We examined in two studies how analytic thinking and valuing epistemic rationality contribute to political belief bias – an inclination to judge politically congruent conclusions as valid (vs. invalid) or to judge politically incongruent conclusions as invalid (vs. valid), regardless of their actual validity. Study 1 established that people exhibit political belief bias, although unexpectedly it was only observed among liberals (vs. conservatives). As hypothesised, analytic thinking was associated with less political belief bias. In Study 2, we measured political belief bias by assessing participants’ political beliefs about each conclusion directly, rather than relying on their general political orientation as a proxy. Analytic thinking as well as how much people value epistemic rationality predicted less political belief bias. These findings highlight the importance of analytic thinking as well as motivation to form beliefs based on logic and evidence in mitigating political belief bias.

According to Inferentialism, a conditional is true precisely if there is a compelling argument for its consequent starting from its antecedent conjoined with contextually given background knowledge. As a direct consequence of this view, the truth of a conditional’s component parts does not guarantee the truth of the conditional, given that it is compatible with there not being an argument from the conditional’s antecedent to its consequent. Thus, Inferentialism invalidates the principle called Centering, according to which the joint truth of φ and ψ guarantees the truth of “If φ , ψ ”. This distinguishes Inferentialism from all standard semantics of conditionals, all of which validate Centering. Here, we report the results from a study that registered (i) participants’ truth evaluations of a set of conditionals; (ii) their truth evaluations of the component parts of those conditionals; (iii) their judgements of the strength of the inferential connection between antecedent and consequent for each conditional; and (iv) their metacognitive confidence in the inference strength judgements. The data from (i)–(iii) allowed us to test Centering and to investigate whether possible violations of the principle can be explained in inferentialist terms. The data from (iv) allowed us to make some progress on testing predictions derived from Hypothetical Inferential Theory, the psychological face of Inferentialism. Our findings show that almost 60% of the relevant responses violated Centering; that participants obeyed Centering only when there was a strong inferential link between true antecedent and true consequent; and that the best models were those that involved inference strength and metacognitive confidence, while the Centering model was weak.

Representational Change Theory has proposed two processes, constraint relaxation (CR) and chunk decomposition (CD), that are responsible for restructuring during insight problem solving (Knoblich et al., 1999). If these processes are independent (Öllinger et al., 2008), then improvements in matchstick arithmetic performance due to instructions that prompt either process should be limited to problems that require that process. In Study 1, CD instructions only improved performance on CD problems while CR instructions only improved performance on CR problems. A combined instruction condition did not outperform the single instruction conditions, and in some cases decreased solution rates. Study 2 varied whether solutions directly matched the instructions and found some evidence that CD instructions generalised to CD solutions that did not directly match instructions. However, CR instructions did not increase solutions on CR problems, and single instructions sometimes decreased solutions on problems requiring another process. Although these results are most consistent with hypotheses that these processes are independent and competitive in the context of matchstick arithmetic problems, issues with the specificity of the hints used in the instructional conditions are discussed.

One of the most debated topics among those who study heuristics is the question of their rationality. The present paper proposes an answer to this question based on the ideas of instrumental rationality and the probabilistic nature of heuristic judgments and decisions. Accordingly, it is argued that the rationality of heuristics is determined by their effectiveness, i.e., their ability to achieve a desired result. At the same time, heuristics do not always produce such a result, but only in a certain number of cases. Therefore, their effectiveness should not be evaluated by the binary logic criterion (effective/ineffective) but by the probabilistic criterion, i.e., by how often they lead to the desired result. Each heuristic has a certain objective probability of achieving such a result, which determines its rationality. However, this probability is mostly unknown to us, so when relying on heuristics, we are likely guided by a subjective perception of it, which serves as a metacognitive cue about the probability of the conclusion obtained with the help of this heuristic.

We investigated whether people show signs of conflict detection in both more implicit and explicit judgments about the authenticity of short video clips depicting interviews with famous American actors. If so, they would be less confident when incorrectly seeing deepfakes as authentic than when correctly seeing authentic videos as authentic. Participants (N = 128; Mage = 33.7, SD = 12.1) from the USA were recruited on Prolific. Results showed that participants were more accurate at recognising deepfakes and less accurate at recognising authentic videos when they were explicitly asked to judge if a video was authentic or deepfake compared to more implicit authenticity judgments. Interestingly, they showed signs of conflict detection both when making more implicit and explicit authenticity judgments. These findings are relevant for the literature on both conflict detection in reasoning and decision-making and on deepfake recognition, as well as for research on training people to learn to recognise deepfakes.

A key component of the susceptibility to cognitive biases is the ability to monitor for conflict between intuitively cued “heuristic” answers and logical principles. While there is evidence that people differ in their ability to detect such conflicts, it is not clear which factors are driving these differences. In the present study (N = 399) we explored cognitive ability, thinking dispositions, numeracy, cognitive reflection, and mindware instantiation (i.e., knowledge of logical principles) as predictors of individual differences in conflict detection and accuracy on a battery of reasoning problems. Results showed that mindware instantiation was the best predictor of both conflict detection efficiency and reasoning accuracy. Cognitive reflection, thinking dispositions, numeracy, and cognitive ability played a significant but smaller role. The regression model explained 40% of the variance in reasoning accuracy, but only 7% in detection efficiency. We discuss the implications of these findings for popular process models of bias susceptibility.

Judgments of direct comparisons, probabilities, proportions, and ranks can all be considered referent-specific judgments, for which a good estimate requires a target to be compared against a referent(s). This paper presents a Referent-Specific Judgment Framework (RSJF) to organize and integrate over- and under-estimation biases commonly associated with these judgments. RSJF assumes a dual-process structure in which one key source of bias can arise from spontaneous comparisons whose input—unless offset by a controlled process—can yield an underweighting of evidence about referents. Another key source of bias is the misaggregation of evidence associated with multiple referents. Two studies tested RSJF predictions about similarities and differences in patterns of bias in comparative versus probability judgments. As expected, there was similarity in patterns tied to misweighting and differences in patterns tied to misaggregation. The findings support the utility of RSJF for organizing and advancing the study of referent-specific judgments.

The beauty contest game is widely used to study the determinants of strategic thinking. Here, we examine the role of theory of mind in strategic reasoning by comparing both performance and the reasoning process in participants with autism vs. typically developing controls. Pantelis and Kennedy (2017) reported a surprising lack of difference between answers of participant with autism vs. controls in the game. Here, we study the process rather than just the outcome of reasoning by using a ‘payoff calculator’ with which one can simulate the game’s outcome before answering. We find that control participants play best response to others’ hypothetical choices entered into the calculator, while participants with autism are less strategic, choosing larger answers relative to those attributed to others. However, this difference could not be explained by the differences in the theory of mind between the groups with and without autism.

In previous published research (“Conditionals and Inferential Connections: A Hypothetical Inferential Theory,” Cognitive Psychology, 2018), we investigated experimentally what role the presence and strength of an inferential connection between a conditional’s antecedent and consequent plays in how people process that conditional. Our analysis showed the strength of that connection to be strongly predictive of whether participants evaluated the conditional as true, false, or neither true nor false. In this article, we re-analyse the data from our previous research, now focussing on the semantics of conditionals rather than on how they are processed. Specifically, we use those data to compare the main extant semantics with each other and with inferentialism, a semantics according to which the truth of a conditional requires the presence of an inferential connection between the conditional’s component parts.