unless people can find a logical reason to reject
them. On the truth table task, the instructions require that any relevant case
be classified as true or false, and this necessarily involves the analytic system.
 58 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING
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Figure 3.1 The heuristic–analytic model of the conditional truth table task.

When judged relevant, most people classify TT cases as true and TF cases as
false, in line with logic. Hence, on this task, when there is less matching bias,
more cases are seen as relevant, so more are correctly classified.
Johnson-Laird and Byrne (2002), as already indicated, claim that the mean-
ing of the conditional statement cannot be captured by the defective truth
table. They explain the experimental findings on the basis of the principle of
implicit models. That is, participants who fail to flesh out the implicit not-p
cases will describe them as irrelevant. Evans et al. (2005b) point out that the
Modus Tollens inference requires this fleshing-out process in the theory (see
above) and that this inference is typically made by about 60–70 per cent of
participants in abstract conditional inference tasks. This seems inconsistent
with the modal tendency to deny the relevance of these cases. A more difficult
problem for their argument has arisen in recent research findings, which are
discussed a little later. First, we need to consider the other key piece of
evidence for the suppositional conditional.
As indicated above, the Ramsey test leads directly to a prediction that the
people will equate the probability of “if p then q” with the conditional prob-
ability, P(q|p). This is known as the conditional probability hypothesis
(Evans, Handley, & Over, 2003b) or simply “the Equation” (Edgington, 1995).
We can also link this with the defective truth table since people consider
only p cases to be relevant when evaluating a conditional. They suppose
 3. SUPPOSITIONAL REASONING 59

p and evaluate their belief in q via mental simulation as described earlier.

Experimental evidence of this hypothesis has only recently been collected
(Evans, Ellis, & Newstead, 1996b; Evans et al., 2003b; Girotto & Johnson-
Laird, 2004; Hadjichristidis, Stevenson, Over, Sloman, Evans, & Feeney,
2001; Oberauer & Wilhelm, 2003). With abstract conditionals, we can provide
frequency distributions of the TT, TF, FT and FF cases. An example of a
problem given by Evans and colleagues (Evans et al., 2003b) is the following:

A pack contains cards that are either yellow or red and have either a circle
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or a diamond printed on them. In total there are:

1 yellow circle
4 yellow diamonds
16 red circles
16 red diamonds.

How likely are the following claims to be true of a card drawn at random
from the pack?

If the card is yellow then it has a circle printed on it

(0–100 per cent)
If the card has a diamond printed on it then it is red
(0–100 per cent)

According to the Equation, people should respond with the conditional

probability, P(q|p). For the first conditional above, this probability is 15 as only
one of the five yellow shapes is a circle. For the second conditional, the
probability is 16
20. However, if the conditional were material, these two con-
ditionals would be equivalent (one is said to be the contrapositive of the
other). They would both have a probability of 33 37 as each is only falsified by
yellow diamonds. In the experiments reported by Evans and colleagues
(Evans et al., 2003b), there was in fact no correlation between ratings of the
probability of conditionals and their contrapositive statements. The majority
of participants, as predicted, based their judgements on the conditional
probability P(q|p), but a sizeable minority based it on the conjunctive prob-
ability P(pq). For example, in the above case, they would give an estimate of
around 371 . These appear to be qualitatively distinct groups, a finding con-
firmed in the independent study of Oberauer and Wilhelm (2003). As both
Evans et al. and Oberauer and Wilhelm observe, the conjunctive probability
response can be reconciled with the mental model theory (on the basis that
initial representations only explicitly represent the pq case) but the majority
conditional probability response cannot.
What could be the cause of these individual differences? Evans and
 60 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

colleagues (Evans et al., 2003b) suggested that conjunctive probability

responders are superficial processors who fail to go beyond consideration of
the pq frequency while conditional probability responders correctly compare
it with the p¬q frequency. In a recent large study, we administered four tasks
to the same 120 student participants: an AH4 test of general intelligence, the
probability of conditionals task, the truth table task and the conditional
inference task (Evans, Handley, Neilens, & Over, in press). As we predicted, the
conditional probability responders – as identified from the probability of
conditionals task – were higher in general intelligence and showed more
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clearly defective truth tables. Those who reason suppositionally on one task
also do so on the other. These participants also showed better logical per-
formance and were significantly less vulnerable to matching bias on the truth
table task.
The three-way association between high ability, conditional probability
responding and the defective truth table not only supports the suppositional
theory but clearly falsifies some proposals within the mental model account
of conditionals. Johnson-Laird and Byrne (2002) explain the defective truth
table pattern, as already indicated, on the grounds that people neglect the
implicit model. They provide the same explanation for the conjunctive prob-
ability response, P(pq), commonly given when people judge the probability of
the conditional statement. So it is the conjunctive and not the conditional
probability responders who should have the most defective truth table – the
opposite to what is observed. The link with cognitive ability makes it worse. It
is well known that measures of general intelligence and of working memory
capacity are highly correlated (Colom, Rebollo, Palacios, Juan-Espinosa, &
Kyllonen, 2004; Kyllonen & Christal, 1990). Those of higher working mem-
ory capacity should be more, not less, able to flesh-out implicit models and
avoid the defective truth table.

BIAS IN CONDITIONAL INFERENCE2

There are two main biases known to be associated with people’s reasoning
about abstract conditional sentences (realistic conditionals are dealt with in
Chapter 4). One that we have met already in the previous and current chapters
is matching bias. Previous theoretical analyses (Evans, 1998) suggest strongly
that matching bias arises from heuristic processes in System 1 that determine
the perceived relevance of cases considered. At one time, it appeared that
matching bias might be restricted to conditional statements that by their
suppositional nature seem only sometimes to be relevant. However, we now

2
This section contains arguments that should be of interest to researchers in the field of
deductive reasoning. However, the more general reader may find it hard going. It may safely be
skimmed or skipped without loss of continuity.
 3. SUPPOSITIONAL REASONING 61

know that the effect is more general as it has been demonstrated with several
connectives including “or” and “and” (Evans, Legrenzi, & Girotto, 1999b) but
always with abstract problems. There is reason to think that the effect is weak
or absent when realistic materials are used that introduce real-world know-
ledge and belief (Evans, 1998) but it is extremely strong in the case of abstract
conditionals on both the truth table and the selection task. It can also be
demonstrated on the third main paradigm in the psychology of conditionals:
the conditional inference task, when the minor premise of the argument
involves implicit negation (Evans & Handley, 1999).
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Recent findings provide support for the idea that matching bias originates
in the heuristic system. First, there is neuropsychological evidence suggesting
that matching bias is associated with occipital lobes of the brain, suggesting a
perceptual effect. Moreover, when matching bias is inhibited, there is a “frontal
shift” with frontal brain areas more usually associated with logical reasoning
and executive control being recruited (Houdé et al., 2000). Although match-
ing bias has a different neurological location from belief bias (see Goel &
Dolan, 2003, and Chapter 4), the fact that both effects can be inhibited by
people high in cognitive ability, activating the prefrontal cortex in the process,
is a striking parallel.
The other major bias associated with abstract conditional reasoning is
manifest in the conditional inference task. Much research (for reviews, see
Evans et al., 1993; Evans & Over, 2004) has focused on the willingness of
participants to endorse each of four inferences associated with the conditional,
as shown in Table 3.2. Two of these inferences are logically valid, meaning
that their conclusion must be true if the premises are true. Modus Ponens (or
MP for short) is readily apparent. Given, the conditional “If Paul is an athlete
then he is fit” and the additional (minor) premise “Paul is an athlete”, the
conclusion that “Paul is fit” follows immediately. The other valid inference,
Modus Tollens (MT), takes a little more thought. In this case, we are told that
Paul is not fit. The major premise tells us that if he were an athlete he would
be fit, so the only assumption consistent with him not being fit is that he is not
an athlete.
The other two inferences that participants in psychological experiments
are invited to consider are logical fallacies. Affirmation of the Consequent
(AC) reasons from the fact that Paul is fit to infer that he is an athlete.
However, this does not necessarily follow. He might be fit for some other
reasons (perhaps he is a soldier or a dancer). For the same reason, Denial of
the Antecedent (DA) is a fallacy: it does not necessarily follow that Paul is not
fit, given that he is not an athlete. I have deliberately chosen here a con-
ditional where counterexamples to these valid inferences are easy to find.
Many real-world conditionals appear to be biconditional, in which q implies p
as well as vice versa, for example: “If Pat is female, then Pat has ovaries”, for
which DA and AC would be strongly suggested inferences. Although logicians
 62 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

Table 3.2
The four inferences associated with a conditional statement

Modus Ponens (MP) If p then q; p therefore q

EXAMPLE:
If Paul is an athlete, then he is fit; Paul is an athlete, therefore, Paul is fit

Modus Tollens (MT) If p then q; not-q therefore not-p

EXAMPLE:
If Paul is an athlete, then he is fit; Paul is not fit, therefore, Paul is not an athlete
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Affirmation of the Consequent (AC) If p then q; q therefore p

EXAMPLE:
If Paul is an athlete, then he is fit; Paul is fit, therefore, Paul is an athlete

Denial of the Antecedent (DA) If p then q; not-p therefore not-q

EXAMPLE:
If Paul is an athlete, then he is fit; Paul is not an athlete, therefore, Paul is not fit

NOTE: MP and MT are valid inferences: their conclusions necessarily follow. DA and AC are
fallacies: their conclusions do not necessarily follow.

use the form of words “if and only if p then q” to indicate biconditionals,
ordinary people generally do not, so that conditionals may appear to be
biconditional according to context (see Chapter 4). When conditional infer-
ence is studied with abstract problem materials, there is no context to signal
clearly whether the statement should be taken as conditional or biconditional.
Studies of conditional inference using abstract materials typically present
people with each of the four arguments shown in Table 3.2 and ask them to
judge whether the conclusion necessarily follows. Abstract materials may
relate colours and shapes (if it is a triangle then it is blue) or letters and
numbers (if there is an A on the card, then there is a 4 on the card) and so on.
When affirmative conditionals are used such studies show that MP is nearly
always endorsed, but the valid MT inference is significantly less frequently
endorsed, about 60–70 per cent of the time. The two fallacies, DA and AC,
are also quite often endorsed as valid arguments (Evans et al., 1993). Differ-
ent theories of these effects have been proposed in the literature. Both mental
logic and mental model theorists (see Chapter 1) agree that more mental work
is required to derive MT than MP but for different reasons. Fallacies may
arise from a failure to consider the fully explicit set of models for the con-
ditional (mental model theory) or by the introduction of pragmatic implica-
tures (mental logic theory). A detailed review of these theories and their
application to conditional reasoning is provided by Evans and Over (2004,
chap. 4).
A number of studies have applied the negations paradigm with the con-
ditional inference task (see Table 3.3). Study of reasoning with all four kinds
 3. SUPPOSITIONAL REASONING 63

Table 3.3
Logical form of the four conditional inferences for statements with use of the
negations paradigm

MP DA AC MT

Rule Given Conclude Given Conclude Given Conclude Given Conclude

If p then q p q not-p not-q q p not-q not-p

If p then not q p not-q not-p q not-q p q not-p
If not p then q not-p q p not-q q not-p not-q p
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If not p then not q not-p not-q p q not-q not-p q p

of conditionals led some years ago to discovery of a phenomenon known as

“negative conclusion bias” (Evans, 1982). Negative conclusion bias is a theor-
etically neutral term that describes a tendency for people to accept more
conditional inferences as valid if the conclusion is negative rather than
affirmative. If this were a universal response bias – for example, to accept
negated conclusions due to caution (Evans, 1982) – then it would seem to be a
heuristic effect. However, the bias is absent on MP, strongly marked on
DA and MT and only weakly present for AC (see Schroyens, Schaeken, &
d’Ydewalle, 2001, for a meta-analysis). The fact that it is strong for DA and
MT suggests that it is mostly due to a difficulty with double negation.
Compare the following two MT arguments:

If the letter is G then the number is 7; the number is not 7, 3.3

therefore the letter is G.

If the letter is not A then the number is 8; the number is not 8, 3.4
therefore the letter is A.

And now the following two DA arguments:

If the letter is B then the number is 5; the letter is not B, 3.5

therefore the number is not 5.

If the letter is R then the number is not 1; the letter is not R, 3.6
therefore the number is 1.

There are strong and reliable findings in the literature (see, for example,
Evans, Clibbens, & Rood, 1995a) that show that people make many more MT
inferences like 3.3 than like 3.4 and many more DA inferences like 3.5 than
like 3.6. The obvious account of this is a double negation effect. That is, in 3.4
people decide the letter cannot be a not A and in 3.6 that it cannot be a not 1,
 64 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

but that does not necessarily lead them to the conclusions given. Seeing that
“not not an A” is the same as “A” requires what logicians call double negation
elimination. This, in turn, depends upon a bivalent logic in which proposi-
tions are either true or false. We have already seen from the way people think
about conditional statements that they do not necessarily embrace bivalence
as such statements are classified as true, false or irrelevant.
The double negation effect on MT can be explained in terms of either
mental logic or mental model theory (Evans et al., 1995a). In the mental
logic account, MT is made by reductio reasoning. Taking 3.3 we suppose
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that there is a G and infer that there must be a 7. However, there is not a 7, so
we have a contradiction. This implies that our supposition is false: there is not
a G. The same line of reasoning with 3.4 leads one to the view that the
supposition “the letter is not A” is false, but finding the conclusions “the letter
is A” requires elimination of the double negation. While this account seems
plausible, and we have suggested something similar ourselves (Evans & Over,
2004), it does not sit comfortably with other assumptions in the main mental
logic systems. For example, Braine and O’Brien (1998b) propose a direct
inference rule for double negation elimination. Although 3.2 would require
an extra step of inference over 3.1, it should be as easy to make as Modus
Ponens. Rips (1994) has a rule for indirect proof in his system, which allows
negative suppositions to be reversed without even the need for an extra step
of inference. Another difficulty for mental logic theorists is that the double
negation effect is equally marked on DA as on MT. This makes little sense of
their claim that different mental processes underlie valid and fallacious
inferences.
The mental model theory can also account for the effect but has to be
modified somewhat to do so. Recall that the model theory explanation of
Modus Tollens is that it requires fleshing out of FF as a true possibility
from among the implicit models. The psychological nature of this fleshing-
out process has never been defined at all clearly in the writings of Johnson-
Laird and Byrne. However, consider the model representation of problem
3.4:

If the letter is not A then the number is 8 (3.4)

¬A 8
...

It might be argued that given the premise “not 8”, which eliminates the
explicit model, people try to flesh out a possible model by reversing the
antecedent, leading to a double negation. However, this account is ad hoc, as
the principles of fleshing out have never been specified at this level of detail.
It also requires the idea that FF is understood as a true possibility that is
contradicted by most of the truth table data as discussed earlier.
 3. SUPPOSITIONAL REASONING 65

Developmental data show that the negative conclusion bias on denial

inferences is absent in young children but grows steadily through adolescence
(Lott, 1999). This rather strongly suggests that the bias lies in the analytic
thinking system, which would make sense if MT and DA results from reduc-
tio reasoning. (In the case of DA, we would have to assume that people
had added the converse “if q then p” and were giving an MT response for this
reverse conditional.) Suppositional reasoning as required by reductio is
exactly the kind of explicit hypothetical thinking that I have been associating
with the analytic system. However, some recent findings of individual differ-
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ences in adult participants are puzzling in this regard. In a large quantitative

study Newstead, Handley, Harley, Wright, and Farelly (2004) found that while
MP rates were correlated positively with general intelligence, DA, AC and
MT rates were all positively correlated with each other and negatively with
general ability. Recent unpublished studies from our laboratory in Plymouth
have shown similar trends.
The suppression of the DA and AC fallacies in higher ability groups
is not surprising, as we know that such participants are better able to
comply with deductive reasoning instructions and show much less evidence
of biconditionality in their general reasoning with conditionals (Evans et al.,
in press). But why do they then find the valid MT so difficult, contrary to the
general finding that high-ability participants find more normatively correct
solutions to reasoning problems (Stanovich, 1999)? Perhaps this is because
they do have a truly conditional representation and must solve MT by
genuinely suppositional (reductio) reasoning in the manner proposed
by mental logic theorists. We know that problems that can only be solved by
reductio reasoning are very difficult for the great majority of participants
(Handley & Evans, 2000). However, this implies that the majority are find-
ing MT by an easier method, but one that still entails a double negation
effect.
My suggestion is this. Most adults faced with abstract conditional sen-
tences interpret them as biconditionals. This enables them to adopt a simple
equivalence reasoning strategy: p goes with q; not p goes with not q. On this
basis, people would tend to endorse all four inferences, MP, MT, AC, DA.
They do in fact, endorse MP and AC at very high rates, which becomes
especially obvious if you separate out the high-ability participants with their
conditional (rather than biconditional) interpretations. These affirmation
inferences are easy and also highly common in young children. Denial infer-
ences are somewhat weaker and will also be affected by a double negation
effect that is symmetrical on DA and MT. Consider again the four denial
inference problems discussed earlier (3.3–3.6):

If the letter is G then the number is 7; the number is not 7, (3.3)

therefore the letter is G.
 66 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

If the letter is not A then the number is 8; the number is not 8, (3.4)
therefore the letter is A.

If the letter is B then the number is 5; the letter is not B, (3.5)

therefore the number is not 5.

If the letter is R then the number is not 1; the letter is not R, (3.6)
therefore the number is 1.
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Problems 3.3 and 3.5 are straightforward for the simple equivalence strategy.
“I don’t have a 7 so I can’t have a G; I don’t have a B so I can’t have a 5”. Look
what happens, however, when the same approach is applied to 3.4 and 3.6. “I
don’t have an 8 so I can’t have a not A; I don’t have an R so I can’t have a not
1.” Double negation will tend strongly to block both MT and DA inferences
for these participants on an equal basis, which is exactly what the data show.
In support of this account, Evans et al. (in press) found that the double
negation effect was universally observed and not restricted to participants of
higher cognitive ability who might be expected to reason suppositionally.
So, is the double negation effect a bias of the heuristic or analytic system?
The answer is analytic without any doubt, in my opinion. It is not like match-
ing bias or belief bias. As yet, no relevant neuropsychological studies of this
bias have been run although doubtless they will be in due course. I expect
brain areas associated with abstract and deductive reasoning effort to be
activated. The dual-process theory does not propose that the analytic reason-
ing system is any form of mental logic but only that it permits high-effort,
low-capacity reasoning of an abstract and sequential nature that is generally
responsive to the task instructions. Simple equivalence is a poor reasoning
strategy from the viewpoint of logic and one most likely to be adopted by
lower ability participants. However, it does meet the criteria for analytic
thinking, reflecting an explicit attempt to derive a conclusion from the
premises given.

DISJUNCTIVE THINKING
There is much less psychological and philosophical research on “or” than on
“if ”. This is a pity, because “or” is also very interesting from the viewpoint
of hypothetical thinking theory. According to our theory, people follow a
singularity principle: they consider one hypothesis at a time. If the conver-
sational effect of “if” is to induce a thought experiment in the listener’s mind,
is “or” used to provoke two such experiments? Can people in fact consider
two possibilities simultaneously? In her recent book, mostly concerned with
counterfactual thinking, Byrne (2005) frequently offers accounts of hypo-
thetical thinking in terms of whether or not people “keep in mind” one or
 3. SUPPOSITIONAL REASONING 67

two possibilities. For example, she claims that a difference between causal and
counterfactual conditionals is that with the former people only consider one
possibility (cause and effect co-occurring) whereas with counterfactuals they
consider two (what did happen and what might have happened). I will return
to the topic of counterfactual thinking later in the chapter.
The logical use of “or” relates two propositions together as in “p or q”.
There is an inclusive reading of this, “p or q or both”, which can always be
expressed by an equivalent material conditional (because just one possibility,
not-p and not-q, is ruled out), and an exclusive reading “p or q but not both”,
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which can always be expressed as a material biconditional (because a second

possibility, p and q, is also ruled out). Quite apart from the serious doubt over
whether ordinary conditionals can ever be material, there are other reasons
for thinking that “or” and “if ” play very different roles in everyday discourse
and communication. One is the relation that these two words have with
“not”. As Evans and Over (2004) observe, “if ” and “not” combined very
happily in everyday conditional statements. Not so with disjunctives.
Hypothetical thinking seems to be equally well equipped with the facility
to imagine events and nonevents. For example, inducement and advice
conditionals can easily be expressed with negations:

If you don’t finish your homework, I won’t let you out to play
If you don’t hurry you will miss your train

as can causal conditionals:

If you brake quickly you will not run through the traffic lights
If you don’t smoke you will live longer

as can counterfactuals:

If I had finished my degree I would not be unemployed now.

If the car had not swerved there would have been a nasty accident.

Although, as we have seen, the use of negations in abstract conditionals

provokes more than one kind of cognitive bias, participants do not claim that
they are incomprehensible. They tend, however, to be completely flummoxed
by statements such as:

Either the letter is not an A or the number is not a 3

Either the letter is a G or the number is not a 4 but not both.

Some researchers even report that participants “drop” the negatives and
reason as if they were not there at all (see Evans et al., 1993, chap. 5)! It is also
 68 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

much harder to think of natural everyday disjunctives that included negated

components. A possible exception is an imperative disjunction such as:

Either finish your homework or I won’t let you out to play

which does seem to mean the same thing as (and be much more naturally
expressed as):

If you do not finish your homework then I won’t let you out to play.
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Just as conditionals can be interpreted in everyday language in a conditional

or biconditional way, so disjunctives can be interpreted inclusively or exclu-
sively. We have seen that with abstract conditionals the common interpretation
is biconditional. Correspondingly, it turns out that with abstract disjunctives,
lacking a modifier such as “or both” or “but not both” will be interpreted
by the majority of participants as exclusive (Evans et al., 1999b; Evans
& Newstead, 1980). However, in natural discourse, both conditionals and
disjunctives tend to be interpreted according to context.
We do know that the use of the logical “or”, particularly in an exclusive
manner, can create enormous problems for people in abstract reasoning tasks.
For example, trying to infer an experimenter’s rule from exemplars classified
as conforming or not conforming to it is especially difficult when the rule
takes an exclusive disjunctive form (Bruner et al., 1956). People tend to fall
into a “common element fallacy” in which they assume (erroneously) that
members of the same category must have features in common. To illustrate
the difficulty, consider one of the most difficult reasoning problems ever
invented, the notorious Wason THOG problem (Wason & Brooks, 1979).
A standard THOG problem is shown in Figure 3.2.
This problem is doubly fiendish and all to do with exclusive disjunction.
First, the experimenter’s rule is an exclusive disjunction: if the design has a
particular shape or else a particular colour, it is a THOG. It must have one but
only one of these features. Next, it is impossible to infer what this rule is from
the information given: there are two mutually exclusive hypotheses that are
possible (another exclusive disjunction!). However, each of these rules classi-
fies the figures in the same way, so the problem set is soluble. We know that
the black diamond is a THOG. Therefore, it contains one, but only one, of
the features with the experimenter’s rule. That feature could be black or it
could be diamond, but not both. If it is black, the rule must be:

A. Either the figure is black or else it is a circle

and if it is diamond, the rule must be:

B. Either the figure is white or else it is a diamond.

 3. SUPPOSITIONAL REASONING 69
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Figure 3.2 Wason’s THOG problem.

If people get this far, the rest is fairly easy. Whichever rule applies, the white
circle is a THOG, and both the black circle and white diamonds cannot be
THOGs. Rule A excludes the black circle as it has both features and the white
diamond as it has neither. Conversely, Rule B excludes the black circle as it has
neither feature and the white circle as it has both. Wason and Brooks (1979)
found that the majority of their participants, perhaps unsurprisingly, failed to
give the logically correct answer. Of more interest was a very common intui-
tive error among the nonsolvers that more or less reverses the correct answer.
Many are convinced that the white circle cannot be a THOG, while the other
two figures may or must be THOGs. This appears to be another manifesta-
tion of the common element fallacy and can be seen as a kind of matching
bias. Logically, the white circle must be a THOG because it shares no com-
mon features with the black diamond; intuitively this just seems wrong: there
is no THOGness about it!
 70 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

Subsequent research on the THOG problem has confirmed its extraordin-

ary difficulty for most people (Newstead, Girotto, & Legrenzi, 1995). Unlike
with the Wason selection task (see Chapter 4), introducing realistic content
generally does not help people to solve it. I believe that the difficulty of the
THOG problem results directly from the use of exclusive disjunction. To
solve this problem by analytic reasoning requires simultaneous consideration
of mutually exclusive possibilities: something that we expect to be very difficult
due to the singularity principle of hypothetical thinking. The intuitive error is
a form of matching bias: heuristic processes are cueing both black and dia-
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mond as relevant features from the example figure given, and by default both
will be encoded into a single mental model of the hypothesis. This default
model must be rejected by explicit analytic reasoning in order for people to
have any chance of finding the correct solution.
The difficulty of exclusive disjunction is manifest in other tasks in the
literature, even when the authors of these papers do not necessarily focus
on this aspect in their framing of the research. Two good examples are
the studies of “illusions” in reasoning by Johnson-Laird and his colleagues
(Goldvarg & Johnson-Laird, 2000; Johnson-Laird & Savary, 1999) and the
study of meta-deduction using Knights and Knaves problems (Byrne &
Handley, 1996; Elqayam, 2006; Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 1990). An example
of one of the reasoning illusions is the following:

Only one of the following premises is true about a particular hand of

cards:
If there is a King in the hand then there is an Ace in the hand
If there is not a King in the hand then there is an Ace in the hand.
What follows?

Most people say that it follows that there is an Ace in the hand. According to
Johnson-Laird this is the opposite of the correct answer. Logically, people
should infer that there is not an Ace in the hand. The argument is this: if the
first conditional is false, then there is a King and not an Ace; if the second
conditional is false, then there is a not a King and not an Ace. Either way
there is not an Ace. Johnson-Laird believes that the illusions result from their
principle of truth – people model true but not false possibilities – and from their
principle of implicit models. Hence, they think that if the first rule is true they
have a King and an Ace, and if the second rule is true they have no King and an
Ace, so either way they have an Ace.
The normative analysis showing “not an Ace” to be correct is highly
debatable as it relies on the material conditional. With the suppositional
conditional, people might well interpret the claim that “if p then q” is
false to mean that “if p then not q”, and strong evidence that they do so
has recently been produced by Handley, Evans, and Thompson (2006). On
 3. SUPPOSITIONAL REASONING 71

this basis you could rewrite the premises as one of the following two
conjunctions:

If there is a King in the hand then there is an Ace in the hand

If there is not a King in the hand then there is not an Ace in the hand

OR ELSE

If there is a King in the hand then there is not an Ace in the hand
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If there is not a King in the hand then there is an Ace in the hand.

Since people know neither which rule set applies nor whether there is a
King in the hand, the problem is indeterminate – that is, nothing follows.
On this analysis, the typical answer that there is an Ace in the hand is still
illusory. In some versions, participants are additionally told that there is a
King in the hand, from which they still infer an Ace. On the above analysis,
this would still be indeterminate. However, the phenomenon may not be
to do with conditionals per se, since similar effects have been reported with
disjunctives.
What do these problems have in common with THOG? The instruction
that one and only one of the following premises is true: an exclusive disjunc-
tion. The singularity principle does not prevent people from running more
than one mental simulation in sequence but we normally think in terms of
alternative suppositions rather than alternative complex connectives like con-
ditionals and disjunctives. In fact, it is quite common to use a disjunction of
conditionals to argue for an inevitable outcome, as in the case of an employee
who has received an offer to move to another company and a counter-offer to
stay where she is. She might well say in this situation:

If I take the offer, then I get a pay rise or if I stay where I am I get a pay
rise. Either way, I am better off.

It is almost impossible to imagine anyone using such a sentence structure to

imply that they would not get a pay rise! Of course, the “or” here does not
have the logical effect of disjoining the two conditional statements as a whole.
What it disjoins are two different mental simulations, or, if you prefer, the
antecedents of these conditionals. On the supposition that I move, I get a pay
rise. On the supposition that I stay, I also get a pay rise.
Meta-deduction problems are set on the island of Knights and Knaves
(Smullyan, 1978). Knights and Knaves look the same, but the former always
tell the truth and the latter always lie. This is exclusive disjunction in yet
another guise: people are either Knights or else they are Knaves; their
statements are true or else they are false. A set of rich reasoning problems can
 72 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

be devised in these scenarios and were first introduced into the psychology
of reasoning by Rips (1989). They are called meta-deductive because you
have to reason about truth and falsity. People tend to struggle with these
problems because they fail to keep track of alternative hypotheses: in particu-
lar they may not consider the Knave hypothesis if a Knight hypothesis will
fit the available information. Elqayam (2006) calls this the “collapse” illusion.
Consider the following claim:

I am a Knave.
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This is a version of the famous liar paradox and most participants can
see that this statement has indeterminate truth value. If the speaker is a
Knight then he must be a Knave, which is a contradiction. If the speaker is
a Knave, then since Knaves always lie, he must be a Knight, which is also a
contradiction. Now consider:

I am a Knight.

This statement too is indeterminate: a Knight could say it, but so too could
a Knave. In this case, many people assume, however, that the speaker is a
Knight, “collapsing” indeterminate to true. As Elqayam (2006) also points
out, the collapse illusion and reasoning with Knights and Knaves problems
generally are consistent with hypothetical thinking theory. One of the general
proposals in this theory is that people adopt a hypothesis and maintain it
until there is reason to give it up. We saw in Chapter 2 that there is much
evidence from the hypothesis testing literature that supports this proposal.
What seems to happen in Knights and Knaves problems is that people try the
Knight hypothesis first and only give it up if it fails to satisfy, as with the
paradoxical “I am a Knave” claim. Where it works, as in “I am a Knight”, they
tend to stick with it.

COUNTERFACTUAL THINKING
The discussion of conditionals given so far has concerned so-called indi-
cative conditional statements. These are often contrasted with counter-
factual conditionals that have false antecedents. There is a close – but not
one-to-one – linkage between counterfactuals and use of the subjunctive
mood. Counterfactuals can be used in the present tense, for example, “If I
were president, I would pull the troops out of Iraq”, but they are most com-
monly used in the past tense, to refer to actions or events that were once but
are no longer possible, as in our earlier example: “If terrorists had not
attacked New York, then the USA would not have invaded Iraq.”
Counterfactual conditionals have been subject to much philosophical
 3. SUPPOSITIONAL REASONING 73

investigation (see Bennett, 2003; Evans & Over, 2004). Past-tense counter-
factuals are particularly interesting because they posit consequences for
antecedents known to be false and events that cannot be changed. Terrorists
did attack New York in 2001, so what is the point in speculating about what
might or might not have happened had history failed to deliver this event?
It might seem that this statement is a roundabout way of stating a causal
relation. The speaker is implying that the attack on New York somehow
caused (or perhaps enabled) the war with Iraq that followed. However,
although counterfactual and causal claims are related, the psychological evi-
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dence suggests that they are not equivalent and do not stimulate the same
processes of hypothetical thinking (Byrne, 2005).
A different question we can ask is whether counterfactual and indicative
conditionals are fundamentally different. A present-tense subjunctive and a
future-tense indicative can seem to mean the same thing, as in:

If Paul were to win the lottery then he would buy a Ferrari. 3.7

If Paul wins the lottery then he will buy a Ferrari. 3.8

The believability (or subjective probability) of these two statements would

certainly be the same under the suppositional theory of conditionals. We
would use our knowledge of Paul to perform a mental simulation of a pos-
sible world in which he wins the lottery. Our knowledge of relevant facts such
as his age, personality and driving style might leads us to assign a (similarly)
high or low degree of belief in 3.7 and 3.8. We might also perform similar
mental simulation with similar results for the past-tense counterfactual:

If Paul had won the lottery then he would have bought a Ferrari. 3.9

Of course, we might evaluate 3.9 differently if relevant beliefs had been

updated in the passage of time. Suppose the counterfactual applies to a
period of time since when Paul had a serious accident while speeding in his
more modest road car. We might have believed 3.7 or 3.8 if uttered at the
time, but not believe 3.9 now. It is not the nature of the conditional or its
mental processing that has changed, just our database of relevant beliefs.
Mental model theorists (Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 2002) propose that the
mental representation of indicative and counterfactual conditionals is fun-
damentally different. Instead of representing just one explicit possibility (the
TT case) as with an indicative conditional, people represent two possibilities.
Thus 3.6 would be represented as:

Paul wins the lottery Paul buys a Ferrari

...
 74 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

whereas 3.7 would be represented as:

FACT
Paul did not win the lottery Paul did not buy a Ferrari
COUNTERFACTUAL POSSIBILITY
Paul did win the lottery Paul did buy a Ferrari.

In our suppositional theory, we disagree with this account (Evans & Over,
2004; Evans et al., 2005b). First, the actual state of the world should not be
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described as “fact” because it is only pragmatically and not logically implied.

Suppose the speaker of 3.9 learns that Paul did in fact win the lottery and did
buy a Ferrari. They would hardly declare their statement to have been false;
more likely, they would say “I told you so”. Second, we do not believe that
there is a fundamental difference in the mental representation of indicatives
and counterfactuals. Recall that our mental models are epistemic, not seman-
tic (Chapter 1). That is, they represent not factual possibilities but beliefs.
They can be also supplemented by pragmatic implicatures. Hence, 3.7 might
be represented as follows:

Paul wins the lottery → .8 Paul buys a Ferrari

[Paul does not win the lottery → .001 Paul buys a Ferrari].

Recall that the notation “→ s” represents a conditional belief strength s (a

subjective probability) that one event leads to the other. The arrow does not
represent an embedded conditional or (worse) a material implication. This
conditional also carries a very strong pragmatic implicature that Paul will not
buy a Ferrari unless he wins the lottery as we know that such a purchase is
totally beyond his current means. This implicature is represented by the
square brackets. In our system this is one mental model not two, and we are
representing beliefs, and not logical possibilities. We might represent 3.9 as
follows:

Paul had won the lottery → .8 Paul would have bought a Ferrari
[Paul did not win the lottery (.999); Paul did not buy a Ferrari (.999)].

