The Mythical Number Two Melnikoff, David E.; Bargh, John A.
Trends in cognitive sciences,
April 2018, 2018-04-00, 20180401, Volume:
22, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
It is often said that there are two types of psychological processes: one that is intentional, controllable, conscious, and inefficient, and another that is unintentional, uncontrollable, ...unconscious, and efficient. Yet, there have been persistent and increasing objections to this widely influential dual-process typology. Critics point out that the ‘two types’ framework lacks empirical support, contradicts well-established findings, and is internally incoherent. Moreover, the untested and untenable assumption that psychological phenomena can be partitioned into two types, we argue, has the consequence of systematically thwarting scientific progress. It is time that we as a field come to terms with these issues. In short, the dual-process typology is a convenient and seductive myth, and we think cognitive science can do better.
The distinction between Type 1 and Type 2 processing has grown more popular each decade.
The World Bank and Institute of Medicine issued reports in 2015 endorsing the Type 1/Type 2 distinction, and urging decision makers and medical practitioners around the globe to rely on Type 2 thinking.
A consensus is emerging among the critics and top proponents of the dual-process typology that the classic distinction between Type 1 and Type 2 processing is flawed.
Since the Type 1/Type 2 distinction first emerged, researchers have discovered that very few processes fit into either category, most possess some mixture of Type 1 and Type 2 features.
The preference for morality in others is regarded as a dominant factor in person perception. Moral traits are thought to foster liking, and immoral traits are thought to foster disliking, ...irrespective of the context in which they are embedded. We report the results of four studies that oppose this view. Using both explicit and implicit measures, we found that the preference for morality vs. immorality in others is conditional on the evaluator’s current goals. Specifically, when immorality was conducive to participants’ current goals, the preference for moral vs. immoral traits in others was eliminated or reversed. The preferences for mercifulness vs. mercilessness (experiment 1), honesty vs. dishonesty (experiment 2), sexual fidelity vs. infidelity (experiment 3), and altruism vs. selfishness (experiment 4) were all found to be conditional. These findings oppose the consensus view that people have a dominant preference for moral vs. immoral traits in others. Our findings also speak to nativist and empiricist theories of social preferences and the stability of the “social contract” underlying productive human societies.
Bayesian principles show up across many domains of human cognition, but wishful thinking-where beliefs are updated in the direction of desired outcomes rather than what the evidence implies-seems to ...threaten the universality of Bayesian approaches to the mind. In this Article, we show that Bayesian optimality and wishful thinking are, despite first appearances, compatible. The setting of opposing goals can cause two groups of people with identical prior beliefs to reach opposite conclusions about the same evidence through fully Bayesian calculations. We show that this is possible because, when people set goals, they receive privileged information in the form of affective experiences, and this information systematically supports goal-consistent conclusions. We ground this idea in a formal, Bayesian model in which affective prediction errors drive wishful thinking. We obtain empirical support for our model across five studies.
It has long been known that advocating for a cause can alter the advocate's beliefs. Yet a guiding assumption of many advocates is that the biasing effect of advocacy is controllable. Lawyers, for ...instance, are taught that they can retain unbiased beliefs while advocating for their clients and that they must do so to secure just outcomes. Across ten experiments (six preregistered; N = 3,104) we show that the biasing effect of advocacy is not controllable but automatic. Merely incentivizing people to advocate altered a range of beliefs about character, guilt and punishment. This bias appeared even in beliefs that are highly stable, when people were financially incentivized to form true beliefs and among professional lawyers, who are trained to prevent advocacy from biasing their judgements.
The Insidious Number Two Melnikoff, David E.; Bargh, John A.
Trends in cognitive sciences,
August 2018, 2018-08-00, 20180801, Volume:
22, Issue:
8
Journal Article
REPLY TO LANDY ET AL Melnikoff, David E.; Bailey, April H.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS,
06/2018, Volume:
115, Issue:
25
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Melnikoff and Bailey reply to the by Landy et al on the study regarding on morality dominance hypothesis (MDH). LP&G critiqued for measuring "transient" liking rather than global impressions. Global ...impressions, they say, are more relevant to the MDH. Accordingly, the findings indicate the MDH must be rejected or qualified as follows: Morality is judged positively in others, so long as one perceives morality in others as goal-conducive.
Contrary to Hoerl & McCormack (H&M), we argue that the best account of temporal cognition in humans is one in which a single system becomes capable of representing time. We suggest that H&M's own ...evidence for dual systems of temporal cognition - simultaneous contradictory beliefs - does not recommend dual systems, and that the single system approach is more plausible.
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