Thinking and Reasoning: A Very Short Introduction

Description

Our extraordinary capacity to reason and solve problems sets us aside from other animals, but our evolved thinking processes also leave us susceptible to bias and error. The study of thinking and reasoning goes back to Aristotle, and was one of the first topics to be studied when psychology separated from philosophy. In thisVery Short IntroductionJonathan Evans explores cognitive psychological approaches to understanding the nature of thinking and reasoning, problem solving, and decision making. He shows how our problem solving capabilities are hugely dependent on also having the imagination to ask the right questions, and the ability to see things from a completely new perspective. Beginning by considering the approaches of the behaviorists and the Gestalt psychologists, he moves on to modern explorations of thinking, including hypothetical thinking, conditionals, deduction, rationality, and intuition. Covering the role of past learning, IQ, and cognitive biases, Evans also discusses the idea that there may be two different ways of thinking, arising from our evolutionary history. ABOUT THE SERIES:TheVery Short Introductionsseries from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable. Halftitle page......Page 2 Series page......Page 3 Title page......Page 15 Copyright page......Page 17 Contents......Page 18 Acknowledgements......Page 19 List of illustrations......Page 20 1 Introduction and history......Page 21 Different kinds of reasoning......Page 22 Early studies by the introspection method......Page 24 The influence of Freudian theory......Page 26 Behaviourism......Page 27 Cognitive psychology......Page 28 2 Problem solving......Page 30 Gestalt psychology and the phenomenon of insight......Page 31 Well-defined problems and the computational approach......Page 35 Insight and expertise in problem solving......Page 37 3 Thinking hypothetically......Page 40 Hypothesis testing and scientific reasoning......Page 41 The Wason selection task......Page 43 Assessing the probability of hypotheses......Page 46 Causal and counterfactual thinking......Page 47 4 Decision making......Page 51 Cognitive biases in decision making......Page 54 Probability judgement: heuristics and biases......Page 58 Conclusions......Page 59 Deductive reasoning......Page 60 Syllogistic reasoning and belief bias......Page 63 Mental model theory......Page 64 Reasoning with probabilities......Page 66 Bayesianism and the new paradigm psychology of reasoning......Page 69 6 Are we rational?......Page 72 The great rationality debate......Page 73 Rational analysis......Page 75 Evolutionary approach......Page 77 Fast and frugal heuristics......Page 78 Individual differences and intelligence......Page 79 So are we rational?......Page 80 7 From dual processes to two minds......Page 82 Type 1 processing and the power of intuition......Page 83 Type 2 thinking, intelligence, and working memory......Page 85 How can dual-process theories explain cognitive biases?......Page 86 Is there one general theory of dual processing?......Page 88 Two minds theory......Page 90 Final thoughts......Page 91 Bayes’ theorem......Page 93 References......Page 94 References......Page 102 Index......Page 110