What people do with this model depends upon what question is asked. Within
the heuristic–analytic theory, heuristic (or pragmatic) processes generate such
epistemic mental models in an automatic and effortless way, but only the
analytic system can interpret, process or modify such models with respect
to verbal instructions and the task set. Establishing the degree of conditional
belief in such a model may involve active participation of the analytic system
in order to simulate the likelihood of q in the supposition of p, if people are
asked to consider a novel conditional sentence, for example. It may also be
 3. SUPPOSITIONAL REASONING 75

retrieved directly from memory if the relation is one with which people are
familiar. The implicature part, however, would be added automatically or as a
by-product of the main mental simulation.
If the question asked of a counterfactual conditional is whether one can
infer not-p or not-q as a consequence, then I would expect such an inference
to be much more commonly endorsed than with indicative conditionals
as has been observed (Thompson & Byrne, 2002). This would reflect the
pragmatic implication of real-world events that goes with the counterfactual
form as shown in the model for 3.7. The same implicature can account for
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the higher rates of DA and MT inferences observed with counterfactual

conditionals (Byrne & Tasso, 1999; Quelhas & Byrne, 2003; Thompson &
Byrne, 2002). On the other hand, if the question asked is the extent to
which the counterfactual conditional is probable or believable then I would
expect this to depend only on the conditional belief between p and q, which
can be determined by a single relevant mental simulation based on the
supposition of p. Again, this is what the data show. When asked to judge
the probability of either causal or conditional statements, people predomin-
antly base this on the conditional probability, P(q|p), in line with the
extended Ramsey test (Over et al., in press). On this task, data for indicative
and counterfactual conditionals are indistinguishable as predicted by the
suppositional theory.
Are there biases in counterfactual thinking? This is hard to decide in
the normal sense, as we would need an agreed normative theory of what is
“correct” counterfactual reasoning. However, there are a number of factors
established by psychological research that affect the likelihood that people
will engage in counterfactual thinking (see Byrne, 2005; Mandel, Hilton, &
Catellani, 2005). A lot of these involve mental “undoing” (Kahneman &
Tversky, 1982b) in the form of “if only” thoughts, which commonly occur
when outcomes of some scenarios are seen as negative and undesirable.
For example, people will more often mentally undo (or regret) an action
than an inaction, unusual rather than common actions, actions that violate
social obligations and more recent rather than older events. Counterfactual
thoughts do not necessarily reflect perceived causes. If you change your route
home from work, skid on a patch of oil and crash your car, you are more
likely to think “if only I had not changed my route” than “if only the patch of
oil had been cleaned up” even though you perceive the oil and not your choice
of route as the cause of the accident (see Byrne, 2005).
One of the most interesting things about counterfactual thinking is that
we do so much of it. Our mental life (in the conscious System 2) is rich in
hypothetical thinking about past as well as uncertain and future possibilities.
We simulate the future in order to try to make good decisions and the past –
presumably – in order to learn from experience. Of course, this is a very
different concept of experiential learning from that which operates at the
 76 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

System 1 level, in the associative learning subsystem. Many of our choices

and intuitive judgements may be based on implicit and associative learn-
ing from our repeated past interactions with events in the world. This kind
of learning is “automatic” and does not require reflective consciousness.
Hypothetical thought does, however, require such reflection. We theorize
constantly about the world and our own actions within it. Counterfactual
thoughts help us to learn from mistakes and formulate better rules for our
future behaviour – or so it seems. Analytic thinking also serves to confabu-
late and rationalize explanations for our own behaviour, as we shall see in
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Chapter 7.

CONCLUSIONS
In this chapter, I have discussed both conditional and disjunctive forms
of suppositional reasoning. Studies of abstract conditional reasoning have
strongly identified two major biases: matching bias and the double negation
effect. As explained, there is good reason to think that these originate in the
heuristic and analytic systems, respectively. Matching bias strongly influences
perceptions of what is relevant and can only be inhibited by quite a small
group of high-ability participants (the top 20 per cent of a university student
population in the study discussed). When allowance for this is made, the main
determinant of relevance lies with the suppositional nature of the ordinary
conditionals: they concern only possibilities in which the antecedent condi-
tion holds. The double negation effect arises in analytic reasoning when
people try to draw conditional inferences that deny either the antecedent or
the consequent.
According to the principles of hypothetical thinking laid out in Chapter 1,
people think about only one possibility or hypothesis at a time. Research on
conditionals is consistent with this, as “if” strongly appears to trigger a mental
simulation based on the supposition of p. This is why the most common
response to a request to judge the probability of a conditional statement is
the conditional probability, P(q|p). There is also evidence that disjunctive
thinking is very difficult, especially when it requires consideration of mutually
exclusive possibilities. Exclusive disjunction lies at the heart of several notori-
ous difficult problems including Wason’s THOG problem, Johnson-Laird’s
illusory inferences and reasoning about Knights and Knaves.
I have also given some brief discussion in this chapter of counterfactual
thinking. According to Byrne (2005) counterfactual thinking arises when
people consider two possibilities rather than one, in apparent conflict with the
singularity principle. However, our notion of mental models is epistemic and
allows the idea that such models are embellished with pragmatic implicatures.
In the case of counterfactuals, the pragmatic implication is that neither ante-
cedent nor consequent is held in the actual world. The idea that people are
 3. SUPPOSITIONAL REASONING 77

considering two possibilities is a direct consequence of a system based on

semantic mental models. I suggest instead that counterfactual conditionals,
like indicatives, evoke only a single thought experiment or mental simulation.
We evaluate belief in a counterfactual in exactly the same way as we do for an
indicative conditional (Over et al., 2005). We suppose that p were (is, will be,
had been) true and, using all relevant belief that can be retrieved, try to
decide whether q would follow, leading to a judgement based on P(q|p).
What has not been addressed in this chapter is the extraordinarily strong
effect of prior belief and knowledge on human reasoning processes, once
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problems are presented with realistic content and context. I will consider this
issue in the chapter that follows.
Downloaded by [Felipe Orejuela] at 17:53 18 February 2015
 CHAPTER FOUR

The role of knowledge and belief

in reasoning
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One of the strongest findings in the psychology of reasoning is that people’s

thinking about inferential problems is profoundly influenced by the content
and context in which the problems are framed, even though logical form is
held constant. Such findings have progressively undermined the view that
human reasoning is based on any kind of mental logic and have also provided
fertile ground for the development of dual-processing accounts. A wide-
spread view is that since System 1 or heuristic processes are responsible
for contextualization (automatic retrieval and application of relevant prior
knowledge) then they are the major cause of any content effects observed.
By contrast, it has been widely assumed, System 2 analytic reasoning is
responsible for the ability to solve problems by decontextualized reasoning
that is also manifest in these experiments (Evans, 1989; Stanovich, 1999).
The equation of the heuristic system with domain-specific processes
responsible for biases and of the analytic system with providing domain-
general processes that support good reasoning is now seen to be oversimplified
and misleading (Evans, 2006a; Stanovich, 2006). It is true that the fundamen-
tal heuristic bias is responsible for a number of the content effects observed,
as the following review will demonstrate. However, the analytic system can
also be responsible for biases as has already been demonstrated in the pre-
ceding chapters. Moreover, as will become evident in this chapter, analytic
thinking is not by its nature abstract and decontextualized, let alone logical.
Analytic thinking is slow, sequential, conscious and reflective but it is not
a mental logic. This kind of thinking can as well be applied to content-rich

79
 80 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

problems as to abstract ones, and the subject of reflection may be explicit

knowledge and belief evoked by the context. Thus the nature of dual-process
accounts of contextualized reasoning is undergoing radical revision in recent
accounts, as I will show in this chapter.
Another important issue in the study of content effects is that of whether
influences of prior belief on reasoning should necessarily be perceived as
biases. Both science and society seem to be divided on the issue of whether
prior belief is necessarily prejudicial. The very term “prejudice” implies pre-
judging a person or an issue on the basis of our prior belief as when we
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attribute characteristics to an individual person based on some kind of

stereotype that we hold. Thus when a colleague tells you that her husband
is an accountant you may assume that he is dull and introverted, but when
another describes her husband as a sales executive you might assume that
he is outgoing and extroverted. In dual-process theories of social psychology
(Chaiken & Trope, 1999) the application of such stereotypes is generally
regarded as rapid and automatic, whereas the identification of the indi-
vidual’s actual attributes requires more conscious processing effort. It can be
argued that stereotypes serve a useful purpose in the absence of any other
information about an individual, providing better than chance information
about the social world. However, it can also be argued that the application of
stereotypes is the foundation for prejudice and discrimination.
The rational case for prior belief derives from the Bayesian framework,
which has already been introduced earlier in this book. To apply Bayes’
theorem (see Equation 1.4), you need to combine your prior belief in a
hypothesis with some current evidence in order to produce a revised belief.
Hence, in this system it is rational to take account of prior belief. Consider
the criminal justice system. When police investigate a crime, they consult a
database of known offenders and compare methods of operation. Increasingly,
criminal investigators working on serious crimes rely on psychological or
geographical profiling of offenders (Canter & Alison, 2000), which increases
their probability of identifying suspects. This is clearly a rational use of
prior belief. However, criminal justice procedures do not regard Bayesian
prior probabilities as evidence that can be used in a court of law, and in fact
the rules of evidence in Western courts normally prevent the prosecution
from telling juries about a defendant’s prior criminal record for fear that it
will prejudice their judgement. The principle here, apparently, is that people
should be tried on the facts of the case alone. This is far from self-evidently
correct. The criminal justice system does require juries to make judgements
of probability. In civil cases they are required to find in favour of one party
of another on the “balance of probability”, while in criminal cases they trad-
itionally must find that the prosecution has proved its case “beyond reason-
able doubt”. Is it right, then, to deny juries access to highly relevant prior
probabilities?
 4. THE ROLE OF KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF IN REASONING 81

In my view, as discussed in Chapter 2, real science is a Bayesian process

(Evans, 2005; Howson & Urbach, 1993) in which new evidence is always
contextualized in the light of prior belief and knowledge. I also believe that
ordinary people are broadly Bayesian in their everyday lives. The reason that
belief bias has been such an issue in psychological research on reasoning
derives from the conventions of the “deduction paradigm” that has been
largely used in this field. Standard instructions require that people should (a)
assume that the premises are true and (b) endorse only conclusions that
necessarily follow from these assumptions (Evans, 2002a). These instructions
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constrain what might naturally be a probabilistic form of inference to one

that is logical and deductive and exclude the relevance of prior belief in the
process. If we let P represent a set of premises and C a conclusion that may be
derived from them, then the following total rule of probability is a simple
consequence of the probability calculus (see Evans & Over, 1996a):

Prob(C) = Prob (P) · Prob(C|P) + Prob(¬P) · Prob(C|¬P). 4.1

In other words, Equation 4.1 means that the probability of a conclusion (or
our belief in it, if you take a subjective view of probability) is the sum of two
factors: (a) the extent to which the conclusion follows from the premises
weighted by the likelihood of those premises; and (b) the extent to which the
conclusion follows if the premises do not hold, weighted by the probability
that they do not. In real life, it is likely that people at least focus on (a),
although they may neglect (b) in light of the singularity principle of hypo-
thetical thinking. That is, given some salient evidence to think about, people
may neglect to consider the likelihood of the conclusion in the absence of the
evidence, a problem related to base-rate neglect (see Chapter 6). However, they
may well take into account both the uncertainty in the evidence itself and any
uncertainty in the process of drawing the conclusion from the evidence in
establishing their overall confidence in the conclusion of an argument.
To take a real-world example, suppose a right-wing politician wants to
convince you that uncontrolled immigration will be a cause of crime. She
might argue that current government policy will allow immigration to rise
steeply in the next four years and that this will lead to an increase in crime due
to pressures on housing and employment, as well as to tensions between
different ethnic groups. She wants you to conclude that crime rates will soar.
In evaluating this argument, you will consider the likelihood of the premise
that current policy will increase immigration, or Prob(P), and the likelihood
that this will cause an increase in crime, or Prob(C|P). If you are very sophis-
ticated you may also consider whether crime will also rise in the absence of
increased immigration – Prob(C|¬P). It seems to me that this kind of prob-
abilistic evaluation of arguments is not only habitual but also rational, given
the uncertainty of real-world propositions.
 82 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

Now consider the effect of deductive reasoning instructions. You are to

remove all uncertainty from your thinking. Assume the premises are true
and so set Prob (P) = 1. Decide whether the argument is valid, meaning that
you must decide whether P(C|P) = 1. Strictly speaking, you do need to assume
the premises are true to evaluate a logical argument as you only need to
decide whether the conclusion follows necessarily from them. However, this
instruction is commonly given because it makes the task equivalent to that of
deciding whether the conclusion is certain. If the premises are true and the
argument is valid then the conclusion must be true, a case known in logic as a
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sound argument. There is evidence that ordinary people confuse the notions
of validity and soundness – that is, they are reluctant to endorse an argument
whose premises they disbelieve (Thompson, 1996). However, the major claim
in the literature on belief bias, as we shall see, is that people are strongly
influenced by whether or not they believe the conclusion of an argument. As
Evans and Over (1996a) have argued, one can make a case that such belief
bias is rational in one sense and irrational in another, depending on whether
you think in terms of what habitually works in ordinary life, or whether you
take into account the precise experimental instructions.
From the perspective of dual-process theory, it is to be expected that prior
belief will have a strong influence on reasoning as one of the main functions
of heuristic processes is to contextualize problems in the light of prior belief,
retrieving and applying relevant knowledge from long-term memory. What I
have been calling the fundamental heuristic bias is the consequential restric-
tion of focus in any reasoning that follows. However, it turns out that beliefs
may directly influence the analytic reasoning processes as well. The remainder
of this chapter is taken up with a detailed examination of the psychological
literatures that bear on these issues.

THE BELIEF BIAS EFFECT IN SYLLOGISTIC

REASONING
Before examining the specific evidence on belief bias, I will introduce a para-
digm that has been extensively used in the study of human reasoning –
categorical syllogisms. Psychologists working in this area have largely confined
themselves to a limited logical system devised by Aristotle. In this system
there are always two premises and a single conclusion that relate together
three terms often known as the subject (S) and predicate (P) of the conclu-
sion, linked together by a middle term (M). A complete syllogism might look
like this:

All M are P 4.2

Some S are not M
Therefore, some S are not P.
 4. THE ROLE OF KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF IN REASONING 83

We already saw some examples of syllogisms in Chapter 1, when reasoning

about the colour of books. Whether or not the above syllogism is valid
depends only on its form and not on its content. It makes no difference at all
what particular terms are substituted for S, M and P. Presented in this
abstract form, you may think the above argument is valid, as many people do.
However, our perception of whether an argument is valid can be strongly
influenced by the content chosen. Consider, this instantiation of the above
syllogistic form:
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All cats are carnivores 4.3

Some pets are cats
Therefore, some pets are not carnivores.

Let us suppose that people try to integrate this information into a mental
model. Despite the criticism of the mental model theory of conditionals in
the previous chapter, the theory is quite plausible when applied to syllogisms,
with an important caveat that will be given later. Johnson-Laird proposes that
syllogisms are represented by mental models that have tokens, rather than a
diagrammatic form, but the format is not important for the present purposes.
The above syllogisms, based on real-world knowledge, suggest relationships
between the three sets S, M and P like the one shown as Model A in Figure 4.1
There is a large set of carnivores (P), a subset of which is cats (M). Some cats
are pets (S) and some are not (for example, feral cats). Some pets are carni-
vores and some are not. In Model A, both premises hold and so does the
conclusion: it is true that all M are P, some S are not M and some S are not P.
However, this does not mean that the conclusion is necessarily true for all
arrangements of S, M and P consistent with the premises.
The fallacy becomes apparent when we modify the wording of 4.3 as
follows:

All cats are carnivores 4.4

Some meat-eating pets are cats
Therefore, some meat-eating pets are not carnivores.

Something is wrong here, since it is evident that while both premises are true
for 4.4 the conclusion is patently false. What this reveals is that the premises
are compatible with another mental model (Model B of Figure 4.1) that
provides a counterexample to the argument, since the set of meat-eating pets
is by definition entirely contained within the sets of carnivorous animals.
When presented with this content, few people would endorse the logically
fallacious conclusion.
Johnson-Laird’s mental model theory of deductive reasoning was first
applied to syllogisms (see Johnson-Laird & Bara, 1984, for a detailed formal
 84 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING
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Figure 4.1 Set representations of syllogistic statements.

model and empirical test). The idea was that people start by forming a
mental model that integrates the two premises and then try to form a conclu-
sion, linking the end terms that hold in this model. They then attempt
to search for counterexamples: models that are consistent with the premises
but not the putative conclusion. If they fail to find such a counterexample,
they declare the inference to be valid. Due to working memory constraints,
however, people make many mistakes when reasoning with syllogisms, like
the example above, that are consistent with multiple models. The theory
was originally applied to a syllogistic production task, in which people
are given the premises without a conclusion and are asked to generate their
 4. THE ROLE OF KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF IN REASONING 85

own. Say they were given, in abstract form, the premises of the above
syllogism:

All M are P
Some S are not M.

and were asked what conclusion followed. If they formulated Model A

(Figure 4.1) then they might well form the fallacious conclusion, Some S
are not P. However, they should then search for a counterexample case. If
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they succeed in finding Model B, then they would withdraw this conclusion.
Johnson-Laird and Bara (1984) found that people made many mistakes with
syllogisms of this kind, often giving a conclusion that does not necessarily
follow and also being biased by the order in which the terms S, M and P are
mentioned. (More conclusions of the form S–P are generated for premises
that mention S before P, an effect known as figural bias.) Mental model
theorists also produced an explanation of how belief bias could affect syllo-
gistic reasoning (Oakhill, Johnson-Laird, & Garnham, 1989). In essence, if
the provisional conclusion generated is compatible with prior belief, people
would be less motivated to search for counterexamples than if it were
incompatible with belief.
Many experiments on syllogistic reasoning, including most of those on
belief bias, have used the syllogistic evaluation task in which a complete
syllogism is presented, and people have to say whether or not the conclusion
follows. There are actually 256 possible syllogisms of a standard kind, assum-
ing a fixed order of premises. These are formed as follows. Each statement is
one of four types, known classically as A, E, I and O:

A All A are B Affirmative universal

E No A are B Negative universal
I Some A are B Affirmative particular
O Some A are not B Negative particular.

Since there are three statements (two premises and one conclusion) in a
standard syllogism and four forms for each statement, that makes 43 = 64
possible moods in which a syllogism can appear. However, we must multiply
this number by four, as there are four ways of arranging the order of terms in
syllogisms (known as Figures). Adopting the convention that the conclusion
is always S–P, the premises can be M–P; S–M or M–P; M–S or P–M; S–M
or P–M; M–S. Although there have been many experimental studies of
syllogistic reasoning (for reviews, see Evans et al., 1993; Manktelow, 1999), to
my knowledge the only study to have presented participants with all 256
syllogisms to evaluate is that of Evans, Handley, Harper, and Johnson-Laird
(1999a). In this study, we used computer presentation, and all syllogisms were
 86 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

in an abstract form, using randomly chosen capital letters to represent the

three terms.
Of the 256 syllogisms, a mere 24 are logically valid. However, it has been
known for many years that people will endorse many invalid syllogisms,
where the conclusion is possible given the premises but not necessitated by
them. In fact, this is the most prevalent finding in all studies of deductive
reasoning and clearly supports the satisficing principle of hypothetical think-
ing. It seems that if people can find a model that supports the conclusion
presented, they will satisfice on this model and endorse the conclusion. This is
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a clear example of the fundamental analytic bias that allows us to link

theoretically phenomena as diverse as confirmation bias in hypothesis testing
(Chapter 2) and the endorsement of fallacies in deductive reasoning as well as
many phenomena in the psychology of judgement and decision making to be
discussed in subsequent chapters.
If people chronically satisfice on models that are merely consistent with
the premises presented, how can this be resolved with the “search for coun-
terexamples” principle of the model theory? The findings of Evans et al.
(1999a) bear directly on this issue. They discovered that although many fal-
lacies are endorsed in syllogistic reasoning, not all fallacies are. First, few
participants endorsed syllogisms whose conclusion were impossible given the
premises. In such cases, there is no mental model of the premises to be found
that supports the conclusion given. Technically, these are classed as fallacies,
but the great majority of syllogisms have conclusions that are possible but not
necessary. Evans et al. (1999a) found that these broke down into two groups,
which they called Possible Strong and Possible Weak. Possible Strong
syllogisms were consistently endorsed as valid by most participants, whereas
Possible Weak syllogisms were usually rejected as invalid. In fact, endorse-
ment rates corresponded closely to those for syllogisms that were actually
valid in the case of Possible Strong, or which were impossible (conclusion
cannot be true given the premises) in the case of Possible Weak.
What these data strongly suggest is that people do not search for coun-
terexamples in syllogistic reasoning, but generally only form one mental
model of the premises (but see Newstead, Thompson, & Handley, 2002, for
evidence that some participants may do so). This is the caveat in my support
for the mental model theory of syllogistic reasoning to which I alluded
earlier. In the case of valid syllogisms, conclusions are usually endorsed
because there is no counterexample model to be found. Similarly, impossible
syllogisms are rejected because there is no model that supports the conclu-
sion. In case of syllogisms with possible conclusions, people endorse them if
the model that comes to mind includes the conclusion, and otherwise they
reject them. In the paper, we showed that two different theories can account
for the reason that Possible Strong syllogisms are the ones endorsed. In
nearly all cases, they conform to what Chater and Oaksford (1999) call the
 4. THE ROLE OF KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF IN REASONING 87

min-heuristic. This means that people prefer conclusions that are weaker in
information-theory terms than the premises. Johnson-Laird’s computational
model of syllogistic reasoning also shows that when premises yield more than
one conclusion, the one generated first corresponds to that given in a Possible
Strong syllogism.
It is clear that the findings of Evans et al. (1999a) provide a strong
fit to the principles of hypothetical thinking theory. People form a single
mental model of the premises and stick with it unless there is reason to give
it up. If the conclusion presented is consistent with the model then it satisfies.
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Only when the conclusion cannot be reconciled with the model of the
premises do people reject it. These findings are also significant for the
interpretation of the belief bias effect in syllogistic reasoning, to which I
now turn.

Belief bias in syllogistic reasoning

Realistic content was introduced into syllogisms in one of the earliest
reported studies of deductive reasoning (Wilkins, 1928). Her findings led to
two apparently contrary hypotheses that have since been thoroughly explored
in the psychology of reasoning: (a) that realistic content can facilitate logical
reasoning relative to artificial problem content; and (b) that the existence of
prior beliefs and attitudes can bias reasoning. The former hypothesis will be
discussed later in the chapter. Belief bias, which she was the first to demon-
strate, is normally described as a tendency to accept conclusions that are a
priori believable and to reject those that are unbelievable, regardless of their
logical validity. This early study was followed sporadically by replications in
the social psychological literature while interest in the effect in the cognitive
literature dates from the early 1980s (Evans et al., 1983; Revlin, Leirer, Yopp,
& Yopp, 1980).
Evans et al. (1983) introduced all relevant controls and established the
main phenomena to be explained (Table 4.1). Using the syllogistic evaluation
task they examined people’s willingness to accept the conclusions of four
types of syllogism as valid. There are two cases with no conflict between logic
and belief: valid syllogisms with believable conclusions and invalid arguments
with unbelievable conclusions. As shown in Table 4.1, acceptance rates were
high (89 per cent) for the former and very low (just 10 per cent) for the latter.
There are two cases, however, in which belief and logic conflict: valid-
unbelievable (56 per cent) and invalid-believable (71 per cent). Statistically,
these data reveal three significant effects to be explained: a main effect of
logical validity, a main effect of belief, and a belief-by-logic interaction. Each
of these has been replicated many times in the subsequent literature (see, for
example, Klauer, Musch, & Naumer, 2000; Morley, Evans, & Handley, 2004;
Newstead, Pollard, Evans, & Allen, 1992).
 88 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

Table 4.1
Examples of the four types of syllogism used by Evans et al. (1983)
together with acceptance rates combined over three experiments

Valid-believable
No police dogs are vicious
Some highly trained dogs are vicious
Therefore, some highly trained dogs are not police dogs 89%
Valid-unbelievable
No nutritional things are inexpensive
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Some vitamin tablets are inexpensive

Therefore, some vitamin tablets are not nutritional 56%
Invalid-believable
No addictive things are inexpensive
Some cigarettes are inexpensive
Therefore, some addictive things are not cigarettes 71%
Invalid-unbelievable
No millionaires are hard workers
Some rich people are hard workers
Therefore, some millionaires are not rich people 10%

Evans et al. (1983) also conducted a number of protocol analyses, mostly

based on concurrent “think aloud” protocols. One of these analyses involved
scoring the presence and absence of mentions of the premises and of irrele-
vant information. These were correlated with the decisions made. For
example, on valid-unbelievable problems – where logic and belief conflict –
participants making (logical) “yes” decisions made significantly more refer-
ences to the premises and fewer to irrelevant information than did those
making (belief-based) “no” decisions. Another analysis based only on concur-
rent think-aloud protocols looked at the order in which people mentioned the
premises and the conclusion. Some mentioned only the conclusion. Some
mentioned the conclusion before the premises while some seemed to reason
from premises to conclusion. The more conclusion-centred was the protocol,
the stronger the observed influence of belief and the less the influence of
logic. This is consistent with a dual-processing account in which sometimes
logical reasoning (premise based) and sometimes belief (conclusion based)
controls the decision made. Consistent with such an account also is the recent
study of De Neys (2006b) who found that concurrent working memory load
disrupted reasoning and increased belief bias only on those problems where
logic and belief are in conflict. Individuals of high working-memory capacity
also had an advantage only on the conflict problems. The point here is that
when belief and logic are consistent, fast heuristic processes will deliver the
correct answers.
From the viewpoint of dual-process theory, the belief bias effect is of great
interest because of this apparent belief–logic (heuristic–analytic) conflict.
 4. THE ROLE OF KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF IN REASONING 89

Evans et al. (1983) showed that the conflict was within participant: that is,
that the same person might sometimes go with belief and sometimes with
logic. It is important to understand exactly how the two influences combine,
and for this reason there has been considerable interest in the belief-by-logic
interaction (Table 4.1), which can be described by saying that belief bias is
stronger on invalid arguments. Evans et al. (1983) proposed two rival accounts,
which have since become known as Selective Scrutiny and Misinterpreted
Necessity. You can also think of them as belief-first or logic-first accounts.
Under the Selective Scrutiny model – which was designed to account for
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syllogistic evaluation tasks – it is assumed that the conclusion is read first and
that, if believable, people tend to accept it without reasoning. When the
conclusion is unbelievable, however, people are much more likely to check the
logic of the argument. This explains why one conflict problem – invalid-
believable – is generally accepted in line with belief, while the other – valid-
unbelievable – is more evenly balanced. However, this is a simplification, as
there is still a significant belief bias on valid arguments in the study of Evans
et al. (1983) and in most replication studies.
The Misinterpreted Necessity model is not well supported in the literature
and will not be discussed here (but see Evans et al., 1993). The notion of
Selective Scrutiny is consistent with common sense as well as evidence from
social psychological experiments (Lord, Ross, & Lepper, 1979) that people
are much more likely to look critically at the evidence for propositions that
they disbelieve. It also appears to fit the revised heuristic–analytic theory of
Evans (2006b), which characterizes heuristics like belief as providing default
responses that a slow analytic process or reasoning may or may not attempt
to change. However, this account has been challenged by recent studies meas-
uring latencies of evaluation of syllogisms. The claim that people do more
reasoning on problems with unbelievable conclusions seems to imply that they
should spend more time on such problems. Two recent studies show that this
is not so. If anything, people spend rather more time on syllogisms with believ-
able conclusions (Ball, Wade, & Quayle, 2006; Thompson, Striemer, Reikoff,
Gunter, & Campbell, 2003). Ball et al. used an eye-movement tracking system
that allowed them to differentiate locus of attention further. Fixations on the
premises of arguments following inspection of the conclusions were higher
for conflict than for nonconflict problems. This suggests that people are aware
of the conflict on invalid-believable as well as valid-unbelievable arguments,
another problematic finding for the dual-process theory.
A recent finding that clearly is consistent with dual-process theory is
that of Evans and Curtis-Holmes (2005). They used the standard syllogis-
tic evaluation paradigm with the same four categories of syllogisms as
those studied by Evans et al. (1983). A control condition was compared
with the performance of a group who were given a short time limit in
which to respond – known as the speeded-task method. Under speeded-task
 90 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

conditions the belief bias effect was much stronger and the logic effect much
weaker. More significantly, the belief-by-logic interaction disappeared (see
Figure 4.2). If we imagine that the speeded condition allows insufficient time
for slower analytic processing to operate, then the selective scrutiny of
unbelievable conclusions will not take place, and the default belief heuristic
will dominate. Note that of the two conflict problems, valid-unbelievable
syllogisms increase in acceptance (according with logic) with free time
responding much more sharply than the acceptances of invalid-unbelievable
conclusions decline.
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The most recent account of belief bias is the Selective Processing model
(Evans, 2000; Evans, Handley, & Harper, 2001b; Klauer et al., 2000), an
account that is specifically focused on the syllogistic evaluation task and
linked to the conclusions of the study of Evans et al. (1999a) using abstract
syllogisms, described earlier. It will be recalled that the data of this study
suggested that most people considered only one mental model of the premises
and rarely looked for another. On this assumption, how would belief bias
work? The model posits both a heuristic and an analytic component to belief

Figure 4.2 Frequency of acceptance of syllogistic conclusions in the study of Evans and
Curtis-Holmes (2005).
 4. THE ROLE OF KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF IN REASONING 91

bias (see Figure 4.3). The default heuristic response is to accept believable and
to reject unbelievable conclusions. This explains the fact that belief biases
affect valid as well as invalid inferences and correspond to the assertion by
mental model theorists that there is a response bias element to belief bias
(Oakhill et al., 1989). If the analytic system intervenes, however, a single
mental simulation is carried out, which attempts to build only one mental
model of the premises. This process is also biased by the believability of the
conclusion, delivering the analytic component of belief bias. When the con-
clusion is believable, a search is carried out for a model that supports the
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conclusion and if successful the conclusion is accepted. If the conclusion is

unbelievable, a search is carried out for a model that refutes the conclusion
(supports its negation). If successful, the conclusion is rejected (see Figure 4.3).
While the default heuristic responses can produce only a main effect of
belief, the analytic process produces the interaction. When a conclusion is
valid, there is only one model to be found that supports the conclusion. Hence,
despite the motivated search, no further belief bias can occur. When it is
invalid, however, there exist models that both support and refute the conclu-
sion. This produces an enhanced belief bias effect on invalid-believable
arguments, leading to the observed belief-by-logic interaction. This model is
fully consistent with the heuristic–analytic theory and with the speeded-task
results of Evans and Curtis-Holmes (2005). Under speeded-task conditions,
there is little time for analytic intervention, and so the default heuristic belief

Figure 4.3 The selective processing model of belief bias.

 92 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

bias dominates and the belief-by-logic interaction disappears. Unlike the

Selective Scrutiny model, Selective Processing does not make the (falsified)
prediction that people will think longer about unbelievable conclusions. The
model works on the basis that analytic system intervention is equally likely
for both believable and unbelievable conclusions.
The Selective Processing model specifically accounts for belief bias in
the syllogistic evaluation paradigm where a conclusion is presented. The
model implies that the mental processing of syllogisms in this paradigm
should be substantially different from that in the production task, where there
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is no conclusion to bias the process of reasoning. While there is evidence of

belief bias in the syllogistic production task (Markovits & Nantel, 1989;
Oakhill & Johnson-Laird, 1985; Oakhill et al., 1989) the effect seems weaker
and can be harder to demonstrate than on the evaluation task (Barston,
1986). The recent study of Morley et al. (2004) is especially relevant to this
issue.
Morley et al. ran two experiments using the syllogistic evaluation task
and two using the production task. In the evaluation task experiments they
found the usual pattern of belief bias, but could find no evidence for figural
bias. Figural bias was reported by Johnson-Laird and Bara (1984) using
the syllogistic production task. When people spontaneously formulate con-
clusions to syllogistic premises, they are biased by the ordering of the
terms S, M and P as mentioned earlier, so that they tend to produce con-
clusions compatible rather than incompatible with the Figure. In their
production task experiments, Morley et al. replicated this effect, but in
those experiments there was no significant effect of belief bias. This study
hence suggests that the mental processing of syllogisms is strongly affected
by the presence of a conclusion to be evaluated. In the absence of a conclu-
sion, people reason forward from the premises. In its presence they start by
inspecting the conclusion, and any attempt to reason is shaped by it. However,
we still have to account for the fact that some studies show belief bias on the
production task.
If people simply reason forward from the premises, it seems there should
be no belief bias as they do not know in advance whether the model they
generate will support a believable or unbelievable conclusion. However, any
model that will support an unbelievable conclusion has to be built upon at least
one unbelievable premise, and this may block the reasoning process, since
people are reluctant to draw conclusions from syllogisms with unbelievable
premises (Thompson, 1996). There are other possible explanations. For ex-
ample, people might construct a model and find that it implies an unbelievable
conclusion and think they have made a mistake. Such a model would not
satisfy, so they may attempt to generate another. It is also possible that pro-
visional conclusions spontaneously occur to people when thinking about the
general content of the syllogisms and, as with the Selective Processing model,
 4. THE ROLE OF KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF IN REASONING 93

they try to generate models that include believable and exclude unbelievable
conclusions generated in this way.
In this section, the literature on belief bias in syllogistic reasoning has been
considered in some detail. However, it should be noted that there is also
widespread evidence of belief bias effects in cognitive and social psychology
on a range of cognitive tasks (Klayman, 1995), but this lies outside the scope
of the current review. For example, people are biased by prior beliefs in
statistical and scientific reasoning problems (Klaczynski, 2000) and in reason-
ing about causal relations (Fugelsang & Thompson, 2003). The latter authors
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actually propose a dual-processing account of belief bias in causal inference

that has a very similar structure to the heuristic–analytic theory of Evans
(2006b) as applied in the current book. They argue that beliefs are rapidly
and automatically recruited and then shape and restrict efforts at analytic
reasoning about the causal relations that follow. I now turn to consideration
of how beliefs influence performance in another major paradigm in the
psychology of reasoning: the inferences that people are willing to draw from
conditional statements.

