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Snap Judgment? Not So Fast: Thought, Reasoning, and Choice as Psychological Realities

Many years ago when I was a student it was frequently impressed upon us that generalizing findings from one type of situation to types too far afield was scientifically unsound. At that time, the field of psychology was also undergoing what has been termed a ‘cognitive revolution,’ in which human beings were increasingly viewed as engaging in thought, reasoning, and choices about the world around them. The revolution was supplanting the behaviorists’ propositions of environmental determinism, the maturationists’ emphasis on biological determinism, and the psychoanalysts’ focus on unconscious processes. All of those schools of psychology presented a view of human functioning as non-rational or irrational and involving a lack of choice. The cognitive revolution also entailed reconsideration of the robustness of findings from laboratory experiments assessing limited phenomena. In the contemporary scene, approximately 50 years after the cognitive revolution, it often seems that findings from small phenomena in laboratory settings are being connected to broad and sweeping assertions about human psychology. Such generalizations are made in assertions that irrationality, determinism (sometimes environmental, sometimes biological), and unconscious processes are the hallmarks of human functioning. Researchers making these assertions and generalizations derive a great deal of public exposure from the media (especially the Op-Ed section of The New York Times and its Science Section, whose reporters seem enamored with all manner of biological and evolutionary explanation), as well as from popular books written by journalists (e.g., with catchy titles like Blink [Gladwell, 2005], and The Hidden Brain [Vedantam, 2010]). The media exposure, I believe, feeds back on research enterprises because it tends to have an air of certainty, without the usual qualifications and acknowledgment of serious differences within scientific communities, and because of the rewards that scientists derive from public attention. An illustrative example of some of this, involving a public presentation of generalizations from small phenomena in laboratory settings to broad assertions, comes from a New York Times Op-Ed [Eagleman, December 5, 2009]. Eagleman, a professor