From slow to fast logic: the development of logical intuitions

Abstract

Recent reasoning accounts suggest that people can process elementary logical principles intuitively. These controversial “logical intuitions” are believed to result from a learning process in which developing reasoners automatize their application. To verify this automatization hypothesis, we contrasted the reasoning performance of younger (7^th grade) and older (12^th grade) reasoners with a two-response paradigm. Participants initially responded with the first intuitive response that came to mind and subsequently were allowed to deliberate on classic “bias” problems (base-rate problems and syllogisms). Results showed that in addition to showing less deliberate correction of an initial erroneous response, younger reasoners were specifically less likely to generate the correct response from the outset. The findings lend credence to the role of a developmental automatization process and indicate that developmental improvements in reasoning accuracy are at least partially driven by an improvement in the accuracy of our intuitions.

Keywords:

• Dual-process
• intuition
• development
• two-response paradigm

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Open data statement

Raw data can be downloaded from our OSF page (https://osf.io/6xqgt/).

Notes

1 Data from one 7th grader was removed as we were informed after the experiment that he wasn’t fluent in French.

2 This reflects how likely an individual is to show each specific direction of change pattern. Thus, for any individual, P(00) + P(01) + P(10) + P(11) = 100%.

3 As suggested in previous two-response studies (Bago & De Neys, 2017; Thompson & Johnson, 2014), we focused on final latencies for conflict detection as initial latencies are not reliable due to the deadline (e.g., Janssen et al., 2020).

4 The general problem is that “fast-and-slow” dual process theories are underspecified. It is posited that deliberation is slower and more demanding than intuitive processing, but the theory does not present an unequivocal a priori criterion that allows us to classify a process as intuitive or deliberate (e.g., takes at least x time, or x amount of load, see Bago and De Neys (2019), for an extensive discussion).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a research grant (DIAGNOR, ANR-16-CE28-0010-01) from the Agence Nationale de la Recherche, France. We thank two masters students, Agnieszka Argasinska and Morgane Velly, for their involvement in piloting the experiment and in data collection.