THE ROLE OF BELIEF IN CONDITIONAL

REASONING
The great majority of studies of the belief bias effect have used syllogistic
reasoning, manipulated belief in the conclusion and employed strong deduct-
ive reasoning instructions. Under these conditions, any effect of belief on
reasoning is technically a normative bias, due to the use of the deduction
paradigm. However, as stated earlier, it is not a bias in ordinary everyday
reasoning to take account of beliefs when reasoning. In terms of achieving
one’s goals, it is highly adaptive to contextualize everyday problems with
regard to prior belief. If we look at studies of how knowledge and belief
affect conditional inference, the studies differ somewhat from those in the
syllogistic reasoning literature. First, most relevant studies have manipulated
the effect of belief in the major premise (the conditional statement) rather
than in the conclusion given. Second, the kinds of instructions used have
been varied quite a lot in these studies.
There are numerous studies of the way in which knowledge influences
people’s tendency to accept or reject each of the four conditional inferences
MP, DA, AC and MT as defined in Chapter 3 (see Table 3.2). As with studies
on the belief bias effect in syllogistic reasoning, content strongly influences
conditional reasoning even when strict deductive reasoning instructions are
applied (see Evans & Over, 2004, for a recent review). Thompson (1994, 2000)
describes these effects in terms of sufficiency and necessity. When we assert
that “if p then q” we may intend to mean that knowing p is sufficient to infer
q (Modus Ponens), and we may also mean that p is necessary for q, in which
 94 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

case we can also infer q from p (Affirmation of the Consequent). If p is both

sufficient and necessary for q then the statement is a biconditional, equivalent
to “if and only if p then q”.
The terms “sufficiency” and “necessity” are taken from a system known as
modal logic, but are used in the psychological literature in a rather loose sense
to refer to the beliefs that people hold about the terms p and q in a realistic
conditional statement. In fact, it turns out that there are two different ways
of thinking about this, one probabilistic and one all-or-none. I will take the
all-or-none version first as this has a longer history of study and is also
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consistent with the popular mental model theory of conditionals. Recall that
the model theory proposes that people will draw an inference unless they find
a counterexample to it. The model theory also uses an extensional semantics,
so that the meaning of a conditional is the set of possibilities that it allows, a
set that can be modified by prior knowledge by the mechanism of pragmatic
modulation (Evans et al., 2005b; Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 2002). Consider the
sentences:

If the key is turned then the car’s engine will start. 4.5

If it rains then the sky is cloudy. 4.6

In the model theory, by default people represent only one state of affairs
in which the antecedent is true, the one where the consequent is true also.
So they should make the MP inference form 4.5 from the assumption that the
key is turned to the conclusion that the engine starts. However, someone
asked to do this might call to mind a counterexample. Say they remember a
time when they left their lights on and the battery went flat. On that occasion
turning the key failed to start the engine. If they attend to such a counter-
example they might refuse to make the MP inference, even though it is
universally endorsed when abstract problems are used. What authors like
Cummins et al. (Cummins, Lubart, Alksnis, & Rist, 1991) and Thompson
(1994) mean by “low-sufficiency” conditionals are ones where these kinds of
counterexamples – also know as disabling conditions – come readily to mind.
High-sufficiency conditionals are ones like 4.6 where few disabling conditions
can be generated. The method involves having one group of participants
attempt to generate counterexamples for a particular set of sentences and
then having another group draw inferences from them.
What the authors of these papers predict and observe is that MP rates
drop when low sufficiency conditionals are used. MT rates drop also because
these are valid inferences that require the conditional relation to hold, no
matter what your theory of how MT is made. If the instructions to these
experiments are strictly deductive, as they sometimes are, then we could con-
sider this to be a form of belief bias. Beliefs are interfering with a person’s
 4. THE ROLE OF KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF IN REASONING 95

ability to draw valid logical inferences. The only problem with this argument
is that exactly similar effects can be observed on the invalid inferences,
DA and AC. Whether or not these are endorsed depends on the perceived
necessity of p for q. Consider the following conditionals:

If the tomato is red then it is edible. 4.7

If you take up running then you will lose weight. 4.8

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Conditional 4.7 would be high-necessity conditional for most people (unless

you like fried green tomatoes). So you would be inclined to infer that a
tomato that is not red is inedible (DA) and that a tomato that is edible is red
(AC). However, 4.8 is low necessity. Although taking up running probably
would make you lose weight, we all know there is another way of doing it
(eating less) even if we are not too keen on the idea. So in this case, you would
likely refuse the DA and AC inferences. The reason that it is rather tricky to
call this belief bias is that people tend to make DA and AC with abstract
materials when there are no beliefs in play (Evans et al., 1995a). So the effect
of a low-necessity conditional is more like a belief debias. This is where we
can see the problem of defining bias by normative standards such as logic.
Adherents of mental logic (Braine & O’Brien, 1998a) argue that different
mental processes underlie valid inferences, like MP and MT, than fallacies like
DA and AC, but it is hard to justify this assertion on my reading of the psy-
chological literature. Both seem receptive to the same kind of psychological
factors, as in the examples discussed here.
In terms of what it means to believe a conditional statement, the suf-
ficiency of p for q seems to be the critical factor. However, this is where the
probabilistic view comes in. With an extensional semantics, like that of the
model theory, we must either represent or not represent the counterexample
case – p and not-q – as being a possibility. If we do not represent this case, we
make MP; if we do, then we withhold MP. However, a view that is gaining
popularity in the literature is that we can believe a conditional statement
to a degree – in other words assign it a subjective probability of being true
(Liu, Lo, & Wu, 1996; Oaksford, Chater, & Larkin, 2000; Over & Evans,
2003). If asked, people will give a rating on a scale from low to high belief/
probability (using the full range), and this degree of belief in turn will predict
their tendency to endorse the MP and MT inferences (Dieussaert, Schaeken,
& d’Ydewalle, 2002; George, 1995, 1997, 1999; Liu et al., 1996; Stevenson &
Over, 1995).
Only recently have we learnt what probability people use when deciding
their belief in a real-world conditional statement. In Chapter 3, we saw that
one consequence of the suppositional theory of conditionals (Evans &
Over, 2004) is that people should assign the probability of “if p then q” as
 96 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

the conditional probability P(q|p) due to use of the Ramsey test (suppose
p, evaluate q). I also referred to experiments on abstract conditional state-
ments, where people were given frequency distributions. We have since
developed a new paradigm for study of the probability of realistic, everyday
conditionals. We call this the probabilistic truth table task, and the method
has been applied to real-world causal conditionals by Over et al. (in press).
In a typical experiment, participants are asked to consider conditional state-
ments of a causal nature that describe events that may or may not occur in
the next five years. As an example:
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If Queen Elizabeth dies than Prince Charles will become King. 4.9

It is easy enough to ask people to rate the probability of a list of such

statements. The tricky part is how to decide what underlying probabilities
predict this, since they are all subjective. Clearly there is no frequency distri-
bution that can be supplied for a conditional like 4.9. In the probabilistic
truth table task what we do is ask people to rate the subjective probability
of each of the four truth table cases – that is, the following four conjunctive
statements:

pq Queen Elizabeth dies and Prince Charles becomes King

p¬q Queen Elizabeth dies and Prince Charles does not become King
¬pq Queen Elizabeth does not die and Prince Charles becomes King
¬p¬q Queen Elizabeth does not die and Prince Charles does not become
King.

Participants are required to assign a percentage probability to each state-

ment such that they total 100 per cent. From these four probabilities we can
then compute any probabilities that may be relevant to belief in the con-
ditional statement. What we actually did was to calculate three statistically
independent predictor probabilities:

P(p) = P(pq) + P(p¬q)

P(q|p) = P(pq)/[P(pq) + P(p¬q)]
P(q|¬p) = P(¬pq)/[(P(¬pq) + P(¬p¬q)].

We then performed multiple regression analyses across our sentences using

the rated probability of the conditional statement (collected in a separate task)
as the dependent variable. We found first that belief in the conditional state-
ment is independent of P(p). For example, in the above case, the subjective
probability that Queen Elizabeth would die in the next five years had no
bearing at all on the rated probability of the conditional statement. (Note
that if the conditional were a material conditional, it should be rated as
 4. THE ROLE OF KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF IN REASONING 97

more probable when p is less likely. This is because material conditionals

are always true when their antecedents are false.) The main finding was that
the regression weighting for conditional probability P(q|p) was very high,
just as it should be according to the suppositional theory of conditionals
described in Chapter 3. If people decide the truth of the conditional by a
mental simulation in which the truth of its antecedent is supposed, then
clearly belief in the first two statements of the probabilistic truth table
task should be the main predictor. For example if people assign some
probability to the case in which Charles does not succeed Elizabeth (say
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because he dies first) then this proportionately lowers their belief in the
conditional.
So we know that belief in conditionals largely reflects the conditional
probability P(q|p) and that this belief in turn strongly influences the tendency
to draw MP and MT. The influence of belief on conditional reasoning can,
however, be attenuated by the use of strong deductive reasoning instructions
(George, 1995; Stevenson & Over, 1995), which makes sense in terms of dual-
process theory, since people instructed to assume the truth of the premises
may reset the default probabilities supplied by the belief system by conscious
effort. How is this conditional belief related to retrieval of counterexamples?
Do people judge P(q|¬p) simply on the basis of how many counterexample
cases of ¬pq cases they can think of, in line with the measures used by
Cummins, Thompson, and others? Not so, it appears. Recent studies have
shown that conditional reasoning is sensitive to strength of association of
counterexamples to both valid and fallacious conditional inferences (Quinn
& Markovits, 1998, 2002).
Dual-process theories of reasoning have tended to put emphasis on the
ability of the analytic system to perform abstract, decontextualized reasoning
(Stanovich, 1999). However, evidence is accumulating from the studies of
conditional reasoning that the analytic system is heavily involved in con-
textualized reasoning. De Neys, Schaeken, and d’Ydewalle (2005a) have
shown that the ease of retrieval of counterexamples to conditionals is
dependent on working-memory resources, as measured both by individual
differences in working-memory span and by the use of secondary tasks. The
findings hold for counterexamples to both valid and invalid inferences. This
leads to an intriguing question. Will participants with high working-memory
spans suppress more valid as well as fallacious conditional inferences? The
problem is that high working-memory capacity is very highly correlated with
cognitive ability (Colom et al., 2004), and high-ability people have generally
been shown to be better at finding logically correct answers to reasoning
problems (Stanovich, 1999). De Neys et al. (2005b) hypothesized that as
higher ability people are more likely to understand the instructions to
make validity judgements, they will in fact use the executive aspect of their
working-memory resources to inhibit counterexamples to valid inferences (see
 98 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

Markovits & Barrouillet, 2002, for a similar hypothesis). Consistent with

Stanovich’s work they in fact found that participants with high working-
memory span accepted more valid (MP, MT) and fewer invalid (DA, AC)
inferences when reasoning with ordinary causal conditionals, implying active
inhibition in the former cases.
From the discussion of the belief bias effect in syllogistic reasoning earlier,
it appears that there is an influence of belief on both heuristic and analytic
processing. Recent studies suggest that the same may be true in conditional
reasoning. In this section, I have referred both to studies that predict con-
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ditional inferences from direct ratings of belief or probability in the relation

between p and q (e.g., Dieussaert et al., 2002) and from studies that measure
availability of counterexamples (e.g., Cummins et al., 1991). Are these two
ways of measuring the same thing, or is there a heuristic-level intuition of
belief strength on the one hand, and an analytic-system level of explicit
consideration of counterexamples on the other? They are difficult to separate,
but Verschueren, Schaeken, and d’Ydewalle (2005a) found that likelihood
ratings better predicted reasoning on fast trials and counterexample ratings
better on slow trials. Since heuristic processing is faster, they suggested that
beliefs may operate through the heuristic system in a graduated manner,
or through the analytic system in an all-or-none manner more consistent
with the mental model theory (Evans et al., 2005b). They have also offered
evidence from verbal protocol analysis for this hypothesis (Verschueren,
Schaeken, & d’Ydewalle, 2005b).
It is clear that the way in which people reason about realistic conditional
statements is very strongly influenced by the beliefs evoked by the content
and context of the problem presented. There is also much evidence for dual
processing in such tasks. It seems that heuristic-level processes retrieve belief
relations that can be expressed as judgements of belief or probability in the
relation between p and q and other relations (q to p, not-p to not-q, etc.) and
that these beliefs affect reasoning. However, it is unlikely that the data can be
explained by a single-level probabilistic treatment of conditionals of the kind
proposed by Oaksford and Chater (2001). We know that deductive effort,
leading to a differentiation between valid MP and MT inferences and falla-
cious DA and AC inferences, can be induced both by use of strong deductive
reasoning instructions and by participants of higher cognitive ability or
working-memory capacity. There are also now a number of studies showing
that analytic-level reasoning is involved in the processing of contextualized
reasoning, as both the retrieval and application of counterexamples to con-
ditional inferences is related to the capacity and inhibition properties of cen-
tral working memory.
 4. THE ROLE OF KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF IN REASONING 99

DOMAIN-SPECIFIC VERSUS DOMAIN-GENERAL

REASONING: THE SELECTION TASK DEBATE
The abstract Wason selection task was discussed in Chapter 2. Actually it
should really be called the abstract, indicative selection task. Although authors
commonly classify selection task research as involving either an abstract or
a thematic form, the tasks really fall into four classes:

A. Abstract indicative
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B. Abstract deontic
C. Thematic indicative
D. Thematic deontic.

The great majority of experiments on the selection task have been of either
Type A or Type D, which means that any comparison between them is poten-
tially confounded, something that went unrecognized for many years prior to
the paper of Manktelow and Over (1991). The difference between indicative
and deontic conditionals is that the former refer to relationships in the world
that might or might not hold, while the latter refer to rules and regulations.
Consider the following statements:

If you are hungry then you will eat that apple. 4.10

If you are hungry then you may eat that apple. 4.11

The example in 4.10 is an indicative conditional that effectively constitutes a

prediction about your behaviour. Supposing that you are hungry; your eating
behaviour will show whether the prediction was true or false. However, 4.11 – a
deontic conditional – is a social rule that gives you permission to eat the apple.
You cannot say that 4.11 is true or false. Deontic conditionals are either
permissions or obligations, often (but not necessarily) containing the modal
terms “may” and “must”, respectively. An example of a deontic obligation is:

If you ride a motor bike then you must wear a crash helmet. 4.12

In the case of 4.12, you could not say that someone riding a bike and not
wearing a helmet (the p¬q case) is proving the rule false; he is simply failing
to obey it. Deontic obligations may or may not have legal force, as 4.12 does
in many countries. In ones where it does not, 4.12 might still be a social obli-
gation, for example, when this rule is given by a parent to a teenage child as a
condition for being allowed a motor bike.
Ironically, the first demonstration that thematic content could facilitate
performance on the Wason selection task used a thematic but indicative rule
 100 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

(Wason & Shapiro, 1971). The rule concerned journeys made by the experi-
menter, who claimed that “Every time I go to Manchester I travel by train.”
The cards represented journeys with a destination on one side and means of
transport on the other, with the exposed sides reading:

Manchester Leeds Train Car

In this study, people did select p and not-q cards (Manchester and Car)
more often than on the control letters and numbers task. However, sub-
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sequent research showed that these materials produce only a weak facilitation
that later studies often failed to replicate (e.g., Griggs & Cox, 1982).
Much research on this problem has shown that strong and reliable facilita-
tion of p and not-q card choices requires problems that are both deontic and
thematic in nature (see Evans et al., 1993; Evans & Over, 2004; Manktelow,
1999, for reviews of this literature). A good example is the drinking-age
problem (Griggs & Cox, 1982) in which people are told to imagine they
are police officers checking people drinking in a bar. They are then given a
rule such as, “if a person is drinking beer then they are over 18 years of age”.
The four cards represented drinkers, showing the beverage on one side and
the age on the other: “beer”, “coke”, “22 years of age”, “16 years of age”.
This problem really is easy: most people pick “beer” (p) and “16 years of
age” (not-q). In this case, people may have direct experience of the rule, but
research shows that permission rules can facilitate reasoning even in contexts
with which people are unfamiliar (see Evans et al., 1993). On such deontic
rules we can still say that the correct choices are the p and not-q cards where
rules have the form “if p then (must) q”, and the instruction is to find cards
that violate (not falsify) the rule. However, the deontic and indicative selection
tasks cannot be described as logically equivalent.
The striking content effects in the selection task have made it a testing
ground for a debate about whether reasoning mechanisms are domain-specific
or domain-general. The earliest theory claiming a domain-specific mechanism
was the proposal of pragmatic reasoning schemas by Cheng and Holyoak
(1985; see also Cheng, Holyoak, Nisbett, & Oliver, 1986; Holyoak & Cheng,
1995). They argued that people acquire schemas for reasoning about deontic
rules – permission and obligations – and that these schemas facilitate logical
performance. For example, the schemas would contain production rules
such as “if you do not fulfil the precondition then you cannot take the action”
that would cue choices of the not-q card such as a person in a bar who is
under 18 years of age. This theory has been criticized on several grounds (see
Evans & Over, 2004, pp. 83–85) but has attracted nothing like the storm of
protest surrounding the claim that deontic selection tasks can be solved using
innate Darwinian algorithms.
Evolutionary psychology entered into the psychology of reasoning with
 4. THE ROLE OF KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF IN REASONING 101

the paper of Cosmides (1989), with ideas that were swiftly popularized as
their form of evolutionary psychology gained popularity (Barkow, Cosmides,
& Tooby, 1992; Pinker, 1997) as well as notoriety in the 1990s. This school of
work, which I will capitalize as Evolutionary Psychology, is a form of cogni-
tive psychology that applies a priori evolutionary theory to paint a picture of
the mind as “massively modular” (Cosmides & Tooby, 1992; Samuels, 1998;
Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). In fact, it is quite a narrow part of the discipline
more generally known as evolutionary psychology (Barrett, Dunbar, &
Lycett, 2002; Caporael, 2001). The notion of a cognitive module seems to
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have been derived from Fodor’s (1983) theory of mind, in that it is regarded
as domain-specific with dedicated or “information encapsulated” cognitive
processes. However, Fodor applied this concept only to input systems such
as vision and language and not to higher order reasoning, which he regards
as part of a domain-general system for higher cognition. Fodor, who effec-
tively has a dual-process theory of mind, is hence one of the leading critics of
massive modularity (Fodor, 2001).
Tooby and Cosmides (1992) argued on a priori grounds of evolutionary
theory that domain-general cognition could not have evolved because it would
be easily out competed by domain-specific mechanisms of thought. This
extreme position was never likely to be sustainable in light of the widespread
evidence of general systems of learning and reasoning and has been at
least partially retracted in more recent writing (Cosmides & Tooby, 2000).
However, it inspired a research programme seeking evidence of domain-
specific mechanisms in higher human thought that introduced a particular
methodology. The method is to find two forms of a problem, A and B, such
that (a) each has the same logical form X, and (b) only A can be solved by
application of an innate cognitive module. Performance on A should be
greatly superior to that on B. This method has been applied in two main
areas: facilitatory effects on the selection task and the use of frequency
information in statistical reasoning (see Chapter 6).
Cosmides (1989) argued that all successful facilitatory contexts used in
selection task research involved social contracts that imposed obligations. She
further argued that people would have evolved innate Darwinian algorithms
for reasoning about social contracts that would include a search for cheaters
algorithm. In order to test this she constructed problems in unfamiliar scen-
arios. For example, a culture is described in which men crave cassava root
(an aphrodisiac) but are only allowed to eat it if they are married, indicated
by a tattoo on their face. The rule used was “if a man eats cassava root then he
must have a tattoo on his face”, leading to correct selections of cards showing
cassava root (p) and no tattoo (not-q). However, there have been numerous
critiques of these experiments published (see, for example, Buller, 2005; Cheng
& Holyoak, 1989; Evans & Over, 1996a; Fodor, 2000; Over, 2003; Sperber
& Girotto, 2002). One common objection is that the studies were poorly
 102 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

controlled in that comparisons were made to “control” selection tasks that

were in fact indicative rather than deontic. Hence, A and B did not have the
same logical form X.
The A, B, X method actually appears too weak to test the hypothesis for
which it was designed. Suppose that the experiments were perfectly controlled
and that A was better than B whenever people could search for cheaters. The
problem is that detecting cheaters is adaptive in the modern social world as
well as in the ancient environment of evolution, and so this behaviour could
have been shaped by social learning within the lifetime of the individual.
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Hence, evidence for domain-specific reasoning is not evidence for innateness. It

is also a fallacy to think that domain-specific cognition is necessarily generated
by domain-specific mechanisms (Almor, 2003). For example, knowledge
that is acquired experientially through implicit learning is known to be
domain-specific (Berry & Dienes, 1993).
Some of the strongest criticisms of social contract theory have come from
authors proposing that content effects on the selection task reflect domain-
general mechanisms. There are two main theories of this type, one based
on decision theory principles (Evans & Over, 1996a; Manktelow & Over,
1991; Oaksford & Chater, 1994) and one based on relevance theory (Oaksford
& Chater, 1995; Sperber, Cara, & Girotto, 1995). In the decision theory
approach, people are assumed to choose cards on the deontic selection task in
a way that is rational according to the goals they are pursuing. Manktelow
and Over (1991) were able to provide a counterexample to the claim of
Cosmides that all facilitatory contexts involved cheater detection. They
found that people chose correct cards on a rule such as “Every time I clean up
spilt blood I wear rubber gloves.” Evolutionary Psychologists responded
by arguing that they had discovered a new module for hazard avoidance
or precaution leading to a whole new line of experimentation (Fiddick,
Cosmides, & Tooby, 2000). In support of this, Evolutionary Psychologists
have recently claimed evidence for neurological differentiation of reasoning
about precautions and social contracts (Fiddick, Spampinato, & Grafman,
2005; Stone, Cosmides, Tooby, Kroll, & Knight, 2002).
The relevance theory of Sperber et al. (1995) proposes that conditional
statements can be processed superficially or deeply according to the context.
The deepest level indicates the relevance of the not-q card, which is cued on
the easy deontic versions. The proponents of this approach recently made a
very strong criticism of social contract theory (Sperber & Girotto, 2002).
They pointed out that successful forms involve an explicit cue in the scenario
that people should be looking for cheaters. It is quite clear in a given context
what a cheater is: say a person under 18 years of age who is drinking beer.
Once this cue is given, Sperber and Girotto argue, the selection task is no
longer a reasoning problem but reduces to a simple classification task, some-
thing they demonstrate with some new experiments. If you already know that
 4. THE ROLE OF KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF IN REASONING 103

you need to find all cards with an alcoholic drink and a person under 18 years
of age, for example, no reasoning about the conditional statement is needed
to pick out the cards that show these values.

Implications for dual-process theory

According to dual-process theory, reasoning has both domain-specific (heur-
istic) and domain-general (analytic) aspects. For example, in discussing the
belief bias work earlier, logical success was attributed to deductive effort via
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the analytic system while the main effect of belief was due to direct cueing
of believable conclusions by the heuristic system. Now there is no question
that people think about selection tasks differently when the content and
context are changed. On many of the successful deontic versions, the correct
solution seems quite easy and obvious because, as Sperber and Girotto say,
little if any analytic reasoning is required. Where knowledge strongly cues the
correct choices, these selection tasks are rather like the no-conflict syllogisms:
believable-valid and unbelievable-invalid. Performance on such syllogisms is
consistently high. The problem cases are where belief and logic come into
conflict. Is there an equivalent of this in the selection task research?
There are comparable versions of the selection task in which pragmatic
cues and logical structure are put into conflict. For example, Cosmides (1989)
used a switched social contract rule. Using a similar context to before, the rule
“if a man has a tattoo on his face then he eats cassava root” will still generate
selections of “cassava root” and “no tattoo” even though these are now the
not-p and q cards. Similar findings have been demonstrated with perspective
shifts (Gigerenzer & Hug, 1992; Manktelow & Over, 1991; Politzer &
Nguyen-Xuan, 1992). For example, if a mother says to her son, “if you tidy
up your room you may go out to play”, the son is cheating on the rule if
he goes out to play without tidying up his room, and these cards are chosen
from the mother’s perspective. If the son’s perspective is given, however,
the mother is cheating if he tidies his room and is not let out to play, and
accordingly the card choices switch even though the conditional statement is
unaltered (Manktelow & Over, 1991). Thus it seems that heuristic processes
dominate on realistic deontic selection tasks with little evidence of analytic or
logical reasoning.
On abstract selection tasks, there is evidence that the small minority who
can solve it are much higher in cognitive ability than nonsolvers (Stanovich &
West, 1998). In this large-scale study, the authors also showed that the rela-
tion between ability and performance on deontic selection tasks was very
much weaker. This suggests that analytic reasoning is required for solution of
the indicative but not the deontic selection task. Consistent with these con-
clusions are recent findings of De Neys (2006a), who used response latency as
an indicator of reasoning process, on the basis that heuristic processes are
 104 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

quicker. De Neys showed that on abstract indicative versions of the selection

task, correct card selections were associated with longer latencies than were
matching responses, consistent with the assumption of analytic and heuristic
process control, respectively. On the deontic selection, by contrast, correct
selections were the quickest, as might be expected if these are cued by rapid
pragmatic processes.
The findings of a more recent study of individual differences on the selec-
tion task by Newstead et al. (2004) were, however, somewhat different from
those of Stanovich and West (1998). In two experiments, Newstead et al.
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found a correlation of ability with performance for deontic and not indicative
selection tasks. However, it turned out that the samples of participants used
in these experiments were of unusually low cognitive ability for university
students. In a third experiment, using higher ability participants, the pattern
was similar to that observed by Stanovich and West. It is possible that the
population at large really has three groups: (a) low ability who are poor at
both tasks; (b) medium ability who are good at the deontic task; and (c) high
ability who are good at both tasks. The results make sense if Stanovich and
West mostly sampled groups (b) and (c) while Newstead et al. (first two
experiments) were mostly sampling (a) and (b).
The findings of Newstead et al. are somewhat at odds with the claim that
System 1 is a universal cognitive system unrelated to heritable differences in
intelligence (Evans, 2003). They are more consistent with the claims of some
developmental psychologists that System 1 (heuristic, experiential, pragmatic)
processes develop through childhood and are related to working memory
capacity and cognitive ability (Klaczynski, Schuneman, & Daniel, 2004;
Markovits & Barrouillet, 2002; Markovits, Fleury, Quinn, & Venet, 1998).
What seems to be developing is the efficiency of retrieval of relevant prior
knowledge. As developmental studies also make clear, however, the ability
correctly to utilize such knowledge to block invalid inferences rather than
to exhibit belief biases is related to analytic reasoning ability, which develops
in parallel. There are clear links here with the studies of conditional inference
discussed earlier in which we saw that the analytic system and working
memory were involved in contextualized reasoning.
As indicated in Chapter 1, while the heuristic–analytic theory is a dual-
process theory, it is not framed at the level of the more ambitious dual-system
theories (Evans, 2003), which posit, for example, an evolutionarily old System
1 shared with animals and a uniquely human System 2. In fact, System 1 is
not really one system at all, but a whole collection of implicit subsystems
(Evans, 2006a; Stanovich, 2004). The heuristic processes with which this
book is concerned are mostly pragmatic, relating to language and belief
systems that are modern human developments rather than older learning
systems of the kind discussed, for example, by Reber (1993). Although these
pragmatic processes are unconscious and automatic in the selection and
 4. THE ROLE OF KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF IN REASONING 105

retrieval of knowledge, they deliver their outputs for conscious processing

via working memory. It is not therefore surprising that the ability to reason
about familiar as well as abstract content is linked to analytic reasoning and
cognitive ability.
How does dual-process theory stand on the issue of whether reasoning
is domain-specific or domain-general? I would argue that unless strong
evidence to the contrary can be shown – for example, implying an innate
cognitive module – both heuristic and analytic processes are domain-general
mechanisms, with two caveats. Note first that the term “heuristic” is used here
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in a narrower sense than the catch-all “System 1”, which might well include
domain-specific modules. Second, while the heuristic processes responsible
for selecting and retrieving relevant belief and knowledge may be dedicated
to that function (and domain-specific in that very broad sense) they are gen-
eral with regards to the content and contexts about which we learn and think.
In this respect, I agree with much that has been written about relevance
theory by Sperber and Wilson (1995). The fact that our knowledge may be
“modular” in the sense of being context-bound does not mean that a content-
specific mechanism (such as a cheater-detection module) was involved. As
noted earlier, experiential learning tends to lead to context-specific know-
ledge (Berry & Dienes, 1993). However, the mechanism by which such know-
ledge is retrieved and applied to a current problem would seem to be equally
general.
This having been said, it is clear that analytic processes are distinct from
the heuristic processes that provide content. It would be a mistake to think of
analytic reasoning as some kind of mental logic that is inherently abstract
and decontextualized in nature, as it clearly is involved in contextualized
reasoning. However, the evidence is also clear in showing that abstract and
logical reasoning, when necessitated by the task given, requires the highest
levels of analytic reasoning ability. That is why performance on such tasks
takes the longest time to develop in children and is most marked in adults
of the highest cognitive ability.

CONCLUSIONS
The studies reviewed in this chapter are consistent with the two fundamental
cognitive biases that affect reasoning and judgement. The first bias (of the
heuristic system) is that we rapidly and automatically contextualize problems
in the light of prior knowledge and belief (see also, Stanovich, 1999). This
prompts default belief-based responses and also restricts the scope of analytic
reasoning by focusing attention on content that appears relevant in the light
of prior knowledge. This chapter has been primarily about these belief-based
heuristic processes, which underlie belief bias effects in syllogistic and condi-
tional reasoning and are responsible for apparently domain-specific reasoning
 106 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

on the deontic selection task. The second fundamental bias (of the analytic
system) to satisfice on a single mental model without consideration of altern-
atives has been in evidence also. For example, we can explain the main effect
of belief bias in syllogistic reasoning in purely heuristic terms, but we need
the notion of selective analytic processing to explain the belief-by-logic inter-
action. Similarly, recent research on contextualized conditional inference
indicates that content effects operate at both the heuristic and analytic levels.
The thematic and deontic selection task, as with the abstract version discussed
in Chapter 2, is apparently dominated by heuristic processes that cue rele-
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vance of the cards that are typically chosen. This does not indicate an absence
of analytic reasoning on this task, however, as has often been assumed.
Rather it reflects the fundamental bias of the analytic system to accept what
appears relevant unless there is good reason to reject it. People do attempt to
reason on the selection task, but only those of very high cognitive ability
appear to do so to much effect.
Dual-processing accounts of reasoning have been around since the 1970s
but, as this chapter shows, are subject to continual revision and refinement.
By contrast, dual-processing accounts of judgement and decision making –
the topics of the following two chapters – are in their infancy. However, this
book is predicated on the strong claim that all forms of hypothetical thinking
are subject to the same basic principles. The following chapters will assess the
degree to which theoretical ideas primarily developed in the psychology of
reasoning can be generalized to other domains in which higher cognitive
processes are studied.
 CHAPTER FIVE

Dual processes in judgement and

decision making
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In this chapter, the main literature on the psychology of judgement and

decision making (JDM) will be examined for evidence of dual processing and
the principles of hypothetical thinking. Despite the obvious connections
with the psychology of reasoning in terms of higher mental processes, this
endeavour is not as straightforward as might be expected. Unlike the psy-
chology of reasoning, the study of decision making is interdisciplinary and
not firmly situated within cognitive psychology. Much research on decision
making is conducted by psychologists and those trained in other disciplines
within business schools where links to economics and applications in public
policy are considered more important than the investigation of cognitive
processes. Psychological studies in this area have also traditionally been linked
very closely with questions about normative theory and rationality. For ex-
ample, the rational theory of choice – subjective expected utility (see Chapter 1)
– has dominated much of the huge literature on this topic, albeit as an ideal
from which departures are regularly demonstrated (for recent reviews, see
Hastie, 2001; Koehler & Harvey, 2004; LeBeouf & Shafir, 2005). The rational
model involves the notions of consequentialism and optimization. That is
to say, people should analyse a decision problem by calculating the con-
sequences of alternative actions. They should also attempt to optimize
choice by maximizing expected utility across all available choices, analysed
to whatever depth is feasible (see Chapter 1).
If rational decision making is so defined, then people are irrational, as
endless violations of the principles of decision theory are to be found in the

107
 108 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

psychological literature. Unfortunately, knowing what people do not do is not

necessarily very informative about the cognitive processes that underlie their
choices and decisions. One approach to this problem is to emphasize the
limited cognitive capacity of human beings, the “bounded rationality” of
Simon (1982) from which the satisficing principle of hypothetical thinking
theory is defined. Advocates of the bounded rationality approach include
Anderson (1990), Oaksford and Chater (1998), and Gigerenzer (1996). For
example, the last has initiated a major research programme on the study of
“fast and frugal” heuristics that people are said to employ in order to generate
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many effective (though less than optimal) decisions on the basis of simple
rules that make minimal demands on cognitive resources (Gigerenzer & Todd,
1999). Such decision making would appear to lie in the heuristic system of
the current framework and be intuitive (unreflective) in nature, but there
are dual-process issues here that I will discuss later. Such heuristics can be
“adaptive” if they have been shaped by evolution or experiential learning
on the basis of past success and failure. While Gigerenzer and colleagues
have emphasized the adaptive nature of heuristics, the “heuristics and biases”
programme of Kahneman and Tversky (Gilovich et al., 2002; Kahneman
et al., 1982) has, in contrast, more often emphasized the situations in which
heuristics lead to biases, putting the two camps into apparent conflict.
The manner in which people make their judgements and decisions is a
matter of central interest to the theory that motivates this book but I will focus
on work that I believe illuminates the cognitive processes involved. Hence,
although I will give some coverage of the major topics in this field, there is no
attempt to balance this chapter to reflect the extent of published literature or
the perceived importance of work within the field. After all, this volume is an
essay and not a textbook, and its purpose is to develop understanding of the
nature of hypothetical thinking. From this viewpoint and as heuristic–
analytic theory would lead one to expect, decision making can and often is
performed without conscious reflection on the consequences of choices
(Baron, 1994). Involvement of the analytic system in real-world decision
making is bound to be limited as this system is slow, capacity limited and
essentially able to attend to only one thing at a time. However, we would also
expect that while judgements can be made “intuitively”, they can also reflect
intervention of the analytic system, just as when belief biases are overcome
by an effort at deductive reasoning. Recently, leading psychologists in the
field of judgement and decision making have started to explore this idea.

DUAL-PROCESS THEORIES OF JUDGEMENT AND

DECISION MAKING
In line with the lesser attention given to cognitive processes generally, the
psychology of judgement and decision making (a tradition known for short
 5. DUAL PROCESSES IN JUDGEMENT AND DECISION MAKING 109

as JDM) has included comparatively little discussion of dual processes com-

pared with research in reasoning (Evans, 2003) and social cognition (Chaiken
& Trope, 1999). For example, in the Blackwell Handbook of Judgement and
Decision Making (Koehler & Harvey, 2004), which provides a recent and
eclectic review of these topics, the subject index identifies only 9 of the 600-plus
pages in which this approach is discussed. I find this extraordinary since
it is fairly evident that if dual systems of cognition dominate our thought
and judgement to the extent that reasoning and social cognition researchers
have identified, they must be equally strongly implicated in the behaviour
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studied by JDM researchers. Fortunately, there are signs that the situation is
changing, led by that most influential of figures, Daniel Kahneman, in his
most recent writings.
Kahneman and Frederick (2002, 2005) endorse the generic dual-process
framework as favoured by thinking and reasoning researchers (see Evans,
2003), adopting Stanovich’s (1999) general labels of Systems 1 and 2. It is
interesting that their application of dual-process theory is similar to that of
the revised heuristic–analytic theory (Evans, 2006b) in that they emphasize
the default nature of heuristic (System 1) processes with which analytic
(System 2) processes may or may not intervene. For example, they state that
“system 1 quickly proposes intuitive answers to judgement problems as they
arise [while] system 2 monitors the quality of these proposals, which it may
endorse, correct or override” (Kahneman & Frederick, 2005, p. 268). They
go on to talk of the two processes competing for control of a judgement, with
the probability of System 2 intervention being affected by its limited cognitive
capacity and the ability to attend to only one task at a time.
Kahneman and Frederick developed a theory of biases based on the idea
of attribute substitution: “a general feature of heuristic judgement [is that]
whenever the aspect of a judgemental object that one intends to judge . . . is less
readily assessed than a related property that yields a plausible answer . . . [the]
individual may unwittingly substitute the simpler assessment” (Kahneman
& Frederick, 2005, p. 269). This provides a link to the influential heuristics
and biases research programme of Kahneman and Tversky (Gilovich et al.,
2002; Kahneman et al., 1982) in which cognitive biases were regularly attrib-
uted to the use of heuristics such as representativeness or availability, which
were simple short-cuts to judgements that could lead people into systematic
error and bias. This kind of work is discussed in Chapter 6.
While all dual-process theorists envisage a distinction between processes
that are fast and automatic on the one hand and slow and controlled on the
other, they vary in the degree to which it is proposed that the systems are
autonomous and independent. The default-interventionist approach of the
heuristic–analytic theory, echoed by Kahneman and Frederick (2002) and by
Stanovich (1999), is not the only approach (see also Evans, in press). Some
theorists described the systems as two parallel styles of thinking that people
 110 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

may adopt. This is true of some of the theories that have been particularly
influential in social psychology, including the rational–experiential theory
(Epstein, 1994; Epstein & Pacini, 1999) and heuristic–systematic theory
(Chaiken, 1980; Chen & Chaiken, 1999) discussed in Chapter 7. Epstein, for
example, lists attributes for the experiential and rational systems that map on
to those common in dual-process theories of reasoning, such as the idea that
the experiential system evolved earlier and that the rational system is
uniquely human. However, he also talks of rational and experiential process-
ing styles that can be induced by experimental manipulations but that also
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correspond to stable personality characteristics that he measures by the

rational–experiential inventory or REI (Epstein, Pacini, Denes-Raj, & Heier,
1996). If he is right, then some people will make decisions based on intuitions
from past experience, whereas others will make them by rational analysis of
alternative actions and their consequences.
There is an important confusion to be avoided here. In terms of quantity,
the analytic system can meet very little of the cognitive demands on the brain
but in terms of quality it can do things that the heuristic system cannot. The
analytic system is required when we need to decontextualize problems and
examine their formal structure; it is involved whenever we engage in hypo-
thetical thinking, supposition or mental simulation; it is also needed when we
apply explicitly learnt rules. By contrast the heuristic system is massively
parallel and rapid, and its strength lies in identifying relevant prior knowledge
and belief that are then activated and made available for conscious process-
ing. This implies a cognitive architecture that cannot be conceived of in terms
of parallel thinking styles. For example, the analytic system could not func-
tion at all unless pragmatic processes in the heuristic system were delivering
content into consciousness on a continuous basis. At the same time, it is
undeniable that there are differences in thinking style that sound as though
they are related to Systems 1 and 2. Not only are these linked to individual
differences in personality, but they also seem to be strongly culturally influ-
enced. For example, there is considerable evidence that people in Western
culture have a more “analytic” thinking style while those of Eastern culture
are more “holistic” (Nisbett et al., 2001).
Dual-process theorists studying reasoning have become increasingly inter-
ested in the study of individual differences in the ability to solve cognitive
tasks and have extended their research into the domain of judgement and
decision making as well as that of deductive reasoning (for examples, see
Klaczynski & Cottrell, 2004; Klaczynski & Lavallee, 2005; Kokis et al., 2002;
Stanovich, 1999; Stanovich & West, 2000). These researchers have examined
both cognitive ability and cognitive style measures. In general (there are some
exceptions) those who are high in cognitive ability show greater normative
accuracy and less susceptibility to cognitive biases on tasks drawn from both
the reasoning and JDM literatures. This has been taken as evidence for dual
 5. DUAL PROCESSES IN JUDGEMENT AND DECISION MAKING 111

processing on the grounds that System 2 (but not System 1) processes are
related to heritable individual differences in general intelligence. However, the
same researchers have also shown that when residual variance is examined
(not attributable to ability) there is also evidence for dispositional factors
related to cognitive style. Some people are more able to reason analytically
than others, but independently of this, some people are also more inclined to
reason analytically.
The resolution of the apparent conflict between asymmetric cognitive archi-
tecture for the two systems with evidence of parallel thinking styles is actually
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quite straightforward. In essence, intuitive thinkers are people who like to go

with their “gut” feelings, while analytic thinkers are people who like to engage
in conscious reflection before making a decision. First, most theorists identify
a volitional or controlled aspect to System 2 that contrasts with the auto-
maticity of System 1 processes (although this does not necessarily imply “free
will”, as what we apparently choose to do is also causally related to variables
manipulated by experimenters – see Bargh & Ferguson, 2000). Second, within
the current dual-process framework, analytic thinking may or may not inter-
vene for a variety of reasons. The disposition by personality (or culture) for
a person to invest the cognitive resources of analytic processing to check
intuitions prior to making a decision is just another of these factors.
Dijksterhuis and colleagues have recently developed a dual-process
approach to decision making that implies parallel conscious and unconscious
processes (Dijksterhuis, Bos, Nordgren, & von Baaren, 2006). In fact, they seem
to be reviving the old “incubation” theory of problem solving that derives
from the introspective recollections of the mathematician Poincaré (1927) on
creativity in mathematics. According to Poincaré, he was able to find solu-
tions to complex mathematical problems on which he was stuck by turning
his mind to completely different subjects. Incubation theory proposes that
unconscious thinking can solve problems when conscious thinking is absent,
for example during sleep, or when conscious attention is distracted by other
matters. Dijksterhuis et al. (2006) revive this idea under the new label of
Unconscious Thinking Theory suggesting that people can engage in delibera-
tive thought without attention and that in some circumstances this leads them
to make better decisions than conscious thinking does. If they are right, then
we would need a quite different form of dual-process theory to accommodate
their proposals. However, incubation theory has long been controversial, with
other explanations offered: for example, absence of conscious attention to a
problem may clear unhelpful sets and assumptions that were inhibiting its
solution (see Woodworth, 1938; for a recent critical treatment of the theory,
see Segal, 2004). The evidence that Dijksterhuis et al. (2006) offer for their
rather startling claim is considered a little later. Next, we consider some
research paradigms in judgement and decision making and their relevance to
dual-process theory.
 112 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

RISKY CHOICE
As already noted, the psychology of decision making has long concerned
itself with testing for violations of human choices from the prescriptions of
formal decision theory, which was developed by economists and mathema-
ticians in the 1940s and 1950s and first introduced into psychology in two
famous review papers by Ward Edwards (1954, 1961). Decision theory is key
to understanding this field because it provided via its normative framework
the structure of the decision tasks that would dominate psychological research
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on the topic for the next fifty years. From economics, we get the notion of
utility, which is the subjective value of an outcome to a decision maker that
should be reflected in his or her choices. Decision making may occur under
uncertainty, as when we buy insurance or accept a wager, or under certainty
as when you choose between two pairs of shoes, trading off the better quality
of one against the lower price of the other. Most psychological work has
focused on decisions that have an interesting degree of complexity, either
because outcomes are uncertain and need to be assigned probabilities, or
because choices have multiple attributes that need to be weighed against each
other. The first of these – risky choice – is discussed in this section, and the
second kind of study in the next.
Some authors distinguish between risk – in which objective probabilities
are known to be associated with outcomes – and uncertainty – in which
the decision maker must assign subjective probabilities to outcomes (Wu,
Zhang, & Gonzales, 2005). The full-blown model is known as SEU (for sub-
jective expected utility) and allows people to combine subjective probabilities
and subjective values (utilities) in order to maximize their expectations of
achieving happiness though their decisions – an idea also known as instru-
mental rationality. Risk is more tractable to modelling than is uncertainty,
and so much attention has been focused on risky prospects of known prob-
ability in which only values need to be subjectively defined as utilities, and in
which (objective) expected utility provides the criterion for rational choice.
The theory of risky choice was revolutionized by the publication of pro-
spect theory by Kahneman and Tversky (1979), which, together with its later
revision and extension (Tversky & Kahneman, 1992), helped lay the founda-
tions for the award of the Nobel Prize for Economics to Danny Kahneman
(under the rules, this sadly could not be shared posthumously with the
legendary Amos Tversky). In this brilliant paper, Kahneman and Tversky
both demonstrated numerous violations of expected utility in a series of
elegant psychological experiments and also provided a descriptive theory of
risky choice, which dealt with all of them. I will do no more here than give
a brief flavour of the paper and its conclusions.
Kahneman and Tversky defined a prospect as a choice that has a given
probability for achieving an outcome of some positive or negative value to
 5. DUAL PROCESSES IN JUDGEMENT AND DECISION MAKING 113

the decision maker. The experimental section of the paper provided some
ingenious demonstrations of violations of expected utility. For example, if
you compare two prospects in which Outcome A is twice as likely as Outcome
B, the expected utility will be the same whatever the actual probabilities are.
Suppose you compare the following prospects:

A $1000; .45 B $500; .90.

The notation means that Prospect A offers you a .45 chance of winning $1,000
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and B a .90 chance of winning $500. Kahneman and Tversky showed that
with choices like this most people prefer B. Now consider the following
choice:

C $1,000; .001 D $500; .002.

Most people here choose C although decision theory says that if your prefer
B to A, you must prefer D to C based on the expected utility. Let the utility
(subjective value) of the prizes be U(1000) and U(500). It follows from the
first choice that since people prefer B:

U(500) × .90 > U(1,000) × .45

or
U(500) > U(1,000)/2.

If we now examine the choice between C and D, since the probabilities are
still in the ratio 1 to 2, and $500 has more than half the utility of $1,000, then
people must also prefer D to C. However, the experiments show the opposite
– most people choose C. An intuitive way of putting this is that if winning is
probable you go for the better chance of winning, but if it is a long shot then
you go for the bigger prize. When people are selling lottery tickets, prospec-
tive customers often ask about the value of the prize, but how many ask how
many other people are in the draw? This was one of many clever experiments
in the paper showing deviations of actual choices from those predicted by
expected utility.
What prospect theory really does is to modify the probability and utility
functions of standard decision theory in such a way as to better fit people’s
actual choices. For example, the theory proposes that people overweight
small probabilities. The conclusions can be summed very simply as follows:

Gains Small probabilities Risk seeking

Medium to high probabilities Risk aversion
Losses Small probabilities Risk aversion
Medium to high probabilities Risk seeking.
 114 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

In other words, the shape of people’s utility functions is such that they are
in general risk aversive on prospects of gains and risk seeing on prospects
of losses. However, these choice patterns reverse when probabilities are very
small indicating that people overweight such low probabilities. This explains
why people gamble on lotteries (risk seeking on gains) and buy insurance
(risk avoiding on losses) as small probabilities are involved in both cases.
Prospect theory is descriptive of what people actually choose, which is
very important for economics. In itself, it gives no insight into the cognitive
processes involved in choice, although there are some interesting pointers. For
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example, the original paper identified framing effects, showing that the same
prospects framed in different ways would lead to different decisions. One
finding in the paper was a certainty effect, in which people prefer a certain
gain to a risky prospect of a greater gain (with reasonably balanced pay-offs).
For example, people prefer a sure win of $30 (A) to a .80 chance of winning
$45 (B) even though the latter has an expected value of $36. They maintain
this preference when this choice is described as a second stage of a process
that is reached only with a 25 per cent probability (and a 75 per cent chance
of nothing). This is illustrated as Prospect 1 in Figure 5.1. If instead the
simple choice is offered between the prospects, C $30; .25 and D $45; .20
(Prospect 2, Figure 5.1) people prefer D to C. It is evident from examination
of Figure 5.1 that the two prospects are mathematically equivalent. What
seems to be happening here is that the two-stage prospect involves people in

Figure 5.1 One- or two-stage prospects based on Kahneman and Tversky (1979).
 5. DUAL PROCESSES IN JUDGEMENT AND DECISION MAKING 115

a mental simulation in which the certainty effect is manifest under the sup-
position of successful transition to Stage 2. Analytic processing becomes
focused for both prospects on the choice problems identified in the boxes
shown in Figure 5.1, only one of which involves the certainty effect (second
stage for Prospect 1).
A different kind of framing effect has been shown in research on support
theory (Tversky & Koehler, 1994) in which participants are shown to attach
lower probability (or less weight in decision making) to extensionally equiva-
lent events that are described using implicit disjunctions than when the
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components are explicitly unpacked. For example, people are willing to pay
higher health insurance premiums for hospital treatment for accident or
illness than for hospital treatment for any reason! In the same way, the
probability of dying in the next five years from any cause will seem to be
lower than the probability of dying from heart disease, cancer or some other
cause. The more disjuncts are explicitly unpacked, the higher the subjective
probability becomes. It seems likely that unpacking is cueing enriched mental
models of the prospects (for example, with additional branches) that affect
judgements of probability. It also indicates that people do not spontaneously
enrich their models by elaboration of alternative possibilities – perhaps a
manifestation of the singularity principle.
In the absence of process-oriented research, one can only speculate about
the cognitive foundations of research findings on risky choice. For example,
the reliable finding that small probabilities are over-weighted in decision
making could well be caused by people conducting mental simulations of
the prospects they are asked to consider. The very act of entertaining a
supposition – introducing a temporary addition to one’s set of beliefs –
may increase belief in the proposition supposed (Evans, Stevenson, Over,
Handley, & Sloman, 2004; Hirt & Sherman, 1985). It seems to me that this
effect is likely to be much stronger when the event simulated is of very low
probability. It seems that when we add a supposition to our existing beliefs
and simulate its consequences, we can’t quite put Humpty Dumpty back
together again when we finish. Thus our mental fantasy about winning
the jackpot in the national lottery provides the event with a reality (and
subjective weight) disproportionate to its minute objective probability. In
the same way, the skilled insurance salesman increases the subjective weight
of a potentially disastrous event, merely by persuading us to imagine its
occurrence.

MULTI-ATTRIBUTED DECISION MAKING

Apart from risky choices, decisions involving multiple attributes are psycho-
logically interesting. Suppose you are considering buying a new car and have
got your choices down to a list of five. You compare these five on a number of
 116 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

independent attributes (also known as “cues”). For the sake of simplicity, let
us assume that you consider only the five attributes listed in Table 5.1 – cost,
performance, space, economy and reliability. How do you choose the car that
is the best one for you? There is a normative model for this problem that is
known as multi-attribute utility theory or MAUT for short (see Shafir &
LeBeouf, 2005, for discussion of the origin of this theory). In order to apply
the normative analysis you must first assign a weight wi to each attribute or
cue such that where i ranges over the n attributes and
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冱w = 1
i=1
i

Such weightings are subjective and should reflect the priorities of the indi-
vidual decision maker. Table 5.1 shows cue weights for an individual who
is most concerned about purchase price but least interested in fuel economy
(perhaps she expects a rise in income); intermediate in order of importance
are reliability, space and performance. Now the next step is to assign a utility
for each choice on each attribute: here we allow numbers between 0 (awful)
and 100 (perfect) and again assume that for a particular decision maker the
utilities are as shown in Table 5.1. The final step is to compute the aggregate
utility for each option by multiplying the cue weight by the utility for that cue
and summing over the set of cues. For example, for Car A the calculation is

(.30 × 40) + (.15 × 65) + (.20 × 40) + (.10 × 15) + (.25 × 55) = 45.

Note that aggregate utilities must also fall in the range 0–100. According to
the computations, D is the best choice, with E close behind and B further back
again. A and C are poor choices (you can fill in the makers’ names for your-
self). Note that according to the principle of dominance, we could have
eliminated A without the need to do any calculations. A choice is said to be
dominated if it is worse than another in some respects and not better in any
other. By this definition A is dominated by B and must be inferior no matter
what the cue weights. C, though also a poor choice, is not dominated as it
scores better than some others on cost.
MAUT is a normative, not a descriptive theory. On grounds of bounded
rationality, it seems unlikely that ordinary people would do this full considera-
tion of possibilities, especially as real-world decisions often involve more cues
and more options. In fact, numerous deviations from MAUT are observed in
the literature, but of particular interest here is the tendency for people to think
about one attribute at a time (Shafir & LeBeouf, 2005), just as originally
demonstrated by Tversky (1972) in his elimination-by-aspects or EBA model.
To understand the EBA strategy, look again at Table 5.1. For this purpose, we
 5. DUAL PROCESSES IN JUDGEMENT AND DECISION MAKING 117

Table 5.1
Utility values and cue weights for a multi-attributed choice problem

Cost Performance Space Economy Reliability Aggregate

Rank 1 4 3 5 2
Weight .30 .15 .20 .10 .25

Car A 40 65 40 15 55 45
Car B 80 70 40 25 60 60
Car C 80 20 50 50 20 47
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Car D 50 60 70 75 90 68
Car E 80 60 40 90 60 65

can ignore the cue weights and simply look at their rank order of preference.
According to EBA, people look first at the most important cue and eliminate
any options that are inferior. Then they move to the next cue and repeat this
process and so on, until only one choice remains. Let us apply this strategy to
the numbers shown in Table 5.1.
For our imaginary decision maker, the most important attribute is cost, so
she looks at this first. Three choices, B, C and E are equally good, so she
eliminates A and D. She then looks at reliability considering only the three
remaining options and is able to eliminate C, which is clearly inferior, leaving
B and E. The third most important cue is space, but the options are equally
good, so she moves on to performance. E is inferior to B on this cue, and so is
eliminated leaving B as the winner. So a person choosing by EBA would end
with choice B even though it is the third-best option according to the MAUT
analysis. How can this happen?
From a normative point of view, EBA can go wrong because an option
can be eliminated too early before its merits are exposed. In our analysis,
this happens with Car D (the best choice in the MAUT analysis), which is
eliminated in the first round because of its greater cost, but which scores
heavily on all other cues. Car E falls at the last hurdle as it is slightly inferior
on performance to B and never gets a chance to show its marked superiority
on economy. EBA is psychologically plausible, however, because it conforms
with the singularity and satisficing principles of hypothetical thinking –
people only have to consider one attribute at a time and maintain options
that are good enough at each stage. EBA hence conforms with bounded
rationality but also with the fundamental analytic bias.
The operation of the relevance principle can also be shown in multi-
attributed choice, as neatly demonstrated in a study by Shafir (1993). In one
scenario you have to imagine you are a judge awarding custody of children in a
divorce court. Each parent has multiple attributes. Parent A is moderate on all
things, but Parent B is highly variable. For example, B may have a better
 118 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

income than A but also has to spend more time away from home. The
intriguing finding was that if participants are asked to decide to which parent
they would award custody they tend to choose B; if asked (in a separate
group) to which parent they would deny custody, they also tend to choose B!
The framing of the choice clearly affects the perceived relevance of the cues.
When making a decision to award custody, participants look for reasons to
do this – that is, positive attributes that are to be found in B’s list. When asked to
deny custody, they look for negative attributes, which are also to be found in
B’s list. This looks to me like preconscious pragmatic processes operating
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through the heuristic system to bias the attention of the analytic system – an
effect comparable to a number discussed in the psychology of reasoning in
previous chapters.
On a dual-process view, decisions could be made quickly and intuitively,
relying on the heuristic system, or more slowly and reflectively, by application
of analytic thinking. However, there is no guarantee that analytic thinking
will produce better decisions, especially when problems are complex, as its
engagement will tend to focus attention on selected parts of the information
available. There are several papers in the social psychological literature that
are directly relevant to this (Dijksterhuis, 2004; Dijksterhuis & Smith, 2005;
Dijksterhuis et al., 2006; Wilson, Lisle, Schooler, Hodges, Klaaren, & Lafleur,
1993; Wilson & Schooler, 1991). In these experiments, participants are pre-
sented with multi-attribute choice problems of varying complexity and are
asked to make a decision either immediately, or after conscious reflection, or
after a period of time in which conscious attention is distracted by another
task. One finding that comes clearly through these studies is that when people
make their choices with conscious reflection they are later less satisfied with
their decisions than when they make them without reflection. This could
simply be because the heuristic processes deliver intuitions of preference for
choices that are pretty much the same processes as those responsible for the
feelings of satisfaction with these choices.
More interesting is the claim that decisions made unconsciously may be
better decisions as measured by correspondence with those of expert judge-
ments (Wilson & Schooler, 1991) or by normative analysis (Dijksterhuis
et al., 2006). The latter study suggested that this finding interacts with the
complexity of the decision and that simple choices may be better made
consciously. The authors of these papers agree that conscious decision
making causes selective attention due to its limited processing capacity.
Intuitive decision making could be superior, due to much greater processing
capacity of the heuristic system, but only, of course, if people have had the
opportunity to engage in the relevant experiential learning for the context,
thus developing veridical implicit models. It is well known that mastery of
complex judgemental tasks through experience results in largely implicit
learning (Berry & Dienes, 1993) and that efforts to learn complex rules
 5. DUAL PROCESSES IN JUDGEMENT AND DECISION MAKING 119

explicitly may be counter-productive (see Reber, 1993). The positive benefits

of intuitive thinking are also emphasized in the dual-process account of
decision making under risk proposed by Reyna (2004) in what she calls fuzzy-
trace theory. On her view, novices rely on fallible explicit reasoning whereas
experts develop gist representations and intuitive processes that permit com-
putationally more powerful and accurate decisions. Reyna does, however,
concede that intuitive thinking is also the cause of many biases observed
in the judgement literature, presumably due to the novel nature of most
laboratory tasks.
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It seems reasonable to suppose that reliance on rapid heuristic processes or

intuitive judgement may be beneficial where appropriate experiential learning
has taken place (see also the discussion of Klein’s, 1999, work on naturalistic
decision making later in this chapter). Much more contentious is the claim of
Dijksterhuis et al. (2006) that decision making benefits from unconscious
thinking of a deliberative nature. The notion of deliberation without aware-
ness has connotations of an entity-like unconscious mind within, acting as
a homunculus. There seems to be nothing in the experimental studies that
justifies this idea of unconscious deliberation. The unconscious choices are
simply ones that are not conscious, either because people are given no time to
think or because they are distracted by other tasks requiring conscious atten-
tion. (This kind of problem may be the reason that many social psychologists
prefer the term nonconscious to unconscious processing.) There is no reason
why they should not be seen as fast recognition processes in the heuristic
system of the kind that I will discuss later in this chapter.

MULTICUE JUDGEMENT
Multicue judgement may sound very similar to multi-attributed decision
making but actually relates to the tradition of work called social judgement
theory (SJT). As mentioned in Chapter 1, this has a quite different origin
from the mainstream study of decision making, which came to psychology
from economics via Ward Edwards. This field originates in the work of
Brunswick, who advocated an ecological approach in which judgement was
regarded as analogous to perception and in which the task of psychology was
seen as that of relating organisms to their environment (see Doherty, 1996;
Goldstein, 2005). A critical concept is that of the lens model, which was
adapted for the study of judgement by Hammond (1955, 1966), who laid the
foundations of SJT. The lens model is so called because it maps the same
set of environmental cues on to the world on one side of the lens and on to
the judge on the other side (see Figure 5.2).
An example of multicue judgement would be that of a personnel manager
selecting candidates on the grounds of multiple criteria such as: (a) education
and qualifications; (b) work experience; (c) psychometric tests; (d) interview
 120 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING
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Figure 5.2 The lens model together with a verbal form of the lens model equation.

performance; and so on. Of course many cues are available in the environment
for this judge that she might or might not think (consciously) to be relevant to
this judgement, such as gender, age, appearance, accent and so on. The total
set of cues predict the criterion on the left side of the lens – performance in
the job – and also the judgements made on the right-hand side of the lens. If
a set of cues are defined with cue values measured for each case about which a
judgement is made, it may be possible to compute two separate multiple
regressions: one from the cues to the criterion values and one from the same
cues to the judgements made.
Now think about what would measure performance in a judge. Imagine
that judgements are made about a large number of cases (in this example
candidates for employment) and that in each case the judgement can be
compared with some objective criterion of the thing being judged (quality of
performance in the job). Then the correlation between the two – known as ra
in the notation of SJT – is the measured performance of the judge. If the
correlation is high, then she is accurately selecting good candidates. The
clever aspect of lens model analysis is that this performance correlation can
be broken down into components using the following simplified form of the
lens model equation:

ra = G·Re·Rs 5.1

where Re is the multiple correlation of the cues with the criterion and Rs is the
multiple correlation of the cues with the judgement made (see Cooksey, 1996,
 5. DUAL PROCESSES IN JUDGEMENT AND DECISION MAKING 121

for a full exposition of the mathematics of the lens model). G measures the
degree of correspondence between the environmental model and the judge’s
model. If the two multiple regressions are carried out, then G reflects the
extent to which the regression coefficients correspond in the two analyses.
A verbal statement of the lens model equation (see Figure 5.2) equates G
with task knowledge (also known as matching), Re with task predictability
and Rs with cognitive control (consistency of judgements). To understand
this better consider that the model differentiates three possible causes of poor
performance:
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1. The criterion may have poor predictability from the available cues
(low Re).
2. The judge may make unreliable or noisy judgements (low Rs).
3. The judge’s model of the task may map poorly on to the environment’s
model.

The most interesting case is (3) as it may happen that although a task is
predictable and the judge is consistent, performance is poor. This is because
the judge’s model is inaccurate. Suppose the two regressions show strong
linear fit but reveal beta weights that diverge sharply. Perhaps the criterion is
predicted mostly by qualification and work experience but the judge relies
mostly on interview performance, gender and appearance. In this case, how-
ever consistent she is, her performance is bound to be poor. We could also
describe the performance as biased, in that it is based upon personal prejudice
rather than an objective understanding of the requirements of the job.
In real-world applications, a performance criterion is not always available,
but one can still gain understanding of judges’ tacit policies by regressing
available cues on to their judgements. When only one side of the model is
used in this way, the technique is referred to as judgement analysis or JA
(Stewart, 1988). Many experiments have been reported in the literature
studying judgement by both judgement analysis and the full-blown lens
model method, particularly in the context of medical decision making (see
Wigton, 1996). Typical findings include the following: (a) experts have tacit
policies, captured by the regression weights, which are highly variable across
individuals, implying large-scale disagreement between experts even in highly
qualified groups such as medical consultants; (b) people can utilize quite a
small number of cues in their judgements (experts use no more information
than novices, although they use it better: e.g., Shanteau, 1992); and (c) judges
have poor self-insight, as measured by the correspondence between their tacit
policies and the explicit policies that they state.
A study of patient management decisions in general practitioners con-
ducted by myself and my colleagues in the early 1990s (Evans, Harries, &
Dean, 1995b; Harries, Evans, Dennis, & Dean, 1996) replicated all three of
 122 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

these typical findings. However, using a slightly unorthodox method, we also

discovered that while doctors can typically use 2–4 cues they state in interview
that they utilize a great many more, around 6–8 (we presented an unusually
large number of cues, in the order of 12–13 per case). We also found that
doctors could correctly state that they were not using certain cues, but of the
ones explicitly identified they had no idea which were and which were not
affecting their judgements.
Our tasks were all computer-presented, and in a later experiment we pre-
sented only a list of the cue names on the screens shown to the doctors, who
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had to click the mouse on any cue whose value they required. They were able
to self-terminate at any time and give a judgement. What happened was that
doctors again chose to inspect more cues than actually influenced their
judgements. Moreover, the cues inspected but not used were similar to those
that featured only in the explicit policy reports in the earlier study. A reas-
onable interpretation of these findings is that the doctors attend to the
cues that they know from their explicit training to be relevant, but are
unaware of the fact that only a subset is actually used. There seems to be clear
dissociation between implicit and explicit knowledge on this task.
A problem in studying expert judgement is that the judges have already
done their learning. In order to understand the cognitive processes better, we
later studied the acquisition of multicue judgement by experiential learning
(Evans, Clibbens, Cattani, Harris, & Dennis, 2003a; Evans, Clibbens, & Harris,
2005a). We used a method known as multicue probability learning or MCPL.
With this technique, cases are presented one at a time on a computer screen
with people asked to predict a given criterion. They are then given outcome
feedback that they can compare with their prediction. Cues are, however,
probabilistically related to the criterion by adding random noise. The idea is
to simulate real-world experiential learning as might be experienced by expert
judges, whose feedback will inevitably be noisy due to various uncontrolled
variables in a real-world scenario. In our case, participants played the role of
personnel managers trying to discover which psychometric test results pre-
dicted performance in different occupations. We used 80–100 training trials
with outcome feedback, followed by 40 transfer trials with no feedback.
Multiple regression analyses on the feedback trials were used to discover
which cues had been learnt.
In this study, some cues were relevant and some irrelevant, but partici-
pants had no information on how many cues were predictive. In a simpler
version, the cues were ability tests that were either positively or zero-related to
performance. In more complex tasks, the predictors were psychometric tests
that could have a positive or negative relation to the criterion (or again be
irrelevant). For example, extroversion might improve performance in some
jobs but hinder it in others. The latter task is really quite complex as neither
the relevance of the cue nor the direction of its effect is known in advance.
 5. DUAL PROCESSES IN JUDGEMENT AND DECISION MAKING 123

Table 5.2
Example set of scores for a particular participant on a given task in the study of Evans
et al. (2003a)

Criterion values Judgement weights Explicit cue ratings

Test A +1 .67 +3
Test B 0 .48 +1
Test C 0 .32 −1
Test D −1 −.25 −2
Test E 0 −.18 −1
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Test F +1 .49 +2

For each cue we ended up with regression weights, reflecting the tacit policy,
and explicit ratings of cue usage taken after the task was finished. An illustra-
tive data set is shown in Table 5.2. A participant who had learnt to predict the
criterion would tend to have high positive, high negative or low judgement
weights corresponding to positive, negative and zero predictors. Correlating
the criterion values with the judgement weights thus gives us a measure of
performance (see Figure 5.3). Figure 5.3 also shows how two other relation-
ships can be extracted. A correlation between explicit ratings and criterion
values, for example, is a measure of explicit knowledge acquired. If people
have learnt the task explicitly, then they should be able to rate the cues accur-
ately. Finally, the correlation between judgement weights and explicit ratings
can be taken as a measure of self-insight. That is, it indicates the extent to
which people are explicitly aware of what they have learnt.
Note that these three abstracted measures are all independent of one
another. What Evans and colleagues (Evans et al., 2003a) found was

Figure 5.3 Relationship of key measures in the study of Evans et al. (2003a).
 124 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

that on simpler tasks (fewer cues, only positive predictors) not only was per-
formance well above chance but so was explicit knowledge. On more complex
tasks (more cues, negative predictors), however, explicit knowledge of the
criterion was not obtained, although performance remained above chance.
The strong implication is that simple tasks benefit from explicit learning
but more complex ones result only in implicit learning, a conclusion gener-
ally consistent with findings in the implicit-learning literature (Berry &
Dienes, 1993).
The most novel and important finding in this study was that “self-insight”
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scores were well above chance on all tasks, even when there was no evidence
of explicit learning. The interpretation we made of these findings was that
there are indeed dual processes controlling such complex judgements and
that both implicit and explicit processes contribute to the judgements made.
On simpler tasks, performance was higher than on complex tasks, and
explicit knowledge was acquired. Hence, we assumed that both implicit and
explicit processes contribute to judgements, both in a helpful manner since
both implicit and explicit knowledge have been acquired in the training. On
complex tasks, although both processes continue to contribute (hence the
retained “self-insight” correlation between explicit ratings and judgements
made) performance drops because the explicit component is no longer based
on any useful learning. In other words, there is always an analytic component
to judgements but where the task is too complex to allow explicit learning,
only the heuristic-level processes contribute usefully. Explicit reasoning here
is mere unfounded opinion. However, with real expert judgement, it may also
be that there is both an experiential and explicit component, but the latter
is based on book learning and therefore likely to be helpful.
Before moving on, I give a word of caution concerning the dual-process
interpretation. As stated in Chapter 1, “System 1” is a rather vague concept, as
there may be a number of different forms of implicit cognition residing in
distinct subsystems (see also Stanovich, 2004). Heuristic–analytic theory
has mostly been focused on linguistic and pragmatic processes that retrieve
relevant knowledge from our stores of belief and shape the direction of
analytic processing, as discussed in Chapters 3 and 4. It is far from clear
that the unconscious element of implicit learning and intuitive judgement
involves the same implicit subsystem as the heuristic processes that influence
reasoning tasks. Beliefs are forms of explicit knowledge (of which we may
become aware) but the processes that retrieve and apply them are implicit
in nature – and hence described as “heuristic”. It seems likely that experien-
tial learning involves a different subsystem in which the knowledge acquired
is implicit rather than explicit in nature (weightings in neural networks
rather than propositions) and may affect behaviour without ever becoming
conscious.
 5. DUAL PROCESSES IN JUDGEMENT AND DECISION MAKING 125

HYPOTHETICAL THINKING IN DECISION MAKING

Despite the cautious comments that ended the previous section, there are
various forms of evidence in the decision-making literature that support
the three principles of hypothetical thinking theory. As briefly described
in Chapter 1, these principles suggest that actual decision making should
diverge markedly from the rational model of choice favoured by decision
theory. Rather than compare alternative options and try to optimize by
choosing the best one, I suggest that people will frequently follow the one-
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at-a-time model shown in Figure 5.4. That is to say, people will consider the
first option that comes to mind (unconsciously cued by context and the
current goal in line with relevance principle) and evaluate this option on its
own (singularity principle) if necessary by conducting a mental simulation to
compute its consequence. This evaluation involves some explicit analytic pro-
cess even if the cognitively costly use of a mental simulation is not considered
necessary. If the option is satisfactory it is “chosen” and acted out; otherwise, it
is eliminated, and the next most relevant option is generated for consideration
and so on.
One finding that fits this model quite well is the so-called focusing effect
in decision making demonstrated by Legrenzi et al. (1993). When people are

Figure 5.4 One-option-at-a-time decision making, consistent with three principles of hypo-
thetical thinking.
 126 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

offered an imaginary decision about one explicitly named alternative, they

tend to seek information only about that option and not alternatives to it. For
example, if people are asked to imagine they are on holiday in a foreign city
with a chance to go the opera, they will ask about the cost of tickets, the
composer and the artists but not about the other activities that they might do
instead. This phenomenon seems related to the disregard of implicit disjunc-
tions demonstrated in research on support theory (Tversky & Koehler, 1994)
mentioned earlier. However, a recent study by Cherubini, Mazzocco, and
Rumiati (2003) suggests that focusing involves the relevance principle and is
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not simply to do with explication of alternatives. For example, people ask few
questions about the status quo (staying at home) when this is explicitly stated
as an alternative and will gather information about implicit alternatives that
negate the status quo (not staying at home).
Evidence for the singularity principle in decision making is also supported
by research on the disjunction effect (LeBeouf & Shafir, 2005; Tversky &
Shafir, 1992). In one example people are asked to decide whether they would
buy a vacation package (a) knowing that they had just passed an important
examination, (b) knowing that they had not passed the examination or (c) not
yet knowing whether they had passed or failed. In Group (a) most people
decide to take the vacation, as do Group (b). According to Savage’s sure-thing
principle, it follows that they must prefer to take the vacation in condition
(c) as well. If you prefer X to Y when Z is true and your prefer X to Y when Z
is false, then you must prefer X to Y when you don’t know whether Z is true
or not. Surprisingly, participants in Group (c) were unhappy to make the
decision and many were willing to pay a premium to defer the decision until
after the examination result was known.
Tversky and Shafir suggest that people have a different reason for their
choice in groups (a) and (b) – to celebrate passing the examination, or to
console themselves after failure. In (c) they don’t have a reason until the result
is known. It seems plausible to suggest that we don’t like making decisions
that require consideration of alternative mental simulations. That is not to
say that people given sufficient time and motivation cannot consider alterna-
tives in decision making, because they clearly can and do. What the singu-
larity principle actually states is that we can consider only one hypothetical
alternative at a time. In other words, to consider alternatives we have to
simulate them separately and store the results in memory for comparison.
Such comparisons do not, however, engender the same sense of confidence
in decision making that a single mental simulation of the world will allow.
We are much more comfortable when we can simulate a single model of the
future world resulting from some action and then deciding whether or not to
proceed.
The relevance principle of hypothetical thinking theory relates to heuristic
processes that rapidly focus attention on some feature of a given problem or
 5. DUAL PROCESSES IN JUDGEMENT AND DECISION MAKING 127

enhance our mental representations with prior belief retrieved from memory.
In the processing model (extended heuristic–analytic theory) such heuristics
can prompt default responses that will cue behaviour if analytic reasoning
does not intervene. An important example of this in decision making and
problem solving involves recognition processes. While some tasks and deci-
sions seem novel, others appear familiar: we recognize them in some way as
prototypical of situations encountered before. For example, when a research
student comes to me with a research design problem that is novel and baffling
her, I usually recognize it as typical of a category of problems I have
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encountered many times before. As a result, I can give her a solution with
little effort of thought. Only occasionally is such a problem novel enough for
me to have to give it some hard thought from “first principles”.
In their research programme on fast and frugal heuristics, Gigerenzer
and colleagues have stressed the importance of the recognition heuristic in
some kinds of decision making (Gigerenzer, 2004; Goldstein & Gigerenzer,
2002). Their research has shown, for example, that non-natives of a country
may do as well as or better than its inhabitants in judging such matters as
the relative size of cities or the success of their sporting teams, based on
nothing more than the fact that one recognizes one city name rather than
another, or that one seems more familiar. The operation of the heuristic is
defined as follows: “If one of two objects is recognized and the other is not,
then that recognized object has the higher value with respect to the criterion.”
Although these authors do not employ a dual-process framework, it seems
necessary to invoke one in order to fully understand the way in which this
heuristic works.
First, it is clear that the recognition heuristic cannot apply to any criterion:
you would not use it, for example, as a basis for judging people’s height.
Goldstein and Gigerenzer state that the heuristic is domain-specific and only
used in domains where it is ecologically valid – that is, highly correlated with
the criterion being judged. This may be programmed either by evolution or by
individual learning experiences. However, this leaves a puzzle: how does the
individual know when to use or not use the heuristic, and does this happen at
the System 1 or System 2 level? It is in the nature of fast and frugal heuristics
that they are both rapid and low in cognitive demands. Coupled with their
proposed origin in experiential learning and/or innate modules this points
clearly towards a System 1 process. Goldstein and Gigerenzer (2002) seem to
reinforce this by the claim that people use this single heuristic without
recourse to additional knowledge. However, this argument would seem to
predict that reliance on the heuristic would lead us into serious error when
applied to exceptional cases. A good example would be cities that we know
well (recognize) but also know to be small – for example, those in a locality
with which we are familiar. Should not a fast and frugal heuristic lead us to
judge these cities to be large? In fact, when people have relevant knowledge of
 128 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

city size they use this knowledge, rather than the recognition heuristic, which
will probably come as no surprise (Oppenheimer, 2003).
In line with their default-interventionist dual-process theory, Kahneman
and Frederick (2002) suggest that the recognition heuristic must have both an
implicit and an explicit component. As in the heuristic–analytic theory, heur-
istic processes propose default responses that require at least minimal
approval by analytic processes before behaviour can occur. In the case of the
recognition heuristic, it seems evident that a feeling of recognition cannot
directly become a judgement, say, that a city is large without some analytic
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process of approving this as the basis for responding to the experimental

instructions. In addition to inducing feelings of familiarity, presentation of a
city name will also (by equally rapid and effortless processes) evoke explicit
knowledge of the city, retrieved from semantic memory. When this know-
ledge conflicts with the recognition heuristic (the city is familiar but small) the
heuristic will be inhibited and overridden by analytic processes. This will be
a lot easier and more effective, say, than the inhibition of belief biases in
reasoning, discussed in Chapter 4. The reason is that no effort of difficult
reasoning is required for the analytic system to be aware of the conflict.
Evidence for the importance of recognition processes is also provided by
studies of naturalistic decision making. Gary Klein has conducted a large
number of studies in which expert decision makers are studied in their natural
working environment (see Klein, 1999, for informal review and discussion of
many of these). Such decision makers include fire service commanders who in
the US system are involved in paramedical decision making as well as in
operations to rescue people and property from damage and disaster. Such
officers have to make rapid choices in dangerous and critical situations. As
Klein points out, such studies differ in many ways from laboratory studies
of decision making: decision makers tend to be experts with much relevant
prior experience who are making decisions under time pressure, often on the
basis of inadequate information. Sometimes goals are unclear, and developing
and prioritizing goals may be one of the important requirements in a given
situation. Most of the time, these commanders have no feeling of making
decisions in the traditional sense at all: that is, there is no conscious delibera-
tion between alternatives. Like me with my students, they mostly recognize a
situation and apply a prototypical solution to it: a process that Klein calls
recognition-primed decision making. Clearly, what makes an expert an expert
is to a large extent the development of such knowledge of prototypes and the
ability to retrieve those that are relevant and apply them appropriately. There
is a clear link here with the claims of Reyna (2004) that experts rely on gist
memory and intuitions to a much larger extent than do novices in making
their decisions. Note that although recognition-primed and rapid, what is
retrieved from long-term memory is a great deal more complex and sophisti-
cated than a feeling of familiarity. It may involve a whole set of learnt
 5. DUAL PROCESSES IN JUDGEMENT AND DECISION MAKING 129

procedures with schemas that have to be applied to the specifics of the given
situation. It is fast but by no means frugal.
Klein’s experts often follow the one-option-at-a-time model shown in
Figure 5.4. In discussing one example of a fire commander’s thinking he
comments, “He thought of several options yet never compared any two of
them. He thought of options one a time, evaluated each in turn, rejected it, and
turned to the next most typical rescue technique” (Klein, 1999, pp. 19–20). As
Klein also shows, such evaluations can be straightforward or can be more
complicated involving mental simulations. Such simulations can be purely
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physical, as when a fire chief works out a novel use of equipment to deal with
an unusual hazard and tries to determine whether it will work before putting
it into effect. Real-world decision making often involves what is known as
higher order intentionality, however, as one person tries to simulate the mind
of another. Klein discusses some high-profile cases such as the shooting down
in 1988 by a US warship of an Iranian commercial airliner whose behaviour
was interpreted wrongly as that of an enemy fighter about to attack the ship.
Readers may relate to dangerous traffic situations they may have encountered
when driving, say of a car overtaking towards you with too little road.
Simulating the minds of other drivers around you, in order to predict their
behaviour, may be the only way to avoid disaster. Mental simulation is, of
course, a fundamental tool of hypothetical thinking that has been discussed
in several contexts in this book.
Klein contrasts recognition-primed decision making or RPD with what he
calls the “rational choice” model in which alternative actions are considered
and compared. RPD is more likely to occur when decision makers are
experienced, time pressure is high and the situation is changing and ill-
defined. The impression given is that rational choice is largely for bureaucrats
who sit in offices with plenty of time to think and with reports to write that
will justify their decisions to others. Of course, documentation is one of the
ways in which we can try to overcome the natural limits of our hypothetical
thinking abilities and to extend our bounded rationality. The rational decision
model is embodied in many of the systems that we set up for organizational,
economic and political decision making. The extent to which such reports
reflect the actual process by which a decision is made, as opposed to an
after-the-fact rationalization of it, is another matter entirely.

CONCLUSIONS
Psychological research on decision making has largely been framed by one of
two major traditions of distinct origins: economic decision theory and social
judgement theory. Neither of these is a traditionally cognitive approach, as
the former is concerned largely with demonstrating violations of normative
decision theory and the latter with ecological mapping of judgements with
 130 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

the environment. Research findings can, however, be viewed within the frame-
work of dual-process theory and decision researchers are clearly becoming
interested in this approach. The research discussed in this chapter provides
much evidence consistent with dual-process theory and in particular with
heuristically cued relevance and recognition processes together with singu-
larity and satisficing effects in the consideration of options. People rarely
engage, it seems, in “rational” decision making in which they deliberate between
alternatives, and they frequently rely on choices that are either retrieved
from memory or tested one at a time by mental simulations (see Figure 5.4).
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People are also reluctant to make decisions that require two alternative
mental simulations of the future state of the world, even when they point to
the same choice of action. Research on decision making also shows that rapid
heuristic processes may often form the basis for expert judgement, while
novices dealing with unfamiliar problems are more likely to rely on explicit
analytic reasoning. This contrasts with claims in reasoning literature that
good performance requires analytic reasoning (see Chapters 3 and 4), prob-
ably because the latter literature relies on the presentation of novel problems
to naïve participants.
What has been omitted from this chapter is consideration of the large
body of work within JDM on judgement under uncertainty and the heuristics
that people use to make probabilistic inferences. This work, together with
more general studies of how people think about chance and probability, is the
focus of the following chapter.
 CHAPTER SIX

Thinking about chance and probability

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We live in an uncertain world, and hence – in the view of many scientists –

we were designed (by natural selection) to make judgements and decisions
under uncertainty. Since all our ancestors had to deal with uncertainty and
variability in their environments, it seems inevitable that the mechanisms
underlying our cognitive processes have developed means of dealing with
this. Of course, animals live an uncertain world also, and it is greatly to their
advantage to be responsive to both the absolute and the relative frequencies of
events that they experience. For example, if a bear likes to eat berries from a
certain kind of bush, it is in its interest to be able to learn that these bushes
grow more often in one kind of landscape than another or that they are often
found in proximity to another (perhaps inedible) plant. A bear that learns
to use such cues in order to find food is acting as if it were calculating and
responding to conditional probabilities.
Animals do in fact respond to probabilistic cues in their natural environ-
ments and can be trained to do so in the laboratory as endless studies of
operant conditioning have demonstrated. Hence, there is a strong a priori
argument that we have some kind of built-in mechanism (or cognitive mod-
ule) that enables us to process frequency information in our environment.
This leads us into the paradox of rationality (Evans & Over, 1996a), however,
since numerous experiments, especially those in the “heuristics and biases”
tradition (Gilovich et al., 2002; Kahneman et al., 1982), have demonstrated
many errors and biases associated with probability judgement, as we shall see
later. Those advocating an innate frequency-processing module (Cosmides &

131
 132 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

Tooby, 1996; Gigerenzer & Hoffrage, 1995) have argued that reasoning about
probability (as opposed to frequency) has no such innate basis and hence that
frequency formats will generally make problems a lot easier to solve. I will
examine this argument closely later in this chapter, and we will see that it has
run into considerable difficulties when tested experimentally. In my view this
is entirely due to the failure of its advocates to recognize the dual-processing
nature of human cognition and to understand its implications.
In the dual-process approach it is assumed that we – and other animals –
can learn to process frequency information in the environment at the System 1
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(heuristic) level without having any explicit concept of probability. To reason

explicitly about probabilities on the other hand requires understanding at the
System 2 (analytic level), which is another matter entirely. All the evidence
suggests that such explicit statistical reasoning is something that people do
poorly – maybe even worse than logical reasoning (see Chapters 3 and 4). The
concept of probability was not invented by mathematicians until the seven-
teenth century. However, it is clear that at least some us can reason about
probabilities, or else there would be no probability calculus and no method-
ology of inferential statistics for us to apply. To make sense of the literature
on judgement under uncertainty, however, we must be very clear that the “as
if ” processing of probabilities at the heuristic level is an entirely different
matter from explicit probabilistic reasoning at the analytic level.
The distinction between the two forms of probabilistic processing was
clearly illustrated in some studies carried out by Nisbett and colleagues in
the 1980s. In one study (Nisbett, Krantz, Jepson, & Kunda, 1983) the ability
of people untrained in statistics to give statistical explanations of real-world
phenomena was examined. Most people have rather poor understanding, for
example, of the law of large numbers (LLN), which dictates that only large
samples provide reliable information about the populations from which they
are drawn. For example, if asked why the highest baseball batting averages
recorded in early season always drop, many people will give nonstatistical
explanations (e.g., the guys get overconfident and lose concentration) rather
than recognizing the problem of small samples. However, people with much
real-world experience of the domain (such as sports coaches) will be much
more likely to recognize the LLN. The key point here, though, is that when
such domain experts are tested in another domain – in which they lack
experience – they perform no better than anyone else. What this strongly
suggests is that their correct statistical understanding reflects an experiential
and implicit learning process that is typically domain-specific (Berry &
Dienes, 1993).
This study contrasts strongly with the findings of another (Fong, Krantz,
& Nisbett, 1986) that showed that formal training in statistical principles –
based on statistics courses, or even a 25-minute laboratory session – improved
statistics reasoning in a whole range of everyday settings – a domain-general
 6. THINKING ABOUT CHANCE AND PROBABILITY 133

effect. Such training apparently enables people to apply analytic reasoning at

the System 2 level as they have access to explicit rules. Converging evidence
for this dual-process account comes from more recent studies by Klaczynski
and colleagues (Klaczynski, 2000; Klaczynski & Robinson, 2000). They
employed a task in which a brief scenario was given with an argument based
on generalization from small samples, thus violating the LLN. The arguments
gave a conclusion that was either compatible or incompatible with the parti-
cipants’ own beliefs. Participants were then asked (a) to rate the strength of
the argument and (b) to give a verbal justification of their ratings. The latter
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were assessed qualitatively for the degree to which they recognized statistical
concepts (sample size, random variation and so on).
As mentioned several times in this book, one of the forms of evidence for
dual-process theory is that heuristic processes appear to be independent of
cognitive ability and working-memory capacity whereas problems requir-
ing analytic reasoning are much better solved by those of higher ability
(Stanovich, 1999; Stanovich & West, 2000). The primary measure of bias in
the Klaczynski studies was the rating of argument strength on problems
where the conclusions were consistent or inconsistent with prior belief – an
effect similar to belief bias in deductive reasoning (see Chapter 4) or what is
called “myside bias” in studies of argumentation and informal reasoning
(Baron, 1995; Stanovich & West, in press). Klaczynski’s studies revealed a
strong belief bias on these LLN problems, which was unrelated to develop-
mental variables and cognitive ability. However, the quality of reasoning
found in the justifications was related to cognitive ability, with young adults
being superior to both adolescents and older adults. These findings strongly
suggest that the ability to reason analytically about probabilistic issues is
related to cognitive ability but does not mean that more able reasoners are
any less prejudiced by their beliefs – presumably because their judgements are
pre-empted by heuristic processes. This work also supports the view that one
function of analytic processes is to rationalize the outcome of unconsciously
caused behaviour (see Chapter 7).
Bearing in mind this dual-process distinction, I will now examine some
of the phenomena associated with thinking about probabilities and making
judgements under uncertainty.

SUBJECTIVE PERCEPTION OF PROBABILITY

AND RANDOMNESS
There are two major academic schools of thought on probability. The clas-
sical or objectivist position is that probability is a relative frequency and can
only be considered when there is a frequency distribution of some kind. This
is the theory that psychologists teach to their students even though it involves
such convolutions as sampling distributions (imagine you ran the experiment
 134 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

many times when the null hypothesis was true) to make it work. The Bayesian
or subjectivist view is that a probability is no more nor less than a degree
of belief in something. While both schools define a probability as ranging
between 0 and 1, and both endorse the probability calculus, the philosophical
difference is considerable. In an uncertain world, we cannot simply believe
that things are true and false in the manner of propositional logic but we
must believe things to an extent. One drawback of the frequentist position is
that it does not allow us to quantify our uncertainty about one-off events,
which are the kind often involved in real-world decision making.
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The Bayesian approach is also associated with Bayes’ theorem or Bayesian

revision, which I will discuss later in the chapter. In essence, it means that
your degree of belief in some proposition or hypothesis is revised in a gradual
manner as you encounter evidence for or against it. Translated into a philo-
sophy of science this provides a stark contrast with Popperian philosophy
(Popper, 1959, 1962) in which current theories are no more than conjectures
to be given up whole when falsifying evidence is encountered. The Bayesian
approach to science (Evans, 2005; see Howson & Urbach, 1993) was discussed
briefly in Chapter 2. It is difficult to see how one can understand hypothetical
thinking without a subjective notion of probability – a key feature, for
example, of the epistemic mental models that feature in hypothetical thinking
theory.
To what extent do ordinary people have a subjective understanding
of chance and probability? Western languages at least have many words
designed to express concepts of likelihood and uncertainty: terms such as
“often”, “frequently”, “rarely”, “occasionally”, “likely”, “improbable” and so
on. Such terms are in the ordinary language and are not derived from formal
study of probability theory and indicate that at least a rudimentary concept
of probability is endemic in our culture. Although the word “random” is
rather technical and perhaps infrequently used by ordinary people, the terms
“chance” and “luck” are common. Thus although we may be predisposed to
think about the world in causal terms (Sloman, 2005) we certainly have the
concept that some of the events around us occur by chance. For example, if
one side dominates a soccer match without scoring and the other scores from
their only chance in the game, most people would describe this as a lucky win,
implying in some way that the “odds” favoured the team who actually lost.
Luck of course is a dubious concept from the viewpoint of probability
theory. It is reasonable to say that someone was lucky or unlucky after the
event, when chance was affecting their outcomes (as in the case of our soccer
team). However, the concept is often applied as though luck was a state that
one could achieve, as in the case of the gambler who believes from early
successes that he is lucky tonight, as if this gave him the basis for further
successful gambling. A great psychological puzzle is why people persist in
gambling, particularly on casino games, when the odds are always against
 6. THINKING ABOUT CHANCE AND PROBABILITY 135

them. Gamblers have many false beliefs about the nature of chance games
(Wagenaar, 1988) and employ systems that assume (fallaciously) that the
outcome of a previous event affects the probability of a later one even in
games like roulette that are based on statistically independent sequences.
This suggests that the “folk” theory of probability is pretty weak. The simple
heuristics that people apply in this domain definitely do not make them smart.
Randomness is a really difficult concept for most people. Most commonly
the term is used to refer to Bernoulli sequences such as successive tosses of
a coin, or successive numbers spun on a roulette wheel where each event is
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predictable only as a random variable with some distribution and where

successive events are completely independent of prior outcomes. It has been
known for many years (Wagenaar, 1972) that people have a poor subjective
understanding of randomness (for a more recent review, see Falk & Konold,
1997). Essentially, people believe that random (Bernoulli) sequences alternate
their outcomes more often than actually happens in a chance sequence. They
will both generate sequences that alternate too often and similarly misperceive
presented sequences.
It is important to understand that a sequence of, say, coin tosses can
violate independence while maintaining an overall probability of .5 for
heads or tails. To generate such sequences all you have to do is to specify a
probability of alternation that is:

P(heads|current spin is tails) = P(tails|current spin is heads) = r.

If r is set to .5 then the sequence is Bernoulli. If r < .5 then it will produce

sequences in which the runs of heads and tails are longer than they should be.
If r > .5 then sequences will be shorter than they should be (relative alterna-
tion or outcomes). Examine the two sequences printed in Table 6.1. Which
of these simulates the random tossing of a coin? The answer is A, but most
people think that this does not look random, as the runs of heads and tails
are longer than expected. Sequence B was generated with an alternation
probability (r) of .6, which corresponds more closely to what most people
perceive as a random sequence. Most people given these sequences would
choose B as the random sequence.
This striking feature of subjective randomness leads to two biases, known
as positive and negative recency. Negative recency bias – also known as the
gambler’s fallacy – means that when people are viewing a sequence of events
believed to be random, they tend to predict the next event as being the oppo-
site of the previous one. The myth embodied in our language as “the law of
averages” is that if a sequence of one outcome is observed with a random
process then it is likely to switch to another in order to compensate and even
things out. This bias underlies the useless betting strategies that people
employ to try to beat the roulette wheel. In fact, casinos are happy to provide
 136 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

Table 6.1
Computer simulation of a sequence of coin tosses: which one is the random sequence?

Sequence A

T T T H T H T T T T
H H T T T T T T T T
H T H T H H H H H H
T T T H T H H T H H
H H T H T H T T T H
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T H T T T T H H

Sequence B

H T H H T T T H H T
H T H T T H T T H T
T T H H T H H H T H
T H T H H H H H T H
T H H H T H T H H H
T H H T H T H H

customers with printed sequences of the outcomes on their wheels, so that

they can apply their systems and lose all the quicker! Presumably people bet
more money with the false confidence that their systems inspire.
Positive recency bias occurs when a person who is actually viewing a
random sequence of events believes that it is patterned (like Sequence A in
Table 6.1) and that a given outcome is on a “streak”. Then they are likely to
predict that the current streak will continue. The best documented example of
positive recency bias is the “hot hand effect” in basketball, originally pub-
lished in a famous and much cited paper by Gilovich, Vallone, and Tversky
(1985). Gilovich et al. showed that basket ball fans perceive shooters as hav-
ing hot streaks where they can shoot successive baskets, whereas statistical
analysis shows that the sequences are consistent with statistical independence.
Of course, better players do have longer streaks, but only because their
probability of completing a basket on any one attempt is higher. If this
effect is interesting, so too have been some of the reactions to it in the
academic literature reviewed recently by Alter and Oppenheimer (2006).
Despite frequent replications (mostly in sporting contexts) many authors have
tried to dispute the findings, convinced that there really are streaks in sports.
(The whole concept of sporting “form”, so beloved by the media, may be
called into question.) Of course, the effect is really part of a domain-general
misperception of randomness.
The biases of subjective randomness are very interesting and almost cer-
tainly underlie the apparently irrational tendency for many people to gamble
 6. THINKING ABOUT CHANCE AND PROBABILITY 137

on chance events like roulette, even though they incur a totally predictable
financial loss by doing so (Evans & Coventry, 2006). Subjective randomness
would seem to be a System 1-level effect, although the false beliefs about
chance and probability that people use to justify their gambling behaviour
(Wagenaar, 1988) require analytic reasoning in System 2. While it is commonly
assumed that these false beliefs are the cause of gambling, from a dual-process
point of view it is more likely that they are confabulated in order to rational-
ize unconsciously caused behaviour. Such rationalizations may then help to
maintain the behaviour in future. Why, however, do we have such biases?
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If there is an innate frequency-processing module, for example, it certainly

is not adaptive in this context. However, as Stanovich (2004) has argued,
biases can arise where a mechanism that evolved in one environment gets
applied in a different and modern context. Noisy but natural environments
are most unlikely to produce random sequences of events with statistically
independent outcomes of the kind generated in the casinos.

THE HEURISTICS AND BIASES

RESEARCH PROGRAMME
One of the most influential research programmes in the study of human
reasoning and decision making has been that known as “heuristics and
biases”. This work was initiated by a series of brilliant papers published by
Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in the early 1970s (for two important
collections of papers on this topic, see Gilovich et al., 2002; Kahneman et al.,
1982). The term “heuristic” represents here a hypothetical construct used to
explain “biases”, which were observable systematic errors in people’s judge-
ments about probability. It was not clear in the early work whether these
heuristics were intended to be specified at the unconscious or conscious level,
or perhaps a mixture of both. Curiously enough, both (a) this programme,
in which the role of heuristics in causing biases is emphasized, and (b) the
“rival” programme of Gigerenzer and colleagues (Gigerenzer & Todd, 1999),
in which the adaptive nature of heuristics is stressed, have their origins in
Herb Simon’s work on heuristic reasoning and bounded rationality.
The term “heuristic” used as a noun does not necessarily map on to
the notion of heuristic processes as applied in the heuristic–analytic theory
of reasoning. The basic idea is that a heuristic is a short-cut technique for
solving problems that would otherwise be intractable given our cognitive
processing capacity. In their famous early studies of problem solving, Newell
and Simon (1972) demonstrated that people can solve problems that have
very large search spaces. What this means is that if you could generate all
possible solutions and then search through them one at a time to check
whether each was a valid solution, this would be an impossibly slow strategy,
even for a high-speed computer. What heuristics do is to cut down the search
 138 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

to a manageable number of possibilities, making it possible – but not certain

– that a solution can be found. For example, experienced crossword puzzlers
may solve anagrams with as many as 15 letters although they clearly could
not possibly generate and examine 2615 possible solutions! Heuristics must be
employed, based on the meaning of the solution provided in the cue and the
presence of possible familiar letter groups within the anagram and so on, to
reduce the search.
Kahneman and Tversky applied the concept of a heuristic to judgement
rather than problem solving. A good example is the availability heuristic
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(Schwarz & Vaughn, 2002; Tversky & Kahneman, 1973), which comes into
play when people try to estimate the likelihood of some event. Essentially, it
was proposed, people will rely on their memories and assume that the more
instances that come to mind, the more frequent must be the event. Suppose,
as an experienced experimental psychologist, a student asks you how often
your predicted effects were observed in the many experiments you have run
( published and unpublished) in your career. How could you go about answer-
ing a question like this? What most people appear to do is to try to generate
examples of event category by retrieving them from memory. For example, if
I were asked about my experimental predictions, I might retrieve significantly
more examples of successful than unsuccessful ones and on this basis answer
around 75 per cent. It is not difficult to see, however, that this reliance on the
availability heuristic might produce systematic biases. For example, I might
well recall disproportionately more successful cases as these led to published
papers and forget older unpublished studies altogether. If I had had a particu-
larly good or bad run of experimental results in the past year, this could
influence my recall and my judgement. If I was feeling depressed when asked
the question, I might generate more failed examples. And so on and so on.
Whether heuristics make you smart or biased is really a question of
emphasis. Heuristics do both because they can enable you to solve otherwise
intractable problems but they can also lead you into errors and systematic
biases. The heuristics and biases programme consists of studies largely
designed to show when heuristics will lead to biases but this does not neces-
sarily mean that these are “bad” heuristics. For example, you can imagine that
an experienced doctor faced with a patient with unusual symptoms might
well recall several similar cases from his long career that turned out to have
a common diagnosis and on this basis infer the probable disease from which
the patient is suffering. Use of the availability heuristic here is likely to sup-
port expert decision making in a similar way to the mechanism described
by Klein (1999) as recognition-primed decision making (see Chapter 5), which
seems to serve expert decision makers so well in many real-life situations.
The heuristic that has been most productive in terms of experimental
studies of intuitive probability judgement is that of representativeness
(Kahneman & Tversky, 1972). The representativeness heuristic comes into
 6. THINKING ABOUT CHANCE AND PROBABILITY 139

play when people are judging conditional probabilities: for example, the like-
lihood of a sample having been drawn from a population, or of an event
given a hypothesis. In such cases, perceived similarity is the key concept. A
sample will appear representative of a population, for example, if it is similar
to it in essential properties. This led Kahneman and Tversky (1972) originally
to predict that people would ignore sample size when inferring properties of
populations from samples, as sample size is a property only of the sample.
Hence, the similarity of the sample mean or proportion to that of the popu-
lation would determine its perceived likelihood regardless of the size of the
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sample. However, early research on this issue quickly led to the view that
people do have some intuitive understanding that larger samples are more
reliable. They nevertheless underweight (rather than neglect) the influence of
sample size in their intuitive judgements (Evans, 1989; Kahneman & Tver-
sky, 1982a). As reviewed earlier, we now also know that the ability to under-
stand and apply the law of large numbers is related both to cognitive ability
and to the receipt of formal training in statistical theory. Hence, the tendency
to rely on similarity of sample and population to the relative neglect of
sample size does look like a heuristic process that may be overridden by
analytic reasoning.
It does seem that ordinary people lack reliable intuitions about statistical
samples. For example, I once saw a letter published in a British newspaper
during a general election campaign claiming that all opinion-polling evidence
was useless. This was based on adding together the size of samples used in all
the published polls and showing that they constituted a tiny proportion of
the population. Of course, the accuracy of samples actually depends only
on their absolute size, unless the population size is so small that sampling
without replacement would cause measurable error. However, undergraduate
students who have had some statistical training also act as though sample to
population size ratio was important (Bar-Hillel, 1979; Evans & Bradshaw,
1986) in making intuitive judgements. If we do have an innate cognitive mod-
ule for frequency processing, it does not deliver accurate intuitions about
sample size at the System 1 level. It is not clear that we should expect it to,
however, since the properties of the sample you have is always the best esti-
mate of those of the population even if it is not a good one. However, it has
been argued that the problem of sampling error is a significant one for those
who favour the theory of natural sampling (Over, 2003).

The conjunction fallacy

The representativeness heuristic was the prime motivator for the important
experimental demonstrations by Kahneman and Tversky of two phenom-
ena known as the conjunction fallacy and base-rate neglect. Tversky and
Kahneman (1983) demonstrated the conjunction fallacy first with regard to
 140 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

people’s stereotypes and social judgements as in the case of the famous Linda
problem. Participants were given the following brief vignette:

Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. At University,

she studied philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues
of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear
demonstrations.

Using different methods (both between and within participants), Tversky and
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Kahneman obtained ratings of the relative likelihood of the three following

statements:

Linda is a bank teller (A).

Linda is a feminist (B).
Linda is a feminist and a bank teller (BA).

Regardless of the method, people’s perceived likelihood for these three state-
ments was B ≥ BA > A. Thus people rate the likelihood of A&B to be greater
than that of A, which is a mathematical impossibility: the conjunction of two
events cannot be more likely than either on its own, as A&B logically implies
A. This paper created enormous interest as evidenced by an astonishing 493
citations of it in the academic literature (Web of Science, April 2006). There
has been much argument about the interpretation of the finding and dozens
of experimental studies of the effect reported in subsequent literature.
However, the phenomenon itself was thoroughly established in Tversky and
Kahneman’s original paper. For example, they showed that the effect was not
restricted to situations involving stereotypes. In one scenario, they showed
that people thought Bjorn Borg, the then dominant tennis player, was more
likely to lose the first set and win a match at Wimbledon, than he was to lose
the first set! They even anticipated the finding that has been of much concern
in the later literature – that fewer errors are made when the task is presented
in terms of relative frequencies rather than probabilities (see next section).
Few people will state that there are more cases of A and B than of A as it
becomes apparent that the former are a subset of the latter.
While representativeness seems to give a plausible account of the Linda
problem (her description fits the stereotype of a feminist much better than
that of a bank teller), it is not clear that it provides the correct account of the
conjunction fallacy. As Kahneman and Frederick (2002) note, there have
been numerous claims in the subsequent literature about pragmatic effects
and the interpretation of words like “probability”. However, their interpret-
ation that the bias reflects a lack of extensional reasoning in System 2 in
which A&B is correctly perceived to be a subset of A appears to be correct.
As will become clear, the reason that frequency formats often facilitate
 6. THINKING ABOUT CHANCE AND PROBABILITY 141

correct solutions on the Linda problem and other problems involving

probability judgement is that they help to explicate the set relationships
involved.
An explanation of the conjunction fallacy in terms of the principles of
hypothetical thinking is as follows. In accordance with the singularity prin-
ciple, people conduct a single mental simulation of the proposition that they
are asked to judge. When that proposition is “bank teller”, they imagine a
person based on their stereotype of bank tellers. This model fits poorly to the
description of Linda so they evaluate the hypothesis as improbable. When the
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proposition is “feminist bank teller”, however, the addition of feminist signals

that they are thinking about an atypical bank teller and hence cancels much
of the stereotype. Their simulation of “feminist bank teller” thus incorporates
compatible elements of their stereotypes of both feminists and bank tellers,
resulting in a simulation that fits much better to the description of Linda
and is thus evaluated as more probable. People consider only the most
likely possibilities in their mental simulations and so “Linda is a bank teller”
effectively becomes “Linda is a bank teller who is not a feminist”, which they
are quite entitled to think is more likely than “Linda is a bank teller who is
a feminist”. This account is compatible with those based on pragmatic
principles (e.g., Maachi, 1995) while incorporating the general thrust of the
representativeness concept.

Base-rate neglect
The other main phenomenon inspired by representativeness is the base-rate
fallacy, which has engendered an even bigger literature, with Kahneman
and Tversky’s (1973) original paper logging 1,315 citations (Web of Science,
April 2006). There is a stereotype version similar to the Linda problem in
which participants are given a thumbnail description of an individual who
sounds more like an engineer than a lawyer. In such a case, participants
are relatively insensitive to being told that he was among a group who were
80 per cent lawyers and 20 per cent engineers, or 20 per cent lawyers and
80 per cent engineers when asked to judge how likely he was to be one or the
other. From a statistical viewpoint, even if this description is strongly (but
imperfectly) diagnostic of an engineer, the base rate makes a lot of difference.
As with the conjunction fallacy, base-rate neglect is not dependent upon
the use of stereotypes, and I will explain it with reference to the medical
diagnosis problem administered to medical students and junior doctors by
Casscells, Schoenberger, and Graboys (1978). The original problem was
worded by Casscells et al. as follows:

If a test to detect a disease whose prevalence is 1/1,000 has a false positive

rate of 5 per cent, what is the chance that a person found to have a positive
 142 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

result actually has the disease, assuming that you know nothing about the
person’s symptoms or signs? %.

Participants found this problem very hard with the most common response
being 95 per cent whereas the correct answer is close to 2 per cent! This is a
strong case of base-rate neglect since people are apparently reasoning that the
test is 95 per cent accurate on the basis of the false-positive rate of 5 per cent
and are therefore ignoring the fact that the disease being tested for is rare,
having a prior probability of only .001. What is the correct answer here?
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Recall that Bayes’ theorem gives the following relationship:

P(H1/D) P(H1) P(D/H1)

= × (2.6)
P(H2/D) P(H2) P(D/H2)

which can be read as posterior odds = prior odds times the likelihood ratio. In
this case we take D, the datum, to be the observation that the person has a
positive test result, H1 the hypothesis that the person has the disease and H2
the hypothesis that they do not. We have been told that the false-positive rate
is 5 per cent, which is the chance of a positive test given H2. We assume that
the hit rate is 100 per cent (often specified in better-worded versions of the
problem) so that a person with the disease always tests positive. The prior
odds are 999 to 1 in favour of H2 (not having the disease). Substituting these
values we get:

P(H1 /D) 1 1
= · .
P(H2 / D) 999 .05

This gives us odds of .02002, which convert into a posterior probability (which
was asked for) of .0204, or approximately 2 per cent. How could we expect
any naïve participant to do such a calculation! Actually, it is quite easy if you
think about it in the following way. Consider that (on average) of 1,000
people tested just 1 will have the disease and test positive. Of the remaining
999 healthy people, 5 per cent – about 50 – will also test positive. Hence, the
probability of a positive tester having the disease is about 1 in 50, or 2 per cent.
We shall see later that versions of the problem that facilitate correct responding
are ones that explicate these nested-set relationships.
The base-rate fallacy is often described as a tendency to ignore base rates –
or relevant prior probabilities – in making posterior probability judgements.
If Fred sounds like an engineer then we think he probably is one and are not
very interested in whether he was taken from a group who were predomin-
antly engineers or lawyers. While this problem is amenable to an explanation
in terms of representativeness, the medical diagnosis problem is not. However,
 6. THINKING ABOUT CHANCE AND PROBABILITY 143

people are still apparently ignoring the base rate. Actually, this is a simplifica-
tion. First of all, a survey of a large number of studies of the base-rate fallacy
by Koehler (1996) revealed that the data are mostly compatible with the view
that people underweight rather than ignore the base rate. Second, there is
evidence that people do understand the relevance of base rates under a vari-
ety of circumstances. If people are given wholly nondiagnostic information
(Fred is married with two children) then they will tend to give the base-rate
probability as their answer, as was shown in the original study of Kahneman
and Tversky (1973). In the medical diagnosis problem, both Cosmides and
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Tooby (1996) and Evans et al. (Evans, Handley, Perham, Over, & Thompson,
2000) found that a sizeable minority of participants who got the problem
1
wrong gave the answer 1,000 rather than 95 per cent, which is the base-rate
probability specified in the question. This suggests that in standard versions
of the tasks, people are having great difficulty in integrating the base rate and
diagnostic information. Instead they base their mental simulations either on
the base rate or (more frequently) on the diagnostic data in line with the
singularity principle.
There is evidence that when base rates are provided by experiential learning
rather than by presented statistics, they are more likely to influence probability
judgements (Koehler, 1996). In fact, the almost universal use of base-rate
statistics to create prior probabilities is probably the main cause of the dif-
ficulties that people have in taking them into account. In my view, it brings
strongly into question the ecological validity of these experiments as a test
of Bayesian reasoning. Remember that Bayesian probabilities are subjective,
representing beliefs. So real-world Bayesian inference involves weighting the
immediate evidence for hypotheses by one’s prior belief in them. It would be
surprising if people were to ignore these prior beliefs, given the strong evi-
dence of confirmation and belief bias effects discussed in Chapters 2 and 4.
Recall, for example, that scientists usually question their methodology and
repeat their experiments before deciding to revise or abandon their hypo-
theses (Fugelsang et al., 2004). The deductive reasoning literature also shows
that it very hard to stop people taking into account their prior beliefs about
statements, even when the instructions clearly make them logically irrelevant
to the task.
How often would statistical information form the basis for beliefs in
everyday life? The answer, surely, is very rarely. How many people consult
actuarial statistics on road accidents before purchasing a motor cycle or on
divorce rates before entering into marriage? Even when such statistics are
available and known to the individual, they are not much help. People are not
deluding themselves when they believe that such statistics do not apply to
individuals. Take the case of actuarial calculation of insurance premiums.
These tend to be high for male drivers under the age of 25 because this group
have a high rate of accidents. From the viewpoint of the insurance company
 144 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

this makes sense because they are calculating their risk for their entire
group of under-25 male clients. However, this does not mean that a particular
individual driver in this group necessarily has a raised risk. He might be (or
believe himself to be) an unusually skilled and careful driver and would hence
reject such statistics in computing his own subjective risk of an accident. In
fact, base-rate statistics never apply accurately to any particular individual
case and are at most one element that a person might take into account in
determining their subjective probability. The same applies in expert judge-
ment. A doctor might have statistics to help her assess a patient’s risk of heart
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disease, for example, but these will be based on placing the patient in broad
categories according to age, gender, smoking etc. and will not take into
account the much more detailed knowledge that she may have about the
patient and his medical history.
In the study of medical decision making described in Chapter 5 (Evans
et al., 1995b) we found that doctors’ willingness to treat raised blood choles-
terol was relatively unaffected by factors related only statistically and not
causally to heart disease, such as presence of the disease in primary relatives.
A parallel finding in the base-rate neglect literature is that people are much
more likely to take account of base rates if a scenario is provided that links
them causally to the hypothesis under investigation (Ajzen, 1977; Bar-Hillel,
1980). The findings might reflect the fact that some people switch to mental
simulations founded on the base rate when a causal mental model is sug-
gested and does not necessarily indicate that individuals can integrate the two
pieces of information.
Given our concern about the almost universal use of base-rate statistics to
provide Bayesian prior probabilities, my colleagues and I decided to investi-
gate the use of prior probabilities supplied by real beliefs that people bring
with them to the laboratory (Evans, Handley, Over, & Perham, 2002). To do
this, we first measured our student participants’ stereotypical beliefs about
the interests of students studying different subjects. Specifically, we measured
their beliefs that students would join different student societies as a function
of the faculty in which they were placed and vice versa. In one experiment,
we presented prior probabilities as base-rate statistics and left diagnostic
information implicit in people’s beliefs, in line with earlier research. For
example, participants were given questions like the following:

40 per cent (10 per cent) of students are in the Engineering faculty
What is the probability that a member of the Drama (Computer) society is
also in the Engineering faculty? %

The pre-test showed that participants believed on average that 31 per cent
of Engineering students would join the Drama society compared with
77 per cent who would join the Computer society. These background beliefs
 6. THINKING ABOUT CHANCE AND PROBABILITY 145

provide the diagnostic evidence P(D|H), whereas the stated base rate provided
the prior probability P(H). The question required them to provide the
posterior probability P(H|D). From a Bayesian point of view both the
explicit base rate and the implicit belief should influence the judgement
equally. Both factors were significant in an analysis of variance – that is,
people gave significantly higher estimates for higher base rates and for
more believable faculty–society connections. However, Bayesian analysis of
individual participants showed that the weighting given to diagnostic infor-
mation was very much higher. Hence, this experiment conforms with the
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general finding in the literature that base rates are underweighted but not
ignored.
The key experiments in this study were ones where the problems were
turned around so that prior probabilities were supplied by belief and diag-
nostic information by statistics. We devised problems in which exactly the
same beliefs were used to supply base-rate information as had been used
previously to give the diagnostic information. An example of the problem
used is the following:

A survey was conducted to discover the recreational activities of Engineering

students. It was discovered that those Engineering students who belonged to the
Computer society owned a PC. However, it was also the case that there were
Engineering students who did not belong to the Computer society but who also
owned a PC. Specifically, 5 per cent of Engineering students who did not belong
to the Computer society owned PCs. Suppose that a group of Engineering
students were randomly selected and asked (a) if they owned a PC and (b) what
societies they belonged to. Giving your best estimate, what percentage of
those Engineering students who own PCs would you expect to belong to the
Computer society? %

In this problem, the diagnostic information (D) is ownership of a PC, and the
hypothesis (H) is society membership. Since the domain of inference is now
limited to Engineering students only, the Bayesian prior, P(H), is provided
by the stereotypical beliefs that people have about society preferences for
Engineers – the same beliefs as were used to provide diagnostic evidence in
the earlier experiments. For example, P(H) will be high for the Computer
society but low for the Drama society. The diagnosticity of the evidence is
supplied statistically in the scenario: 100 per cent ownership for Computer
society members and 5 per cent for non-members. The actual false positive
rate was varied among 5 per cent, 15 per cent, 30 per cent and 50 per cent
across different scenarios.
Evans et al. (2002, Exp. 4) initially found that false-positive rates
influenced probability judgements in the expected manner but that implicit
base rates did not. However, when participants’ personal base rates (as
opposed to group norms) were examined these did predict judgements. In a
 146 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

subsequent experiment, participants were asked to give the relevant personal

base rates (“What percentage of Engineers belong to the Computer society?”)
immediately before reading each scenario. Presented in this way, personal
base rates exerted a much larger influence than false positive rates. These
findings suggest, however, that people do not spontaneously introduce their
beliefs as prior probabilities in the same way that they do to provide diagnostic
evidence. There is still a bias towards focusing on the individual evidence of
the case in hand. However, the data also show that if base rates are made
salient enough – both personal and judged immediately before the inferential
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task – then they may dominate judgements. Once again, however, it seems
that people use one cue or the other.

The frequency/probability debate

The evidence examined to date suggests that most people asked to judge
posterior probabilities conduct mental simulations that are based on either
diagnostic or base-rate information, with a strong bias towards the former.
People have been shown to switch to base rates when diagnosticity of the
specific evidence is weak, when base rates are causally linked to the hypo-
thesis or when base rates are derived from personal beliefs and made salient
to the task. However, there are circumstances in which people can engage in
analytic reasoning in Bayesian inference in which they succeed in correctly
integrating base-rate and diagnostic information. This requires that people
construct mental models that correctly represent the nested-set relationships.
For example, the solution of the medical diagnosis problem requires imagina-
tion of a model such as that shown in Figure 6.1. Here, we can see that of

Figure 6.1 Nested-set relationships for the medical diagnosis problem.

 6. THINKING ABOUT CHANCE AND PROBABILITY 147

1,000 people, 1 has the disease and will test positive and about 50 (5 per cent
of 999) will give false positive tests, making the solution of around 2 per cent
(1 in 50) transparent. However, it seems that few people spontaneously
construct such a model unless the presentation of the problem is designed
specifically to help them do so.
Cosmides and Tooby (1996, p. 24) presented the following version of the
medical diagnosis problem to their participants:

1 out of every 1,000 Americans has disease X. A test has been developed to
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detect when a person has disease X. Every time the test is given to a person who
has the disease, the test comes out positive (i.e. the “true positive rate” is 100 per
cent). But sometimes the test also comes out positive when it is given to a
person who is completely healthy. Specifically, out of every 1,000 people who
are perfectly healthy, 50 of them test positive for the disease (the “false positive”
rate is 5 per cent).

Participants are then told that a sample of 1,000 Americans were selected by
lottery and given the test. They were asked to judge how many people who
test positive for the disease would actually have the disease, expressed as a
fraction out of . Cosmides and Tooby found that 56 per cent of
participants gave the correct 2 per cent answer on this version compared
with only 12 per cent on the original version used by Casscells et al. (1978).
It is evident that the two versions vary in a number of ways, so the question
is: what is it about the Cosmides and Tooby version that produces the
facilitation?
This literature has been marked by a rather heated debate about fre-
quency formats. This goes back to the early 1990s when Gigerenzer (e.g., 1991,
2002; see also Gigerenzer & Hoffrage, 1995) argued that cognitive
illusions including the conjunction fallacy and base-rate neglect could be
made to “disappear” by use of frequency formats. The argument was origin-
ally based on the idea that we have evolved some mechanism to deal with
frequencies in our environment but not with one-case probabilities, which are
a relatively recent invention of mathematicians. Cosmides and Tooby (1996)
developed this idea within their evolutionary psychology framework to
include the idea of an innate frequency-processing module. They applied a
similar logic to that associated with their work on social contract theory and
the Wason selection task discussed in Chapter 4. Hence, they argued that the
above version of the medical diagnosis problem was much easier than the
probability version of Casscells et al. because the frequency format allowed
the innate module to be applied.
Cosmides and Tooby’s interpretation of their experiments was met with
scepticism by a number of reasoning researchers who believed instead that
the frequency version was simply cueing a mental model of the kind shown
in Figure 6.1. This led to several experimental papers (e.g., Evans et al., 2000;
 148 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

Girotto & Gonzalez, 2001; Sloman, Over, & Slovack, 2003) designed to dis-
tinguish between the frequency module and the nested-set hypotheses. These
experiments include demonstrations that frequency versions can be difficult
and probability versions can be easy. Manipulations that explicate the
nested-set relationships facilitate performance while those that obscure it
(even if frequencies are used) have the opposite effect. In response, Hoffrage,
Gigerenzer, Krauss, and Martigon (2002) have argued that the nested-set
hypothesis is intrinsic to what they call natural sampling, which must appar-
ently be done in such a way as to make the set relationships transparent. It is
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now unclear whether anyone wishes to defend the view that frequencies per se
are sufficient to facilitate statistical reasoning. For further comment on the
natural sampling hypothesis and the credibility of the evolutionary argument,
the reader is referred to Over (2003).
My purpose here is to comment on these findings from the viewpoint of
dual-process theory. It seems reasonable to suppose that we – and other
animals – may have evolved some specialized cognitive mechanism for pro-
cessing frequency information in our environments. In fact, I have suggested
that this could be an underlying cause for problem gambling, when such a
mechanism is misapplied in a casino environment (Evans & Coventry, 2006).
However, such a module – if it exists – would be an implicit form of cognition
resident in System 1 and hence affect our learning and interaction with
environments in which frequency information was a reliable cue. What such
a mechanism would not do, according to the dual-process account, is to
facilitate reasoning about quantitative word problems, presented with explicit
verbal instructions. It is noticeable that advocates of natural sampling do
not actually run experiments in which people encounter events with natural
frequency relationships at all, but rather present people with word problems
in which frequency statistics have already been collated. I feel that if the
natural sampling theory is to be properly investigated it needs to involve
situations where people learn frequency information experientially. This
could be done using computer simulations, as in the manner of our own
work on multicue probability learning (Evans et al., 2003a) discussed in
Chapter 5.
It seems to me that quantitative word problems of the kinds used in the
heuristics and biases literature have little to do with natural sampling mech-
anisms but instead provide difficult problems for analytic reasoning in the
same way as do many of the tasks used in the deductive reasoning literature
(see Chapters 3 and 4). As with logic problems, these probability tasks are
given to people who generally lack training in the relevant normative systems
of reasoning (logic, probability theory). In such cases, people will attempt
to solve them using explicit mental models and simulations in accordance
with the general principles of hypothetical thinking. Just as people make
many fallacies in deductive reasoning by satisficing on single models, so they
 6. THINKING ABOUT CHANCE AND PROBABILITY 149

similarly may construct simplified mental models of probability problems

that fail to reflect their formal properties (see also Kahneman & Frederick,
2002, for their discussion of attribute substitution in naïve probabilistic reas-
oning). Frequency formats have been successful in debiasing phenomena
such as the conjunction fallacy and base-rate neglect because they directly
cue mental models that encode the relevant nested-set relationships and thus
facilitate analytic system solution of the problems. However, such study of
quantitative word problems provides no evidence one way or the other as to
whether we have any kind of natural frequency processing module that
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shapes our learning and behavioural interaction with the environment.

Addressing that question requires an entirely different kind of research
methodology.

PSEUDODIAGNOSTICITY
While most of the literature on Bayesian reasoning has focused on use of
base rates or prior probabilities, there is a different and much smaller litera-
ture on how people reason about diagnostic information. Specifically, there is
a claim in the literature that people reason “pseudodiagnostically” by focusing
on evidence for a hypothesis without considering the extent to which that
evidence discriminates it from its alternatives. Recall the formula for Bayes’
theorem:

P(H1/D) P(H1) P(D/H1)

= × .
P(H2/D) P(H2) P(D/H2)

The likelihood ratio – the last part of the equation – compares the probability
of a piece of evidence given each of the alternative hypotheses under con-
sideration. The larger the ratio, the more diagnostic of H1 is the evidence.
Now consider the situation described in Table 6.2 in which two symptoms are
probabilistically related to two diseases. Which provides better evidence of
Disease A, Symptom 1 or 2? The answer is Symptom 2, because it yields a
likelihood ratio of 4:1 in favour of A, as compared with 8:7 for Symptom 1.
However, a person reasoning pseudodiagnostically would be more impressed

Table 6.2
Diagnosticity of cues: percentage of patients showing symptoms as a function of
their disease

Symptom 1 Symptom 2

Disease A 80 40
Disease B 70 10
 150 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

with Symptom 1 because 80 per cent of Disease A patients have this compared
with only 40 per cent for Symptom 2.
The pseudodiagnosticity (henceforth PD) effect was first demonstrated
by Doherty et al. (1979), who saw it as a form of confirmation bias (see
Chapter 2). Their participants were given a scenario in which they had to
imagine that they were undersea explorers who had discovered a pot and
wished to return it to its homeland—one of two islands. They were provided
with a description of six characteristics of the pot, for example, whether the
clay was smooth or rough and whether or not it had handles. Subjects were
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then permitted to seek 6 pieces of information from a possible 12 pieces.

The information concerned the probability of each characteristic being pres-
ent in pots from both islands.
In order to gain diagnostic evidence relevant to the decision, partici-
pants should choose to discover three pairs of probabilities, so that they
know for three of the features their relative likelihood of being found on
either of the islands. The analysis showed, however, that a large number
of them formed a favoured hypothesis about a particular island at the
outset and then sampled mostly or exclusively evidence about that island,
ignoring the other. The basic finding has been replicated in a number of
subsequent studies using a number of variants on the task (e.g., Beyth-
Marom & Fischhoff, 1983; Doherty, Chadwick, Garavan, Barr, & Mynatt,
1996; Evans, Feeney, & Venn, 2001a; Mynatt et al., 1993; Ofir, 1988; Skov
& Sherman, 1986). These studies also include manipulations that induce
people to reason diagnostically, for example by getting them to focus on a
particular cue rather than a particular hypothesis. However, it seems that in
unstructured tasks lacking such cues people will generally consider only
one hypothesis, a striking example of the singularity principle. In fact,
the principle has never been more clearly stated than by Mynatt et al.
(1993), who comment on the basis of this work that “We propose that the
number of objects that can be maintained and operated upon in working
memory is one. . . . A corollary of this . . . assumption is that subjects
will continue to test the hypothesis in working memory, unless prompted
to change it”. In general, work on this form of statistical reasoning pro-
vides strong evidence for the kind of hypothesis-testing behaviour observed
when reasoning deterministically about hypotheses that I reviewed in
Chapter 2.
Mynatt et al. developed a rather more elegant version of the PD tasks in
the following form:

Your sister has a car she bought a couple of years ago. It’s either a car X or
a car Y but you can’t remember which. You do remember that her car does
over 25 miles per gallon and has not had any major mechanical problems
in the two years she’s owned it.
 6. THINKING ABOUT CHANCE AND PROBABILITY 151

You have the following information:

A. 65 per cent of car Xs do over 25 miles per gallon.
Three additional pieces of information are also available:
B. The percentage of car Ys that do over 25 miles per gallon.
C. The percentage of car Xs that have had no major mechanical
problems for the first two years of ownership.
D. The percentage of car Ys that have had no major mechanical
problems for the first two years of ownership.
Assuming you could find out only one of these three pieces of information
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(B, C or D), which would you want in order to help you to decide which
car your sister owns? Please circle your answer.

With problems of this kind (in a number of different scenarios) Mynatt et al.
observed 28 per cent choices of B (correct), 59 per cent C (the PD response)
and 13 per cent D.
On the PD task, X is referred to as the focal hypothesis because this is the
one that people are induced to think about by the information given. We can
think of this as the supposition on which their singular mental simulation is
based. However, the effect depends upon people being given initial evidence
to support the focal hypothesis so that it satisfies. When belief in the focal
hypothesis is undermined by weak evidence, there is a noticeable shift
towards more diagnostic choices (see Mynatt et al., 1993, Exp. 2, and Evans
et al., 2002, Exp. 1) or to D responses, which can be interpreted as PD choices
for the alternative hypothesis. A plausible interpretation of these findings is
that when the focal hypothesis is unbelievable it fails to satisfy and people
simulate the alternative hypothesis instead.
Studies by Aidan Feeney and colleagues have shown that people are
sensitive to the rarity of features, which is implicitly relevant to their diag-
nosticity. For example, suppose you are told that your sister’s car had
power-assisted steering and a top speed of 140 mph. Many modern cars
have power steering but few can do such high speeds, so we have a common
and rare feature. Feeney, Evans, and Clibbens (1997) found that if told in A
that most car Xs have the rare feature (top speed of over 140 mph) many
people will switch to the diagnostic choice C, in order to find out whether Y
also had this feature. Rare information is implicitly diagnostic because
background beliefs tell you that other makes of car (in general) are not
likely to have it. However, Feeney, Evans, and Venn (2000) argued that there
was a rarity heuristic operating at an unconscious level, as a bias towards
rarity persisted regardless of relevant explicit and statistical information.
For example, if a context is given in which all cars are high-performance
sports cars, the preference for the “rare” cue continues, even though its diag-
nostic value is much less in this context. Hence, it is unlikely that people’s
interest in rare features reflects any process of explicit analytic reasoning
 152 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

and more likely that it operates through the relevance principle at the Sys-
tem 1 level.
There is also evidence that analytic reasoning is involved in the PD task,
as responses can be shifted quite significantly by variants in instructional
framing, as several studies have shown (e.g., Beyth-Marom & Fischhoff,
1983; Evans et al., 2001a; Mynatt et al., 1993). For example, participants are
more likely to make the diagnostic choice when asked to choose information
that would help them decide “whether the car was X or Y” as opposed to
“whether or not the car was X” (Feeney, Evans, & Venn, 2001). However,
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research on this topic most strikingly supports hypothetical thinking theory

by showing that people tend to become focused on a single hypothesis by
unconscious cues to its relevance and thereafter to think only about this focal
hypothesis.

CONCLUSIONS
In this chapter, I have reviewed a number of studies that concern the way in
which people reason about statistical information and probabilities. It is clear
that probability problems are very difficult for most ordinary people who
have not received special training in mathematics and statistics. For example,
heuristic processes seem generally to focus people on selective aspects of the
problem information. Hence, in Bayesian reasoning, for example, people will
usually think about either the base rate or (more often) the diagnostic evi-
dence and fail to combine the two unless problem formats are used that make
the nested-set relationships transparent. In effect, people often answer a dif-
ferent question from the one they were asked (Kahneman & Frederick, 2002).
However, if they are cued to construct the right kinds of mental model, then
their analytic reasoning will deliver the correct answers. In general, normative
solutions are more likely to be found by high-ability participants on such
tasks, just as they are on deductive-reasoning problems (Stanovich, 1999).
Combining information about base rates and diagnostic evidence is hard to
do and only appears possible when the analytic system is involved.
It is possible that we do have some innate cognitive module in System 1
cognition that enables us to process frequency information. There are good a
priori arguments that this should be so, as both we and other animals would
gain benefit from veridical processing of frequency information in the natural
world. It is clear from the psychological research that we have very poor
intuitions about random events, but it could be argued that true randomness
is rarely manifest in the natural world and that we were designed by evolution
to detect patterns in noisy environments. That we see such patterns where
there is only randomness, in an artificial casino environment, might account
for the apparently nonadaptive tendency for people to bet in the face of
expected losses. Having said this, I do feel that most research conducted
 6. THINKING ABOUT CHANCE AND PROBABILITY 153

by those interested in evolutionary and ecological adaptation has been

misdirected on to the study of quantitative word problems that strongly
load on to general-purpose reasoning process in System 2. For example, the
undoubted debiasing that can be achieved by use of frequency formats can be
accounted for in terms of the assistance that it provides in constructing the
kinds of mental models needed for successful analytic reasoning.
There is much evidence in these literatures consistent with hypothetical
thinking theory. The singularity principle is strongly indicated by the pseudo-
diagnosticity effect, for example, which shows clearly how people tend to
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focus on one hypothesis or the other, rather than thinking about both
together. Other phenomena, such as the conjunction effect, are also amenable
to explanation with these principles. We seem to construct singular mental
simulations whose nature is strongly constrained by preconscious heuristic
processes in line with relevance principle. As Kahneman and Tversky have
demonstrated in several studies, social stereotypes can strongly influence
our thinking about individual cases but these default processes can also be
altered. Hence, our default stereotypical thinking about a bank teller is
sharply altered when we think about a feminist bank teller, leading to the
paradoxical conclusions known as the conjunction fallacy.
I have deliberately left some issues hanging in this chapter concerning the
implications that research in the heuristics and biases tradition has for human
rationality. Are Kahneman and his colleagues right to emphasize the biases
that result from heuristic thinking or do Gigerenzer’s research group have the
better idea in showing the adaptive nature of such thinking? The implications
of research on biases for human rationality is one of several broader issues
that are dealt with in the following and final chapter of this book.
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 CHAPTER SEVEN

Broader issues
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In this book, I have developed and applied a theory of hypothetical thinking

built around three key principles: singularity, relevance and satisficing. The
processing model for this theory is a substantially revised version of the
heuristic–analytic theory of reasoning that falls within the more general
class of dual-process theories that have been widely applied in cognitive and
social psychology. Processes described as heuristic (fast, parallel, implicit,
high capacity) and analytic (slow, sequential, explicit, low capacity) in this
theory map on to the distinction between System 1 and System 2 processing
in the general family of dual-process theories (Evans, 2003; Stanovich, 1999).
In the preceding chapters, the three principles and the role of dual-processes
have been discussed in a wide range of cognitive tasks, including hypo-
thesis testing, inductive reasoning, deductive reasoning, decision making and
statistical inference.
Accounting for cognitive tasks in this way actually opens up several
broader issues with which this final chapter is concerned. A problem that
has been alluded to several times is that many of the phenomena take the
form of cognitive biases, a term that seems to imply irrationality. The
debate about rationality and its relation to dual-process theories is the first of
the issues to be addressed. The second broad issue that has so far been men-
tioned only in passing is that of self-knowledge. If much of our behaviour is
caused unconsciously at the heuristic or System 1 level, then to what extent
are we consciously in control of our actions and aware of the mental events
that underlie them? In the third and final section of this chapter, I will

155
 156 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

address the relation of the heuristic–analytic theory to other dual-process

theories of cognition, including those developed in areas such as social
psychology that lie outside of the main research topics reviewed in this
book.

BIAS AND RATIONALITY

There is no single and agreed definition of what it means to be rational.
The term is used in several different (not necessarily exclusive) ways in the
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philosophical and psychological literature, including the following:

• Personal rationality (also known as individual or instrumental ration-

ality): the extent to which an individual succeeds in achieving their
personal goals
• Normative rationality: the extent to which a person’s behaviour con-
forms with the rules of a formal normative system used to define
correct reasoning or decision making
• Bounded rationality: the idea that people have instrumental rationality
(achieve their goals) within the constraints of their cognitive apparatus
with its limited processing capacity
• Ecological rationality: the extent to which people’s behaviour is
adapted to the environment in which they find themselves
• Evolutionary rationality: the extent to which an organism’s behaviour
serves the goals of their genes.

A concern – obsession even – with normative rationality has marked all of

the research fields reviewed in this book. We have seen in all the previous
chapters that phenomena described as biases are explicitly or implicitly linked
to some normative system of correct reasoning. Table 7.1 lists a number of
the major biases that have been reviewed in this book. In each case, the term
“bias” is explicitly linked in the relevant literature to violation of some norma-
tive theory. Confirmation bias violates Popperian falsificationism; belief bias
is illogical because validity concerns only the relation of premises to conclu-
sions; the disjunction effect violates Savage’s sure-thing principle; base-rate
neglect violates Bayes’ theorem and so on. These biases constitute the main
phenomena in these research fields and hence appear to demonstrate that
people are normatively irrational, a conclusion that many authors have found
disturbing or inappropriate (see, for example, Cohen, 1981; Funder, 1987;
Gigerenzer, 1991; O’Brien, 1993; Oaksford & Chater, 1993).
The problem is that it seems paradoxical to accuse people of being
irrational on the basis of their susceptibility to cognitive biases in the labora-
tory. This is because the human species is evidently very smart and accom-
plished, and indeed all animals appear to have high ecological rationality: that
 7. BROADER ISSUES 157

Table 7.1
Some of the main cognitive biases reviewed in this book

Bias Description Research paradigm Normative system

Confirmation bias Acting so as to discover Hypothesis testing; Popperian

confirming and avoid concept learning philosophy of
falsifying evidence science
Positive testing bias Considering only Hypothesis testing Various
positive predictions of a philosophies of
focal hypothesis science
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Matching bias Focusing on cases that Deductive reasoning Logic

match lexical content of
propositional rules
Belief bias Judging the validity of Deductive reasoning Logic
arguments on the
believability of their
conclusions
Double negation Failing to recognize that Deductive reasoning Logic
effect not-(not-p) implies p
Positive/negative Systematic Probability judgement; Probability
recency biases misperception of gambling theory
random sequences
Overweighting of Decision making under Expected utility
small probabilities risk
Disjunction effect Failure to prefer A to B Decision making Savage’s
when an irrelevant event sure-thing
C is unknown principle
Conjunction fallacy Judging P(A&B) to be Probability judgement Probability
more likely than P(A) theory
Base-rate neglect Insufficient Probability judgement Bayes’ theorem
consideration of prior
probabilities in posterior
probability judgements
Pseudodiagnosticity Judging a hypothesis on Probabilistic Bayes’ theorem
the basis of P(D|H) hypothesis testing
without considering
P(D|¬H)

is, to be adapted by some combination of evolution and learning to successful

life in their normal environments. So a lot of authors have felt that something
must be wrong in these endless demonstrations of normative irrationality:
the question is what? My own analysis (Evans, 1993; Evans & Over, 1996a)
suggests that answers to this question fall into three broad categories:

1. The normative system problem. This is the argument that psychologists

 158 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

apply the wrong normative system to the problems administered to their

participants. If the correct system were applied, behaviour would appear
rational. Advocates of this approach include Mike Oaksford and Nick
Chater, who, for example, have argued that choices on the Wason selec-
tion task are rational if viewed in terms of expected information
gain (Oaksford & Chater, 1996) and that, more generally, deductive-
reasoning performance is rational if assessed from the viewpoint of prob-
ability theory rather than standard logic (Oaksford & Chater, 2001).
2. The interpretation problem. This argument attributes deviations from
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normative theory not to faulty reasoning processes but to participants

adopting alternative mental representations of the problem information
from those intended by the experimenters (for examples, see Henle,
1962; Revlin, Leirer, Yopp, & Yopp, 1980; Smedslund, 1970, 1990). For
example, if a participant takes “if p then q” to be a biconditional “if and
only if p then q” then they will, by a process of logical reasoning, deduce
conclusions that appear to be fallacious.
3. The external validity problem. A number of authors (e.g., Cohen, 1981;
Funder, 1987) have argued that problems chosen to demonstrate cogni-
tive “illusions” in the laboratory are not representative of reasoning
accuracy in the real world. They are rather analogous to visual illusions,
such as the Muller-Lyer, which demonstrate the fallibility – by special
tricks – of a generally veridical and adaptive process.

Arguments (2) and (3) do not really stand up to close scrutiny. The interpreta-
tion argument fails because there are biases that cannot be accounted for a
process of logical reasoning from any consistent interpretation of the tasks
given. For example, all theories of conditionals (see Evans & Over, 2004, and
Chapter 3 of this book) agree that Modus Tollens is a valid inference and that
the not-q card should be selected on the Wason selection task. The same
applies if the conditional is read as a biconditional. In spite of this, people
often fail to make MT arguments and very frequently fail to pick the not-q
card. The external validity argument is not credible either: laboratory demon-
strations of biases and normative violations are so many and varied that it
beggars belief that each could be the result of a carefully engineered illusion.
Also, many of these biases have been demonstrated with expert judges or in
everyday contexts (see Gilovich et al., 2002, for many examples).
This leaves us with the problem of normative rationality, which is much
more tricky. Before considering this further, it is worth noting Stanovich’s
(1999, 2004) analysis of the alternative positions that authors take on the
rationality debate. He characterizes three positions, as follows:

1. Panglossian (named for Voltaire’s fictional philosopher). Roughly speak-

ing, this is the view that people are rational no matter what they do.
 7. BROADER ISSUES 159

Panglossian authors (such as Cohen, 1981) are happy to explain all

apparent deviations from rational behaviour on the basis of one of the
three arguments listed above. People are being assessed by the wrong
normative system, or they are misunderstanding the question, or the
experiment creates by trickery an unrepresentative cognitive illusion,
and so on. Such arguments are apparently motivated by a priori beliefs
that people must be rational.
2. Meliorist. On this view, people can be and often are irrational, but not
inherently so. They often get it wrong due to lack of education, lack of
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mental effort and so on, but can be improved. Meliorists are keen to find
ways of helping people to improve their reasoning and judgements,
which requires them to concede that they are often less than optimal to
start with. Meliorist authors include Stanovich himself (e.g., 2004) and
Jonathan Baron (e.g., Baron, 1985, 1994).
3. Apologist. This is the bounded rationality approach. Apologists, like
Meliorists, concede that behaviour can often be suboptimal but attribute
this to failures in cognitive capacity. Such authors tend to assume that
people have been shaped by evolution and/or learning to be as rational
as they can be. The research programme of Gigerenzer and colleagues
that demonstrates fast and frugal heuristics that can apparently make us
smart, with minimal demands on our cognitive resources, falls into this
category (Gigerenzer, 2004; Gigerenzer & Todd, 1999).

Of these three groups, Meliorists – who want to improve reasoning and

judgement – are the most willing to concede the reality of errors and biases
and the most favourably inclined to normative theories or at least prescriptive
theories (Baron, 1985) that people can realistically be taught to aid their
everyday reasoning and decision making.
For many years, I conducted experimental research on biases in reasoning
without thinking that I was doing anything more than cognitive psychology –
documenting and understanding phenomena that revealed the nature of
human thinking. However, when Panglossian authors began to attack all
work on cognitive biases, a response was required. My own was to argue that
the word “rational” was being used in two distinct ways termed rationality1
and rationality2 (Evans, 1993). These correspond to personal and normative
rationality, respectively. The argument was that demonstrating people to be
irrational2 (non-normative) by no means necessarily meant that they were
irrational1 (failing to achieve their personal goals). For example, standard
logic, which deals in propositions that can only be true or false, maps poorly
on to a real world full of uncertainty in which people must actually reason.
Hence, logic may be a poor normative model against which to assess human
reasoning (Evans, 2002a; Oaksford & Chater, 1991).
In my subsequent collaboration with the philosopher David Over (Evans
 160 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

& Over, 1996a), the concept of the two kinds of rationality was developed so
that the definition of rationality2 now included the phrase “acting when one
has a reason for what one does sanctioned by a normative theory”. David
insisted that to be termed rational in this sense, one had to be following rules
explicitly, not simply complying with rules in the manner of a bumblebee
apparently maximizing expected utility in its observed behaviour (Real, 1991).
However, this subtly shifted the terminology to represent two different con-
cepts of rationality, rather than two different ways of using the word. This
was also the starting point for the revised dual-process theory of reasoning
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with which this collaborative book ended. It was not our intention simply
to equate rationality1 with System 1 and rationality2 with System 2 as
some readers apparently inferred. However, it is true that thinking deeply
about these two concepts of rationality forced us to make the dual-process
distinction.
Here is the reason. If you think about instrumental rationality (rationality1)
then it is fairly evident that many organisms (even plants) must be deemed
“rational” in this sense due to either evolutionary programming or operant
conditioning or a combination of both. A cat achieves the goal of eating by
following a complex but stereotyped pattern of hunting behaviours that are
evidently genetically programmed. A domestic cat can also learn to find food
by reminding its owner to put food in its bowl. Whether such processes are
genetically hard-wired or experientially acquired they appear to be automatic
and implicit. It seemed to us that much human behaviour is like this also,
achieving rationality1 without requiring any effort of conscious or delibera-
tive thinking. However, humans can also solve problems and make decisions
in quite a different way, by conscious reflection and hypothetical thought
about imaginary possibilities.
A potential confusion arose in this analysis which I hope I have avoided in
the present volume. If rationality2 were to be equated with System 2 or ana-
lytic thinking, then it would imply that the analytic system was a kind of
mental logic, following normative rules. This is most definitely not what I
believe to the case. In fact, the discussion in this book of cognitive biases has
relied on the idea of two fundamental biases – one heuristic and the other
analytic. It has been argued that considering a single hypothesis and main-
taining it in line with the satisficing principle – the fundamental analytic bias
– is a major factor underlying many of the phenomena discussed. This
combines with the fundamental heuristic bias to contextualize problems with
regard to prior knowledge and belief in line with the relevance principle (see
also Stanovich, 1999). However, it would be correct to say that rationality2
(as defined by Evans & Over, 1996a) cannot be achieved without the use of
reflective, analytic thinking. It now seems preferable to emphasize the nature
of analytic thinking and to avoid any reference to rationality in its definition.
What matters is that it is a different kind of cognitive resource (from heuristic
 7. BROADER ISSUES 161

processing) that is available to human beings. Use of this resource can also
serve rationality1 by helping us to achieve our goals.
In favour of the value of normative rationality is the empirical observation
that participants of high cognitive ability often provide normatively correct
answers to problems in reasoning and judgement that are known to generate
biases in their less able colleagues. Stanovich (1999) has used this as an argu-
ment against Panglossian claims that these biases are but disguised forms of
rationality. However, even Stanovich reported exceptions to this finding, and
further research is suggesting a more complex picture of individual differ-
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ences in reasoning. For example, Newstead et al. (2004) found evidence that
participants of medium cognitive ability may be better at pragmatic forms of
reasoning than are those of lower ability, but worse at abstract reasoning than
are those of higher ability. This corresponds with findings that retrieval of
knowledge from memory relevant to contextualized reasoning develops with
age (e.g., Klaczynski, 2000; Markovits & Quinn, 2002) and is better
developed in adults with higher working-memory capacity (De Neys et al.,
2005b). This works in contrast with traditional Piagetian theory (e.g.,
Inhelder & Piaget, 1958) in which it was assumed that children develop con-
crete thinking that is replaced by abstract logical thought in adults. The con-
temporary developmental researchers cited above assume that both kinds of
thought develop in parallel, and the evidence suggests that most adults are
more competent with concrete than abstract thinking problems.
Normative rationality is essentially a philosophical and not a psycho-
logical concept. Analytic reasoning may (or may not) involve following
explicit rules as some theorists argue (e.g., Sloman, 1996), but the relation of
those rules to formal normative theories cannot form part of our psycho-
logical definition of System 2 thinking. Higher ability participants do appear
to think more analytically (or to do so more effectively) but not necessarily
more in accordance with standard normative theories. For example, we have
recent evidence that high-ability participants show very strongly defective
truth tables (see Chapter 3) in line with the suppositional theory of con-
ditionals, but in conflict with standard textbook treatments of material con-
ditionals (Evans et al., in press). This does not mean that there is anything
“wrong” with propositional logic and its material conditional – it is very useful
in developing computer logic, for example. However, it does illustrate that
we cannot build our theory of analytic thinking around standard normative
systems.
The notions of evolutionary and ecological rationality can seem to
get confused (Over, 2000a, 2000b; Todd, Fiddick, & Krauss, 2000). The dis-
tinction is that ecological rationality is manifested when an organism is well
adapted to its environment, and evolutionary rationality is that programmed
by genes. Because the dominant evolutionary theory is that of adaptationism
based on Darwinian principles, one might expect these to be the same.
 162 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

However, this is not necessarily so. First, there is the problem of how specific
or general our genetic programming might be. When our behaviour is well
adapted, is this due to application of an innate cognitive module with
encapsulated software (see Chapter 4) or the application of some domain-
general learning mechanism? Of course, our ability to learn is provided by the
genes, but there is a big distinction between custom-programmed modules
and general-purpose cognition on a “long-leash” from the genes (Stanovich,
2004; Stanovich & West, 2003).
A second issue is that we evolved in an environment that was in many ways
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strikingly different from the one in which we now operate. Hence, evolution-
ary rationality may conflict with ecological rationality, something that has
not generally been recognized in the influential tradition of evolutionary
psychology led by Tooby and Cosmides (e.g., 1992). These authors have been
criticized for always emphasizing the adaptive nature of human behaviour in
the modern environment as though this was an inevitable consequence of
evolutionary processes (Stanovich, 2004, chap. 5; Stanovich & West, 2003).
We could turn this on its head and argue that evolutionary psychologists
ought to be looking for biases resulting from mechanisms adapted to ancient
environments that are no longer relevant. The problem with looking for adap-
tations, such as the cheater detection algorithm proposed by Cosmides (1989;
see Chapter 4), is that any behaviour adapted to the modern environment
may have come about through some general process of learning.
Evolutionary considerations are relevant to broader forms of dual-process
theory, if System 1 is viewed as including innate cognitive modules as well as
implicit knowledge acquired through experiential learning. For this reason,
some dual-process theorists have looked closely and critically at the argu-
ments of evolutionary psychologists and especially the claim that the mind is
massively modular, thus apparently precluding any powerful role of general-
purpose reasoning in System 2 (Over, 2003; Stanovich, 1999, 2004). However,
such considerations are well beyond the scope of the present book with its
focus on the heuristic–analytic theory of reasoning and judgement. The
implicit heuristic processes on which this book is focused are principally
those that deliver prior knowledge and belief to consciousness for analytic
processing in line with the relevance principle. Whether this fundamental
heuristic bias has an ancient evolutionary origin is obviously highly ques-
tionable. However, it is sufficient for our present purposes to focus on the
nature of the heuristic processes that carry this out and the interaction with
the analytic processes that is reflected in our response to cognitive tasks.

SELF-KNOWLEDGE
Common sense (folk psychology) tells us that we are consciously in control of
our actions. However, experimental psychology tells us that much of our
 7. BROADER ISSUES 163

behaviour is controlled by processes that are partially or wholly unconscious.

Common sense tells us that since our behaviour is consciously controlled we
can introspect to derive the reasons for our actions and report them to others.
For example, we can tell opinion pollsters not only how we intended to vote,
but the reasons we have for doing so. Once again, experimental psychology
tells us otherwise: as Nisbett and Wilson (1977) famously put it, we cannot
tell what we do not know. While lack of insight into our own thought
processes is attributed to motivation and repression in Freudian theory, a
much more convincing reason is that many of our cognitive processes are
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simply unconscious and automatic and therefore inaccessible to introspection

(Wilson, 2002; Wilson & Dunn, 2004).
It is important to understand that this book has not been focused on the
many kinds of implicit cognitive processes that may affect us in wholly
unconscious ways. Such processes include those associated with attention,
perceptual and motor skills, language processing and the acquisition and
application of implicit knowledge through low-level associative learning
processes. There are many kinds of implicit cognitive processes in the mind
beyond the type of heuristic processes discussed in this book. Since we have
focused on explicit reasoning and judgement tasks that involve hypothetical
thinking, some element at least of analytic thinking is generally involved, in
order to generate a response that complies with the verbal instructions. Such
processing may be superficial and minimal, however, effectively delivering
default heuristically cued responses. For example, this happens when a con-
clusion to an argument that appears congenial is accepted as valid (belief
bias) or when an example that comes readily to mind is interpreted as being
probable (availability bias). We have also seen how more active intervention
by the analytic system can lead to such default responses being discarded and
replaced by ones based on more deliberative and appropriate reasoning.
It is hardly surprising that people will lack insight into mental processes
that are wholly implicit. For example, no one would seriously expect that
people could, by introspection, explain the processes underlying their recog-
nition of a familiar face, or their construction of the meaning of a spoken
sentence. However, psychologists have seriously addressed the question of
whether people have insight into reasoning, judgement and decision making –
all tasks that appear to involve conscious thinking. Let us reprise a couple
of examples that have arisen in the main review chapters of this book. In the
study of multicue judgement there has been some debate about the degree to
which people are aware of the “policies” that are implicit in their judgements
and which can be extracted by the methods of social judgement theory
using multiple regression analysis. Our own research on this, described in
Chapter 5, accords with the traditional view in this literature that such self-
insight is limited at best. For example, we found that doctors knew which
cues they were not using to make a judgement, but reported use of all cues
 164 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

to which they consciously attended (Harries et al., 1996), whereas only a

subset actually affected their judgements. Subsequent research indicated that
such judgements are influenced by a combination of implicit and explicit
knowledge (Evans et al., 2003a).
The multicue judgement work actually takes us beyond the bounds of the
heuristic–analytic theory and into more general forms of dual-process theory.
This is because implicit learning falls into the category of processes that can
influence our behaviour directly, even though they appear to combine with
explicit processes in producing the judgements observed in this paradigm.
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More relevant for our current purposes are phenomena such as matching bias
and belief bias that fall centrally within the remit of the heuristic–analytic
account. The difference in these cases is that heuristic processes are forming
default mental models for analytic processing either by focusing attention on
selected aspects of the problem or by retrieving relevant prior knowledge
from memory. What level of self-insight can we expect in such cases?
It would be surprising indeed if people were to report that their
responses were based on matching or belief bias. Verbal reports – including
“introspections” – require the analytic system for their generation, a system
that has been motivated by the experimental instructions to engage in
logical reasoning. If people were aware that they were choosing cards because
they match, or conclusions because they were believable, they presumably
would refrain from doing so! The fallacy, as so well exposed by Nisbett and
Wilson (1977), is to assume that a request for someone to explain their choices
would somehow cause them to retrieve the memory of a conscious thought
process responsible for the behaviour. In fact, such requests constitute a new
cognitive task that necessarily involves heavy use of the analytic system. In
effect, people think – given my response and given the task I was set, what is
the reason for this choice? As Wason and Evans (1975; see also Lucas & Ball,
2005) showed, people actually rationalize their choices in such reports. For
example, choice of a matching card may be justified on the basis of verifica-
tion or falsification depending on how it maps on to the logic of the problem.
In the same way, Nisbett and Wilson (1977) showed how unconsciously
controlled social judgements were often explained by use of a priori causal
theories that are culturally available.
As argued by Ericsson and Simon (1980, 1984), concurrent verbal proto-
cols (think aloud) are much more useful than retrospective reports as they
provide evidence about the current locus of participants’ attention. These are
not introspections but process-tracing methods, like eye-movement tracking
or neural imaging. Only by this method, for example, could we discover the
presence of “secondary matching bias” (Lucas & Ball, 2005; Wason & Evans,
1975) in which people think about matching values on the hidden sides of
cards. Such protocols have also shown us that participants who attend to the
premises (rather than just the conclusion) of a syllogistic argument are less
 7. BROADER ISSUES 165

prone to belief bias (Evans et al., 1983). In essence, people can report the
contents of their verbal working memories, but this is best done concurrently
to avoid forgetting. Moreover, these reports do not reveal reasons: it is the
task of the experimenter and not the participant to infer the underlying
cognitive processes.
The literature on judgement includes study of several meta-cognitive
biases that have not so far been discussed in this book. One such is hindsight
bias or the “knew it all along effect” (Fischhoff, 1982; Hawkins & Hastie,
1990; Roese, 2004). There are two paradigms, which Roese (2004) calls the
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hypothetical paradigm and the memory paradigm. The memory paradigm has
been popular in recent research and involves showing that when people
answer questions and later are asked to recall either their answers or con-
fidence ratings with the correct answers known, their memories shift in a
self-serving manner. That is, they are inclined to believe that they gave more
correct answers or had more confidence in answers that turned out to be
correct than they actually did. Of more interest here is the hypothetical para-
digm as employed in Fischhoff’s original studies. In this method people judge
the a priori probability of outcomes with and without outcome knowledge.
When outcomes are known, people overestimate the probability that they
could have predicted them. For example, Fischhoff (1975) asked participants
to estimate the probability of various outcomes of an historical battle (A
won, B won, truce, stand-off etc.). Each group were given the same scenario
but told that different outcomes occurred. Not only did participants allocate
higher probabilities to the “known” outcomes, but they also attributed causes
in the scenario according to the outcome. For example, if a guerrilla force was
said to have beaten an organized army, then the presence of a hilly terrain
with good cover might be cited as a key causal factor.
Hindsight bias (in the hypothetical paradigm) is highly consistent with
hypothetical thinking theory. It seems that people construct a single mental
simulation of the causal factors leading to the outcome that is biased by the
knowledge of what that outcome was. This process can lead to selective
rewriting of the past and failure to learn from history (Fischhoff, 1982). It
is also very interesting to compare hindsight judgements to counterfactual
thinking (Roese, 2004; Teigen, 1998). Logically, they should have an inverse
relationship. If there are two possible outcomes, A and B, and you know that
A occurred, hindsight bias should lead you to overestimate the probability of
A and underestimate the probability of B. However, the relevant research
shows that this is not necessarily so. What determines the counterfactual
judgements is their perceived closeness (Evans & Over, 2004, chap. 7) or what
Teigen (1998) calls the proximity heuristic. To understand what may be going
on here, consider a real-world example.
In April 2006, Arsenal and Villareal met in the second leg of a European
Champions’ League semifinal. Arsenal had a 1–0 lead from the first leg and
 166 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

were favourites to go through. In the game, the score remained 0–0 until three
minutes from the end at which point Villareal were awarded a disputed
penalty kick. The Arsenal goalkeeper, Jens Lehman, saved the penalty, and
Arsenal progressed to the final. I have no actual data on this case, but the
research literature suggests that the following would occur if people were
asked after the game to judge the probability of different results. If they
were asked the probability of the actual outcome (drawn second leg) they
would do this by considering a priori causal factors, such as the quality of
the two teams, their prior record in European competition and the tactical
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advantage (to Arsenal) of holding a 1–0 lead. They might well overestimate
the probability of the draw as they could focus on causal factors relevant to it
(for example, Arsenal could play defensively as they only needed a draw).
This is hindsight bias. Now suppose instead that they were asked to give the
probability of a counterfactual outcome – Villareal won 1–0. In this case, the
late penalty save would influence their thinking, making this counterfactual
possibility a close one that they would therefore judge probable. This infor-
mation would not influence the factual judgement, however, explaining the
dissociation between factual and counterfactual probability judgements. In
this case, it is quite possible that a group asked to judge the likelihood of a
draw and another group asked to judge that of a Villareal win might give
probabilities adding to well in excess of one.
The findings here are similar to those of the work on reasons pro and con
discussed in Chapter 5 (Shafir, 1993). In that case people might choose the
same option when asked to select one of two actions as when asked to reject
one. In all of these cases, people are constructing single mental simulations.
The biasing factor is the relevance principle by which unconscious cues
to relevance flesh out the content of the simulation. What is relevant to
accepting an option appears different from what is relevant to rejecting
one. Similarly, what is relevant for judging a factual probability is different
from what is relevant for judging a counterfactual probability. Although
people consciously evaluate their mental simulations, much of their content
is determined by unconscious heuristic processes. Note, however, that when
people simply compare the probability of factual and counterfactual con-
ditional statements (see Over et al., in press; see also Chapter 4) they seem to
use a similar process, presumably because both appear to concern the causal
connection between p and q. However, psychological research on closeness in
counterfactual conditional sentences to date has been minimal (see Evans &
Over, 2004, chap. 7).
People – including expert judges – are chronically overconfident of their
judgements, giving confidence ratings that actually overestimate their proba-
bility of correctly answering questions or making predictions (Fischhoff &
McGreggor, 1982; Koriat, Lichtenstein, & Fischhoff, 1980). This is one of a
number of biases that can be seen as “self-serving” along with hindsight bias
 7. BROADER ISSUES 167

and myside bias (Baron, 1995; Stanovich & West, in press) – the tendency to
see arguments as stronger when they support your own beliefs. Clearly there
could be motivational factors in self-serving biases, but I prefer a cognitive
account. For example, forecasting a future event requires conducting a men-
tal simulation. In accordance with the relevance and singularity principles,
people will tend to focus on the most plausible scenario (most relevant by
default). This process is almost bound to bias any subsequent question about
confidence in an upward direction as the mere act of simulation will make the
chosen alternative more available. In fact, there is evidence that just asking
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someone to imagine a possible scenario will increase their degree of belief

that it will come about (Hirt & Sherman, 1985).
All in all, our insight into our own cognitive processes seems to be very
limited. This appears problematic for dual-process theories that place a lot of
emphasis on the automatic-controlled distinction (see Evans, 2006a), since
such views suggest that at least some of our decision making is conscious and
controlled in the manner expected by folk psychology. However, my argument
is not that such intentional level decision making does not occur, but rather
that it does not result in self-insight. First, no action is ever entirely controlled
by conscious analytic thinking as much of its content and directional focus is
determined by preconscious processes. Moreover, any question that we ask to
try to determine self-insight introduces a reactive measurement whether it be
an introspective report or a confidence rating. Giving your reasons for choos-
ing cards on the selection task, for example, is a different cognitive task from
that of actually choosing them. If asked retrospectively for reasons, a process
very similar to that of hindsight bias operates. If you know you have chosen
the 3 card and that you were asked to make the rule true or false, then you
solve this (new) task by coming up with a reason that links the two together,
just as in the hindsight bias paradigm you seek and find causal factors relevant
to the outcome you know to have occurred.

LINKS WITH OTHER RESEARCH ON

DUAL PROCESSES
In the discussion of the cognitive literatures on reasoning, judgement and
decision making in this book, a specific dual-process account has largely
been applied: the revised heuristic–analytic theory (Evans, 2006b). There are
actually a large number of dual-process theories in psychology applied both
in these fields and in others, most notably in the psychology of learning and in
social psychology. Some of the major ones are listed in Table 7.2. On a
superficial examination, it may seem that they are all drawing a broadly
similar distinction, that between fast, automatic processes on the one hand
(System 1) and slow, deliberative and conscious ones on the other (System 2).
However, more detailed consideration reveals that any attempt either (a) to
 168 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

Table 7.2
Some of the major dual-process theories of cognition

System 1 System 2

Fodor (1983, 2001) Input modules Higher cognition

Epstein (1994); Epstein and Pacini (1999) Experiential Rational
Chaiken (1980); Chen and Chaiken (1999) Heuristic Systematic
Reber (1993); Evans and Over (1996a); Implicit/tacit Explicit
Sun (2001)
Evans (1989; 2006b) Heuristic Analytic
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Schneider and Schiffrin (1977) Automatic Controlled

Hammond (1996) Intuitive Analytic
Stanovich (1999, 2004); Kahneman and System 1 (TASS) System 2 (analytic)
Frederick (2002)
Nisbett et al. (2001) Holistic Analytic
Wilson (2002) Adaptive unconscious Conscious
Toates (2006) Stimulus-bound Higher order

map these theories on to each other or (b) to map each on to two underlying
cognitive systems is fraught with difficulties (see Evans, 2006a).
Dual-process theories of learning have been around for many years, and
the account of Reber (1993) was an inspiration in the development of more
broadly based two-system theories of reasoning (Evans & Over, 1996a;
Stanovich, 1999). Dual-process learning theories propose that there are two
distinct forms of learning: implicit and explicit, which lead correspondingly
to distinct implicit and explicit forms of knowledge (see also Berry & Dienes,
1993; Dienes & Perner, 1999; French & Cleeremans, 2002; Osman, 2005; Sun,
2001; Sun, Slusarz, & Terry, 2005). At a computational level, these two forms
of learning can be modelled using neural networks for the implicit processes
and some form of rule induction for the explicit learning (Sun et al., 2005),
with the added psychological assumption that the latter process is explicit
and limited by working memory capacity. On this basis, dual-process theories
of learning seem to map well on to Sloman’s (1996) distinction between
associative and rule-based processes in reasoning.
Evidence for implicit learning has been accumulated from several distinct
paradigms such as artificial-grammar learning (Reber, 1976) and tasks
involving control of complex systems (Berry & Broadbent, 1987, 1988). For
example, in the latter case, participants might be asked to set variables in
order to control output of a factory within a computer simulation. The
system to be controlled has rules that are unknown to the participants.
Instead, they make adjustments and then receive outcome feedback on a trial-
by-trial basis. Eventually, they learn to control the system to the specified
criteria but without ever being able to state explicitly the rules that govern
its behaviour. In the artificial-grammar paradigm, participants are asked to
 7. BROADER ISSUES 169

judge the grammaticality of letter strings that are generated (or not) by a
phrase structure grammar. Again, with outcome feedback over a number of
trials, people learn to tell grammatical and ungrammatical strings apart, but
are not able to state the explicit rules that underlie their definition.
In other kinds of learning tasks, people can explicitly describe the basis
of their learning, and the difference between this and implicit learning has
led some theorists to postulate two distinct forms of cognitive processes
and two distinct forms of knowledge representation as noted above. However,
this position has become quite controversial (e.g., Cleeremans & Jiminez,
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2002; Shanks & St John, 1994), with some recent theorists favouring a single-
process approach in which knowledge structures lie on a continuum of
strength. Conscious attention may be more or less required – or involved
initially but later replaced by well-learnt processes that become “automatic”.
By analogy with this, some authors have argued against dual-process accounts
of reasoning (Osman, 2005; Stevenson, 1997) as though these also might be
on a continuum. Newstead (2000) has also argued (on different grounds) for
the continuum approach, something also incorporated into the distinction
between intuitive and analytic thinking in the cognitive continuum theory of
Hammond (1996).
I am less inclined now than previously (Evans & Over, 1996a) to think that
dual processes in learning can easily be related to the kinds of dual-process
distinctions in reasoning and judgement discussed in this book. There is a
clear distinction between implicit and explicit knowledge, which is that the
former affects our behaviour without becoming conscious, and the latter has
the potential to be retrieved and posted in consciousness. The complication is
that the kind of heuristic processes discussed in this book are mostly con-
cerned with the retrieval and application of explicit knowledge from long-
term and semantic memory, albeit by implicit processes. Explicit knowledge is
not what we are aware of at a given time (which is very little), but what has the
potential to become conscious. The heuristic–analytic theory is concerned
with the kind of implicit cognitive processes that deliver content for con-
scious analytic processing and shape its direction in line with the relevance
principle. Although fast and automatic in themselves, these heuristic pro-
cesses clearly fall into the category of implicit processes that post their results
into consciousness.
In essence, while System 2 still stands up as a unitary concept, System 1
does not. It is in reality a collection of quite different kinds of implicit cogni-
tive systems (see also Stanovich, 2004; Wilson, 2002). Heuristic processes
shape our conscious thinking both by retrieving relevant prior knowledge
and by directing attention to different parts of the presented information.
More than one mechanism probably underlies these but they are at least
coherently linked by the relevance principle. These are different from the pro-
cesses involved in the acquisition of and application of implicit knowledge to
 170 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

our behaviour, which is the focus of dual-process research in learning. There

are also forms of implicit knowledge that appear to be acquired initially
through a process of explicit learning and later become automated and hence
rapid and effortless (Monsell & Driver, 2000; Schneider & Shiffrin, 1977).
There are also undoubtedly cognitive modules in the mind with encapsulated
and domain-specific processes such as those involved in language processing
and vision (Fodor, 1983) even though attempts to explain higher level reas-
oning and decision processes with reference to such modules has proved
highly controversial (see Chapters 4 and 6).
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Failures to distinguish between different kinds of implicit processes is a

source of potential confusion in broader dual-system accounts. Thus, while
Sloman’s (1996) distinction between associative and rule-based processing is
highly appropriate to the literature on inductive and categorical learning,
it may be an oversimplification to try to generalize this, as he does, to
decision-making and deductive-reasoning tasks. Most dual-process theorists
in reasoning are focused on the distinction between belief-based and analytic
reasoning but if you accept the account of such tasks given in this book, it
should be apparent that these heuristic processes are not associative. They
might better be termed pragmatic, as they are highly sensitive to context and
deliver relevant content. On a somewhat different track, Evans and Over
(1996a) and Stanovich (1999) may have confused matters by applying the idea
from learning theory that the two processes might be old (implicit) and new
(explicit) in evolutionary terms to dual-process accounts of reasoning. As
Goel (2005) has shown in his neural-imaging studies of reasoning, belief
biases are located in frontal regions of the brain that are recently evolved and
distinctively human. There is clearly something wrong with the concurrent
proposals of reasoning theorists (Evans, 2003) that System 1 is ancient
and shared with other animals and that belief bias is part of System 1. What
is wrong is that there is no singular implicit system with a particular evo-
lutionary history that competes with analytic reasoning in System 2. Nor can
it be the case that the most cognitive biases observed in reasoning research are
primarily due to cognitive modules that evolved for different purposes in an
ancient environment as Stanovich (2004) appears to suggest.
Dual-process theories have also been strongly applied in cognitive social
psychology for many years (for recent reviews and collections of papers, see
Chaiken & Trope, 1999; Hassin et al., 2005; Wilson, 2002) but with little or
no cross-reference to the literatures in reasoning, judgement and decision
making. Again, the distinctions made seem superficially to correspond well
with the generic Systems 1 and 2 of reasoning theory. Social psychologists
distinguish between processes that are fast and automatic on the one hand
and slow, deliberative and conscious on the other. The rational–experiential
theory of Epstein (1994; Epstein & Pacini, 1999) proposed two systems that
are also distinguished by being evolutionarily old (experiential) and recent
 7. BROADER ISSUES 171

(rational) with the latter being distinctively human. The heuristic–systematic

model of Chaiken (1980; Chen & Chaiken, 1999) is based on distinctions
that seem very similar to those between heuristic and analytic reasoning pro-
cesses. Automatic versus controlled processing has been a major construct in
accounting for studies of social cognition (e.g., Bargh & Ferguson, 2000) but
social psychologists also seem to draw upon the distinction between implicit
and explicit knowledge as when they assert dissociation between implicit
and explicit levels of attitudes (Wilson, Lindsey, & Schooler, 2000) and
stereotypes (Bargh, 1999).
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Research in social psychology provides evidence for dual processing pri-

marily by demonstrating dissociations between implicit and explicit levels
of processing or knowledge. For example, some individuals express explicit
stereotypical attitudes about gender, race and so on, and some do not. (Those
who do not can still state explicitly what the stereotypes in their culture are.)
Many experimental studies have shown, however, that almost everyone can
be shown to possess these stereotypes at the implicit level (Bargh, 1999). A
typical method used is that of semantic priming borrowed from the cognitive
literature on implicit memory (see Lucas, 2000). For example, McRae and
colleagues (Macrae, Bodenhausen, Milne, Thorn, & Castelli, 1997) showed
people pictures followed by a lexical decision task (judging whether a letter
string is a word or nonword). Some of the pictures were of women, and,
provided that a semantic judgement was required (animate–inanimate), a
marked priming effect was observed on the lexical decision tasks. Stereotype-
consistent words (e.g., caring, emotional) were recognized much faster than
counter-stereotypical words (e.g., confident, assertive). However, the effect did
not occur if people simply examined the pictures for visual features. Hence,
although stereotype activation is automatic, its operation is influenced by the
consciously controlled locus of attention.
There is a debate in the social cognition literature as to whether people
have any control over activation and application of stereotypes in their social
thinking. A relatively optimistic view is that while activation is automatic,
stereotypical thoughts can be consciously suppressed and inhibited (e.g.,
Devine, 1989). The argument here would seem to parallel those of reasoning
researchers who suggest that belief biases in reasoning can be inhibited pro-
vided that the participants are properly motivated by instructions and of
sufficient cognitive ability (Chapter 4). However, a more pessimistic view is
taken by Bargh (1999), who reviews evidence showing that people cannot
effectively inhibit stereotypical thinking even when made consciously aware
that it might influence their judgements. Bargh implies that social psycholo-
gists have suffered from wishful thinking on this topic and also argues
that both psychologists and their participants suffer from the illusion that
“controlled” cognitive processes are somehow freely willed and lacking in
deterministic mechanism (Bargh, 2005; Bargh & Ferguson, 2000). His views
 172 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

clearly support those of other social psychologists such as Wilson (2002) that
people lack self-insight (see previous section).
The literature on dual processes in social psychology is huge, and effective
review of it is well beyond the scope of this book. Social psychologists appear
to have been less concerned than their cognitive colleagues with issues of
cognitive architecture and evolution but are engaged in detailed argument
about what forms of social knowledge are implicit and explicit and the extent
to which social processes are automatic or under voluntary control. They
have also had rather more to say about the issues of self-knowledge and free
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will. Social psychologists, dealing rather more directly with the real world,
have also addressed concerns about the extent to which individuals can be
held morally and legally responsible for their social attitudes and behaviour,
in the light of the massive accumulation of evidence of automatic processing
of social information.
In summary, dual-processing accounts of reasoning and judgement that
have been the focus of this book are clearly linked in some way with those
developed in other fields of psychology, especially in the study of learning
and of social cognition. Integrating these literatures is, however, a formidable
task. There do appear to be distinct implicit and explicit forms of knowledge
representation that are acquired by different mechanisms of learning, and it is
likely that the implicit form evolved much earlier. However, these implicit
processes largely differ from the kinds of heuristic processes discussed in this
book, which concern the locus and content of conscious attention in the
analytic thinking system and often also the implicit processes that retrieve
and apply explicit knowledge. Social psychologists have concerned them-
selves with the distinction between implicit and explicit knowledge, but in a
manner that relates more closely to the literature on implicit memory than on
implicit learning, with the use of semantic priming being a very popular
methodology. Social psychologists are also interested in the ways in which
automatic and controlled processes appear to compete for control of social
judgements that provide potential links with dual-processing accounts of
reasoning and judgement.

FINAL THOUGHTS
This book has been focused on hypothetical thinking. This is the kind of
thought that occurs when we attempt explicitly to make an inference, judge-
ment or decision that requires imagination of hypothetical possibilities.
The theory of hypothetical thinking offered incorporates a particular dual-
processing account in order to deal with the cognitive processes underlying
such thinking. While there are many kinds of implicit and automatic pro-
cesses in the brain that control much of our behaviour, including associative
learning, and encapsulated modules that control perceptual and language
 7. BROADER ISSUES 173

processing, these are not the main concern of the heuristic–analytic theory of
thinking. The focus here has been, rather, on the kinds of implicit processes
– which I term “heuristic” – that bias and shape our analytic reasoning.
The original heuristic–analytic theory of reasoning (Evans, 1989) was
designed to explain cognitive biases that arise in reasoning, judgement and
decision making. This was based upon the idea that we can only think about
limited representations of problem information and that the attentional and
pragmatic processes that determine these representations are of necessity
preconscious. In this book, I have also been interested in explaining biases
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and have used this idea – the fundamental heuristic bias – extensively in this
exercise. It does indeed seem that we automatically and rapidly contextualize
problems in the light of prior knowledge and that this process can bias our
conscious reasoning (see also Stanovich, 1999). Where this book departs
from these previous analyses is in attributing biases of reasoning not only to
this fundamental bias of the heuristic system, but also to an equally funda-
mental bias in the analytic system. We tend to think about only one possibility
at a time and accept this as the basis for inference, decisions or action if it
seems good enough. Taken together, this account of hypothetical thinking
involves the three principles of relevance, singularity and satisficing that have
been illustrated with respect to a wide range of psychological literatures.
In discussing hypothetical thought, I have also made extensive use of the
concepts of epistemic mental models and of mental simulations. The popular
and successful mental model theory of reasoning (Johnson-Laird, 1983;
Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 1991) has, I believe, had limited success in trying to
account for the accumulation of evidence that human reasoning is primarily
pragmatic and not deductive in nature. In common with mental logic theories,
mental modellers have tried to account for reasoning on the grounds that it is
a logical process subject to influence by pragmatic factors relating to prior
knowledge and belief. To this end, Johnson-Laird and colleagues have pro-
moted the idea of semantic mental models that represent situations in the
world. Such models are truth-verifiable and well suited to an account of
human reasoning in terms of extensional logic.
The view of human reasoning taken here is radically different. People do
indeed make use of mental models in their reasoning and decision making,
but these models are epistemic in nature. This means that they do not simply
represent the states of the world (as in semantic models) but rather the
beliefs that people hold about these states. Such models are not truth-
verifiable, because if I believe that, say, the Republicans will win the next US
election with subjective probability .6, this belief can never be confirmed. The
Republicans will win or they will not but they cannot win .6. Nor is there
any relevant frequency distribution to be considered for such a one-off event.
But epistemic mental models can do much more than represent subjective
probabilities. They can represent any kind of belief or propositional attitude
 174 HYPOTHETICAL THINKING

that we hold with regard to their content. For example, they can represent
beliefs about causal relations in line with accumulated evidence that causal
mental models are prevalent in human thought (Sloman, 2005). They can
represent counterfactual thoughts about past possibilities that never occurred
and which can now never be verified. Crucially, they can represent the fact
that the models themselves are hypothetical or suppositional, so that we can
distinguish our thought experiments from our beliefs about reality.
Epistemic mental models should not be thought of as static structures that
are retrieved unaltered from memory, although we probably do store such
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models that are commonly used in our thinking. Normally, we engage in

hypothetical thinking in order to deal with a novel problem. We are invited to
dinner by someone for the first time and need to work out the route of travel
and estimate its duration. We decide to take a holiday and need to choose a
destination and form of accommodation that will fit our requirements and
suit our budget. We are offered tickets to a sporting event and try to work out
whether we will enjoy it enough to be worth the time and expense of attend-
ing. Real-world decision making is like this. We usually consider one possibil-
ity at a time but often lack any preformed belief or knowledge to determine
our action. In such cases, we conduct thought experiments or mental simula-
tions in order to develop epistemic mental models that are well enough
defined to be useful.
Mental simulation is an idea that links together many of the diverse litera-
tures discussed in this book. It is the primary tool that the analytic system
uses to evaluate possibilities. We use mental simulations to think and reason
about conditional statements, to evaluate hypotheses, to make forecasts, to
evaluate options that we can choose and so on. Mental simulation always
engages the analytic system with its conscious but slow and capacity-limited
processes. Any form of hypothetical thinking requires explicit representation
of its suppositional nature. However, mental simulations are also constrained
by the three principles of hypothetical thinking, including the relevance prin-
ciple that reflects heuristic processing. We tend to think about one possibility
at a time (singularity principle), which is the one that appears most appropriate
in the context (relevance principle). Our imagination of possibilities is limited
and predictable (see Byrne, 2005, for many examples), and we are unable to
keep track of possible but less likely branches when we build the simulation
forward in time (Kahneman & Tversky, 1982b). We may revise or abandon
the mental representations that are generated, but have a strong tendency to
accept them unless there is clear reason to do otherwise (satisficing).
This process of hypothetical thinking has bounded rationality because it
allows us to function in a world of great complexity and uncertainty, while
taking actions that achieve our goals much of the time. However, it is hardly
surprising that those experimental psychologists who are interested in finding
error and bias have little difficulty in doing so. We have seen, for example, that
 7. BROADER ISSUES 175

different research programmes can treat heuristics more or less sympatheti-

cally: some finding situations where short-cut rules of thumb lead to effective
solutions to otherwise intractable problems and some devising tasks where
systematic biases result. For example, people may appear to be biased by
prior beliefs and to be stereotypical and prejudiced in their social perception
and judgements. The ability to inhibit such beliefs and to reason in abstract
manner appears to be related both to cognitive ability and to cognitive style.
Some people are more able to think analytically than others; some are also
more inclined to do so than others.
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I sometimes think that we should call a halt to all psychological experi-

mentation for ten years or so and instead spend our time just reading what
has already been done and thinking about it. The literatures are so large that
no one person can know more than a fraction of the work in any detail. If we
were not all so busy running and analysing our experiments, perhaps we
would make more sense of what has already been reported. It is no wonder
that parallel literatures have developed on dual processes in several distinct
fields of psychology that make little or no cross-reference to each other.
In this book, I have at least tried to connect several literatures that are norm-
ally studied separately – hypothesis testing, deductive reasoning, statistical
reasoning, judgement and decision making. While the tasks that are given
to participants in these fields are many and varied, they engage the same
cognitive systems. I hope that I have been able to show how a dual-process
framework with a common set of principles can usefully be applied in all of
these.
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 Author index
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Adams, E. 55 Bradshaw, H. 139

Ajzen, I. 144 Braine, M.D.S. 8, 10, 54, 64, 95
Alison, L. 80 Broadbent, D.E. 168
Alksnis, O. 94, 98 Brooks, P.G. 68–69
Allen, J.L. 87 Bruner, J.S. 28, 68
Almor, A. 102 Bueler, R. 50
Alter, A.L. 136 Buller, D.J. 101
Anderson, J.R. 108 Byrne, R.M.J. 7–8, 10, 19, 43, 54–58, 60,
Arkkelin, D.L. 36 62, 64, 66–67, 70, 73, 75–76, 85, 89,
Austin, G.A. 28, 68 94, 100, 173–174

Ball, L.J. 17, 44, 46, 89, 164 Campbell, J.I.D. 89

Bara, B.G. 83, 85, 92 Canter, D. 80
Bargh, J.A. 14, 111, 170–171 Caporael, L.R. 101
Bar-Hillel, M. 139, 144 Cara, F. 102
Barkow, J.H. 101 Casscells, W. 141, 147
Baron, J. 108, 133, 159, 166 Castelli, L. 171
Barr, D. 150 Catellani, P. 75
Barrett, L. 101 Cattani, A. 122–123, 164
Barrouillet, P. 98, 104 Chadwick, R. 150
Barston, J.L. 19, 87–89, 92, 164 Chaiken, S. 5, 14, 80, 109–110, 168,
Bennett, J. 52, 73 170–171
Berry, D.C. 14, 102, 105, 118, 124, 132, Chater, N. 3, 39, 46, 86, 95, 98, 102, 108,
168 156, 158–159
Beyth-Marom, R. 150, 152 Chen, S. 110, 168, 171
Bodenhausen, G.V. 171 Cheng, P.W. 100–101
Bos, M.W. 111, 118–119 Cherubini, P. 126

197
 198 AUTHOR INDEX

Choi, I. 4, 110, 168 Falk, R. 135

Christal, R.E. 60 Farelly, D. 65, 104, 161
Cleeremans, A. 168–169 Feeney, A. 46, 59, 150–152
Clibbens, J. 45, 57, 59, 63–34, 122–123, Ferguson, M.J. 111, 171
148, 151, 164 Feynman, R.P. 31
Cohen, L.J. 156, 158–159 Fias, W. 17
Colom, R. 60, 97 Fiddick, L. 102, 161
Cooksey, R.W. 13, 120 Fischhoff, B. 150, 152, 156–166
Cosmides, L. 15, 101–103, 131, 143, 147, Fleury, M.-L. 104
162 Fodor, J. 101, 168, 170
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Cottrell, J.M. 110 Fong, G.T. 132

Coventry, K. 137, 148 Frederick, S. 5, 16, 19, 109, 128, 140,
Cox, J.R. 100 149, 152, 168
Cummins, D.D. 94, 97–98 French, R.M. 168
Curtis-Holmes, J. 89–91 Fugelsang, J.A. 31, 33, 93, 143
Funder, D.C. 156, 158
Daniel, D.B. 104
De Neys, W. 88, 97, 103–104, 161 Gale, A.G. 17, 44, 46
Dean, J. 121, 144, 163 Garavan, H. 150
Denes-Raj, V. 110 Garnham, A. 85, 91–92
Dennis, I. 121–123, 163–164 George, C. 95, 97
Devine, P.G. 171 Gigerenzer, G. 30, 103, 108, 127, 132,
DeVooght, G. 37 137, 147–148, 153, 156, 159
Dienes, Z. 14, 102, 105, 118, 124, 132, Gilovich, T. 12, 108–109, 131, 136–137,
168 158
Dieussaert, K. 95, 98 Girotto, V. 17, 59, 61, 68, 70, 101–103,
Dijksterhuis, A. 111, 118–119 125, 148
Doherty, M.E. 13, 17, 36, 48, 119, Goel, V. 14–15, 61, 170
150–152 Goldstein, D.G. 127
Dolan, R.J. 15, 61 Goldstein, W.M. 119
Dragan, W. 17, 150–152 Goldvarg, Y. 70
Driver, J. 170 Gonzales, R. 112
Dunbar, K.N. 31, 33, 143 Gonzalez, M. 148
Dunbar, R.I.M. 101 Goodnow, J.J. 28, 68
Dunn, E.W. 163 Gorman, M.E. 36
d’Ydewalle, G. 17, 37, 45, 63, 95, 97–98, Graboys, T.B. 141, 147
161 Grafman, J. 102
Green, A.E. 31, 33, 143
Edgington, D. 52, 54–55, 58 Griffin, D. 12, 50, 108–109, 131, 137, 158
Edwards, W. 11, 112, 119 Griggs, R.A. 100
Ellis, C.E. 59 Grosjean, S. 28, 35, 47
Elqayam, S. 70, 72 Gross, K.A. 36
Epstein, S. 19, 110, 168, 170 Gunter, R.W. 89
Ericsson, K.A. 164
Evans, J.St.B.T. 4–5, 7–8, 10, 12, 14–15, Ha, Y.W. 35–37
17–22, 29–30, 34–35, 37, 39, 41–48, 50, Hadjichristidis, C. 53, 59, 75, 77, 96
52–55, 57–68, 70, 73–75, 77, 79, 81–82, Hammond, K.R. 119, 168–169
85–96, 98, 100–102, 104, 109, 115, Handley, S.J. 17–19, 45–46, 54, 58–61,
121–123, 131, 134, 137, 139, 143–145, 65–66, 70, 74–75, 77, 85–87, 90, 92, 94,
147–148, 150–152, 155, 157–161, 96, 98, 104, 115, 143–145, 147, 151,
163–170, 173 161
 AUTHOR INDEX 199

Harley, C. 65, 104, 161 Lafleur, S.J. 118

Harper, C. 46, 58–87, 90 Larkin, J. 95
Harries, C.H. 121, 144, 163 Lavallee, K.L. 110
Harris, A. 122–123, 164 LeBeouf, R.A. 107, 116, 126
Harvey, N. 11, 107, 109 Legrenzi, P. 17, 61, 68, 70, 125
Hassin, R.R. 14, 170 Leirer, V. 87, 158
Hastie, R. 11, 107, 165 Lepper, M.R. 89
Hawkins, S.A. 165 Levine, M. 28
Heier, H. 110 Lichtenstein, S. 166
Henle, M. 158 Lindsey, S. 171
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Hilton, D.J. 75 Lisle, D.J. 118

Hinton, P.R. 4 Liu, I.-M. 95
Hirt, E.R. 115, 167 Lo, K.-C. 95
Hodges, S.D. 118 Lopez, A.L. 36
Hoffrage, U. 132, 147–148 Lord, C. 89
Holyoak, K.J. 100–101 Lott, J. 65
Houdé, O. 61 Lubart, T. 94, 98
Howson, C. 26, 30, 32, 81, 134 Lucas, E.J. 17, 44, 46, 164
Hug, K. 103 Lucas, M. 171
Lycett, J. 101
Inhelder, B. 161 Lynch, J.S. 34, 41–42

Jepson, D.H. 132 Maachi, L. 141

Jiminez, L. 169 MacPherson, R. 17, 110
Johnson-Laird, P.N. 5, 7, 10, 17, 19, 30, Macrae, C.N. 171
34, 39, 41, 54–60, 64, 70, 73, 76, 83, Mandel, D.R. 75
85–87, 90–92, 94, 125, 173 Manktelow, K.I. 46, 85, 99–100,
Juan-Espinosa, M. 60, 97, 125 102–103
Marcus, S.L. 54
Kahneman, D. 5, 12, 16–17, 19, 50, Markovits, H. 92, 97–98, 104, 161
75, 108–109, 112–114, 128, 131, Martigon, L. 148
137–141, 143, 149, 152–153, 158, Mazzocco, A. 126
168, 174 McGreggor, D. 166
Kirby, K.N. 46 Mellet, E. 61
Klaaren, K.J. 118 Miles, J.N.V. 17, 44, 46
Klaczynski, P.A. 14, 17, 93, 104, 110, Milne, A.B. 171
133, 161 Mithen, S. 15
Klauer, K.C. 87, 90 Monsell, S. 170
Klayman, J. 28, 35–37, 93 Morley, N.J. 87, 92
Klein, G. 18, 119, 128–129, 138 Moutier, S. 61
Knight, R.T. 102 Murray, D.J. 30
Koehler, D.J. 11, 107, 109, 115, 126 Musch, J. 87, 90
Koehler, J.J. 143 Mynatt, C.R. 17, 36, 48, 150–152
Kokis, J.V. 17, 110
Konold, C. 135 Nantel, G. 92
Koriat, A. 166 Naumer, B. 87, 90
Krantz, D.H. 132 Neilens, H. 60, 65–66, 161
Krauss, S. 148, 161 Newell, A. 137
Kroll, N. 102 Newstead, S.E. 8, 43, 59, 62, 65, 67–68,
Kunda, Z. 132 70, 85–87, 89, 100, 104, 161, 169
Kyllonen, P.C. 60, 97 Newton, E.J. 17
 200 AUTHOR INDEX

Nguyen-Xuan, A. 103 Rips, L.J. 8–9, 54, 64, 72

Nickerson, R.S. 46, 57 Rist, R. 94, 98
Nisbett, R.E. 4, 100, 110, 132, 163–164, Roberts, M.J. 17, 44
168 Robinson, B. 133
Nordgren, L.F. 111, 118–119 Roese, N.J. 165
Norenzayan, A. 4, 110, 168 Rood, B. 45, 57, 63–64
Ross, L. 89
Oakhill, J. 85, 91–92 Ross, M. 50
Oaksford, M. 3, 39, 45–46, 86, 95, 98, Rumiati, R. 126
102, 108, 156, 158–159
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Oberauer, K. 59 Samuels, R. 101

O’Brien, D.P. 8, 10, 54, 64, 95, 156 Savary, F. 70
Ofir, C. 150 Schaeken, W. 17, 37, 45, 56, 63, 95,
Oliver, L.M. 100 97–98, 161
Oppenheimer, D.M. 128, 136 Schiavo, M.D. 48, 150
Osman, M. 14, 168–169 Schneider, W. 168, 170
Oswald, M.E. 28, 35, 47 Schoenberger, A. 141, 147
Over, D.E. 4–5, 10, 12, 14, 17–19, 29, 39, Schooler, J.W. 118
43, 46, 50, 52–55, 58–62, 64–67, 73–75, Schooler, T.Y. 171
77, 81–82, 93–103, 115, 131, 139, Schroyens, W. 17, 45, 56, 63
143–145, 147–148, 151, 157–162, Schuneman, M.J. 104
165–166, 168–170 Schwarz, N. 138
Segal, E. 111
Pacini, R. 110, 170 Shafir, E. 107, 116–117, 126, 166
Palacios, A. 60, 97 Shanks, D.R. 169
Pearl, J. 30 Shanteau, J. 121
Peng, K. 4, 110, 168 Shapiro, D. 100
Perham, N. 143–145, 147, 151 Sherman, S.J. 115, 150, 167
Perner, J. 14, 168 Shiffrin, R.M. 168, 170
Piaget, J. 161 Simon, H.A. 4, 18, 108, 137, 164
Pineau, A. 61 Skov, R.B. 150
Pinker, S. 15, 101 Sloman, S.A. 5, 14, 30, 54, 59, 75, 77, 96,
Pliske, D.B. 36 115, 134, 148, 161, 168, 170, 174
Poincaré, H. 111 Slovack, L. 148
Poletiek, F. 31, 35–36, 46 Slovic, P. 12, 108–109, 131
Politzer, G. 103 Slusarz, P. 168
Pollard, P. 19, 87–89, 164 Smedslund, J. 158
Popper, K.R. 29–34, 47, 134, 156–157 Smith, E.E. 36
Smith, P.K. 118
Quayle, J.D. 89 Smullyan, R.M. 71
Quelhas, A.C. 75 Spampinato, M.V. 102
Quinn, S. 97, 104, 161 Spellman, B.A. 36, 38
Sperber, D. 5, 18, 101–103, 105
Ramsey, F.P. 52 St John, M.F. 169
Real, L.A. 160 Stafford, A. 36
Reber, A.S. 5, 14, 104, 119, 168 Stalnaker, R. 53, 55
Reber, R. 12 Stanovich, K.E. 5, 14, 17, 21–22, 46, 65,
Rebollo, I. 60, 97 79, 97–98, 103–105, 109–110, 124, 133,
Reikoff, R. 89 137, 152, 155, 158–162, 166, 168–170,
Revlin, R. 87, 158 173
Reyna, V.F. 119, 128 Stein, C.B. 31, 33, 143
 AUTHOR INDEX 201

Stenning, K. 45 Venet, M. 104

Stevenson, R.J. 59, 95, 97, 115, 169 Venn, S. 150–152
Stewart, T.R. 121 Verschueren, N. 45, 98
Stone, V.E. 102 von Baaren, R.B. 111, 118–119
Striemer, C.L. 89
Sun, R. 168 Wade, C.N. 89
Wagenaar, W.A. 135, 137
Tagart, J. 57 Warner, W.J. 36
Tasso, A. 75 Wason, P.C. 22, 28, 30, 34–39, 41–42,
Teigen, K.H. 12, 165 46–47, 56–57, 68–70, 76, 99–100, 147,
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Terry, C. 168 158, 164

Thompson, V.A. 70, 75, 82, 86, 89, West, R.F. 17, 46, 103–104, 110, 133,
92–94, 97, 143, 147 162, 166
Thorn, T.M.J. 171 Wetherick, N.E. 34–35
Toates, F. 168 Wigton, R.S. 121
Todd, P.M. 108, 137, 159, 161 Wilhelm, O. 59
Tooby, J. 15, 101–102, 132, 143, 147 Wilkins, M.C. 87
Toplak, M.E. 17, 110 Wilson, D. 5, 18, 105
Trope, Y. 5, 14, 80, 109, 170 Wilson, T.D. 2, 118, 163–164, 168–172
Tversky, A. 12, 16–17, 50, 75, 108–109, Woodworth, R.S. 111
112–116, 126, 131, 136–141, 143, 153, Wright, H. 65, 104, 161
174 Wu, G. 112
Tweney, R.D. 36, 48, 150 Wu, J.-T. 95

Uleman, J.S. 14, 170 Yama, H. 45

Urbach, P. 26, 30, 32, 81, 134 Yopp, H. 87, 158
Yopp, R. 87, 158
Vallone, R. 136
Vandierendonck, A. 37 Zago, L. 61
Vaughn, L.A. 138 Zhang, J. 112
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 Subject index
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2 4 6 problem, see Wason 2 4 6 problem 103–106, 110, 133, 139, 161, 171,
175
Aristotle 82 Cognitive architecture 110, 172
Associative vs. rule-based processes 14, Cognitive biases 3–4, 10, 13, 15–17,
168, 170 21–22, 47–48, 50–51, 67, 105, 109,
Automatic vs. controlled processing 14, 155–157, 159–160, 170, 173
172 and rationality 156–162
Automaticity 167, 172 Cognitive modules 15, 101–102, 105,
Availability heuristic, see Heuristics 127, 139, 147–148, 152, 162, 168,
170, 172
Base rate fallacy (neglect) 81, 139, frequency processing 131, 137, 147,
141–147, 149, 156 149
Bayesian inference (see also Philosophy Common element fallacy 68–69
of science) 142–146, 152 Conditional inference 8–9, 29, 41, 44, 55,
Bayes’ theorem 32, 134, 142, 149, 58, 60–66, 75–76, 93–95, 97–98, 104,
156–157 106, 158
Belief bias 19–22, 29, 61, 66, 81–95, 98, biases of 51–60
103–106, 108, 128, 133, 143, 157, influence of belief 93–99
163–164, 170–171 Conditional probability hypothesis
Misinterpreted Necessity model 58–59
89 Conditionals (see also Conditional
Selective Processing model 90, 92 inference) 9, 41–43, 45–46, 48–49,
Selective Scrutiny model 89, 92 52–56, 58–65, 67–68, 71–73, 75–76,
Brunswick, Egon 13, 119 83, 93–99, 102–103, 158
causal 67, 96, 98
Causal inference 93 counterfactual 53, 55, 67, 72–77,
Cognitive ability (see also General 166
intelligence) 46, 60–61, 66, 97–98, deontic 99

203
 204 SUBJECT INDEX

material 51–52, 54–56, 67, 70, 96–97, Economics 11, 107, 112, 114, 119
161 Einstein’s general theory of relativity
Ramsey test 52–53, 55, 58, 75, 96 31–32
suppositional 52, 55–56, 58, 70 Elimination-by-aspects 116–117
theories of 51–60 Evolution 3–4, 14–15, 100–102, 108,
Confirmation bias 28–32, 34, 37, 41, 127, 147–148, 152–153, 157,
47–48, 86, 150, 157 159–162, 170, 172
Conjunction fallacy 139–141, 147, 149, evolutionary psychology 101, 147, 162
153, 157 massive modularity hypothesis 101
Consciousness 15, 21, 76, 110, 162, 169 Expected utility 11–12, 19, 46, 48, 107,
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Contextualization (and 112–113, 160

decontextualization) 5, 15, 22, Expert judgement (see also Medical
79–82, 93, 98, 100–106, 110, 127, decision making) 122, 124, 130
132, 161, 170, 173 Eye-movement tracking 44, 89, 164
Counterexamples in reasoning 7, 10, 26,
61, 83–86, 94–95, 97–98, 102 Fast and frugal, see Heuristics
Counterfactual thinking (see also Figural bias 85
Conditionals) 17, 66–67, 75–76, 174 Folk psychology 162, 167
Criminal justice system 80 Fundamental analytic bias 44, 86, 117,
160
Darwinian principles 100–101, 161–162 Fundamental computational bias 22
Decision theory 11, 102, 107, 112–113, Fundamental heuristic bias 22, 37, 79,
129 82, 160, 162, 173
Deduction paradigm 7, 10, 25, 39, 81, 93
Deductive reasoning 4–10, 17, 20–22, 26, Gambling 12, 134, 137, 148, 157
30–31, 39, 46–47, 61, 65–66, 82–83, General intelligence (see also Cognitive
86–88, 93, 97, 103, 105, 108, 110, ability) 14–15, 20, 60, 65, 111
132–133, 143, 148, 152, 155, 158,
164, 170, 175 Heuristic–analytic theory 5, 14–15,
Defective truth table 45, 56–58, 60 17–22, 33, 37–39, 41, 44, 48, 50, 58,
Developmental studies 104, 161 61, 65–66, 74, 76, 79, 88–89, 91–93,
Disjunctives (see also THOG problem) 97–98, 103–106, 108–110, 118–119,
8–10, 21, 49, 52, 68, 70–71, 76, 126, 127–128, 137, 149, 152, 155–156,
156 160, 162–164, 167, 169, 173–174
disjunction effect 126, 157 Heuristics
Domain-specific cognition, see availability 12–13, 138
Contextualization fast and frugal 108, 127, 159
Double negation effect (see also Negative recognition 127–128
conclusion bias) 63–66, 76 representativeness 12–13, 109, 138–142
Dual-process theories 5, 10, 13–16, 23, Heuristics and biases paradigm 12, 16,
66, 82, 88–89, 101, 103, 105, 107, 108–109, 131, 137–149, 153
109, 111, 128, 130, 133, 148, 160, Heuristic–systematic theory 110, 171
162, 164, 171 Hindsight bias 165–167
default-interventionist 109, 128 Hypothesis testing 11–22, 25–26, 28–30,
of learning 168–170 33–34, 36–37, 47–48, 72, 86, 150,
in social psychology 170–172 175
Dual-system theory 14–15, 17, 20–22, test severity 31, 33
49–50, 60, 75–76, 79, 104–105, 109, Hypothetical thinking theory 12, 17, 28,
111, 124, 127, 132–133, 137, 37, 44, 49, 66, 72, 87, 108, 125–126,
139–140, 148, 152–153, 155, 152–153, 165
160–162, 167–170 in decision making 125–129
 SUBJECT INDEX 205

relevance principle 18, 47–48, 117, Matching bias 37, 41, 44–45, 48, 57–58,
125–126, 152–153, 160, 162, 166, 60–61, 70, 76, 164
169, 174 matching heuristic 43, 57
satisficing principle 18, 21–22, 25, 28, Medical decision making 13, 31, 121,
86, 108, 117, 160 141–144, 146–147
singularity principle 17–18, 21, 25, medical diagnosis problem 141–143,
28, 37, 50, 66, 70–71, 76, 81, 146–147
115, 125–126, 143, 153, 167, Mental logic 8, 10, 54, 62, 64–66, 79, 95,
174 105, 160, 173
Mental models 7, 9–10, 17–20, 22, 28,
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If-heuristic 43, 45, 56–57 37–38, 47–48, 54–56, 59–60, 62, 64,
Illusory inference 76 70, 74, 76, 83, 84, 86–87, 90–91, 94,
Incubation theory 111 106, 144, 146–149, 152–153, 164,
Inductive reasoning 25–26, 155 173–174
Instructional effects 39, 44, 46, 71, 82, epistemic 17, 19, 21, 33, 48, 54, 74,
100, 152 134, 173–174
Introspection 163, 167 fleshing out 55, 64
Intuitive vs. deliberative thinking 2–3, 5, semantic 9, 77, 173
14 Mental simulation 1, 12, 17, 22, 49–51,
53–54, 56, 59, 71, 73, 75–77, 97, 110,
Judgement analysis (see also Social 115, 125–126, 129–130, 141, 143,
judgement theory) 121 146, 151, 153, 166–167, 173–174
Judgement and decision making (JDM) Meta-deduction 70, 72
paradigm 2–5, 10–13, 17–18, 23, Multi-attributed decision making
25, 48, 86, 106–112, 115, 118–119, 116–119
121, 125–130, 134, 137–138, Multicue judgement 13, 119, 122, 148,
144–156, 159, 163, 167, 170, 163–164
173–175 Myside bias 133, 167

Knights and Knaves problems (see also Negations paradigm 42–43, 62–63
Meta-deduction) 70–72, 76 Negative conclusion bias (see also
Double negation effect) 63, 65
Law of large numbers (understanding Neuropsychology 15, 61, 66
of) 132, 139 Normative theory (see also Rationality)
Learning 11–12, 51, 75, 107, 158, 160
experiential (associative) 15, 50,
75–76, 105, 108, 118–119, 122, 127, One-option-at-a-time model of decision
143, 162–163, 172 making 125, 129
explicit 124, 168, 170
implicit 102, 118, 124, 132, 164, Philosophy of science 29, 32
168–169, 172 Bayesian 32–33, 47, 80–81
Lens model (see also Social judgement Popperian 29–33, 134, 156
theory) 13, 119–121 problem of induction 26, 29
Linda problem (see also Conjunction Piagetian theory 161
fallacy) 140–141 Planning fallacy 50
Logic 1, 3, 7–8, 10–11, 16, 19, 38, 46, Positive test strategy 35–37
51–52, 55, 58, 62, 64, 66, 82, 87, Positivity bias 37
88–92, 94–95, 103, 106, 134, Pragmatic inference 6, 11
147–148, 158–159, 161, 164, Pragmatics 10, 74–75
173 Probabilistic reasoning 101, 132, 148
logicism 10 Prospect theory 112–114
 206 SUBJECT INDEX

Protocol analysis 38, 46, 88, 98, 164 Singularity principle, see Hypothetical
Pseudodiagnosticity 48, 149–153, 157 thinking theory
Social contract theory 101–103, 147
Ramsey test, see Conditionals cheater detection 102, 162
Rational-experiential theory 110, 170 Social judgement theory (SJT) 13, 23,
Rationality 119–120, 129, 163
Apologist position 159 Speeded task method 89–91
bounded 4, 18, 28, 108, 116–117, 129, Statistical reasoning
137, 159, 174 frequency formats 132, 140, 146–149,
ecological 156, 161–162 153
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evolutionary 161–162 Stereotypes 13, 80, 140, 141, 171

instrumental 112, 156, 160 Subjective probability 12, 32, 54–55,
Meliorist position 159 73–74, 95–96, 144, 173
normative 3, 156, 158–159, 161 Subjective randomness 135–136
Panglossian position 158–159, Support theory 126
161 Suppositional thinking (see also Mental
Rationality1 159–161 simulation) 22
Rationality2 159–160 Syllogistic reasoning 7, 82–90, 92–93, 98,
Rationalization (confabulation) 21, 39, 105–106, 164
46, 76, 129, 133, 137, 164 Systems 1 and 2, see Dual-system theory
Recognition heuristic, see Heuristics
Recognition-primed decision making Thinking styles 4, 19, 110–111
128–129, 138 cross-cultural 110
Relevance principle, see Hypothetical THOG problem 68–71, 76
thinking theory Truth table task 57–58, 60, 96
Representativeness, see Heuristics
Risky choice 112–115 Unconscious processes 104, 111, 119,
Rule learning 28, 157 124, 137, 151–152, 162–163, 166,
168
Satisficing 18, 21–22, 25, 28, 50, 86, 106, deliberative 119
108, 117, 130, 148, 155, 160,
173–174 Wason 2 4 6 problem 30, 34–39, 41, 47
satisficing principle, see Hypothetical Wason selection task 22, 34, 39–48,
thinking theory 56–57, 61, 70, 99–104, 106, 147, 158,
Savage’s sure-thing principle 126, 167
156–57 deontic 99–106
Self-insight and self-knowledge 121, Working memory 10, 14–15, 17, 20–21,
123–124, 155, 162–167, 172 50, 60, 84, 97–98, 104–105, 133, 150,
Selection task, see Wason selection task 161, 168
Semantics, extensional 94–95 capacity 97–98, 133