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The article reveals the main psychological and pedagogical features of effective learning. The memorization techniques from Joshua Foyer are considered, where the author introduces the concept of the idea of a palace of images, or a palace of memory, which contains images, associations created in the last lesson, related to the past theme. If there is a purpose and meaning of memorization, then the process of reproduction will be more efficient and simpler.The significance and role of the image in the theory of the modern scientist V.V. Klimenko. The image is considered as a reflection of the subject and a standard-regulator of cognitive, moral actions and aesthetic actions.Emphasis is placed on the prominent role of restorative exercises and interval repetitions in the study of the concept of effective learning. The article states that effective learning requires the skill to praise students correctly and carefully. Praise as a means of motivation becomes productive if it is skillfully used in pedagogical communication, establishing more emotional interaction between teacher and students.It is emphasized that effective learning will give results when teachers pay attention to the importance of perception of the student’s point of view, his thoughts, impressions, judgments, motives. The main, in this aspect, is psychological reasoning – non-cognitive factors that affect learning. The more often students begin to think about the learning process, the results of their actions, successes in the study of certain topics, categories, concepts – the more effective, and most importantly, conscious will be the learning process. Emphasis is placed on the category of “growth thinking”, which is interpreted as the belief that abilities and intelligence are variable, and we can increase their level. The concepts of associations, the process of image creation, on the basis of which thought is built, are studied. Emphasis is placed on the important role of the teacher’s emotional response, which should meet the learning objectives and encourage students to further success and learning outcomes.The category of metacognition as a process of thinking about one’s own thoughts, effective reception of learning is considered. The theory of the American scientist Carl Rogers on the important questions that true professional and wise teachers should ask themselves is highlighted.Key words: learning, teacher, growth thinking, motivation, emotional response, metacognition. Стаття розкриває основні психолого-педагогічні особливості ефективного навчання. Розглянутотехні-ки запам’ятовування від Джошуа Фойера, де автор вводить поняття ідеї палацу образів, або палац пам’яті, в якому містяться образи, асоціації, створені минулого уроку, пов’язані з минулою темою. Якщо є мета і значення замап’ятовування, тоді і процес відтворення буде відбуватися ефективніше і простіше. Висвітлено значення і роль образу в теорії сучасного науковця В.В. Клименко. Образ розглядається як відображення предмета і еталон-регулятор пізнавальних, моральних вчинків та естетичних дій. Наголошено на визначній ролі відновлювальних вправ та інтервальних повторень у рамках вивчення поняття ефективного навчання. У статті визначено, що ефективне навчання потребує майстерності правильно і обережно хвалити учнів. Похвала як засіб мотивації стає продуктивною, якщо вміло її використовувати в педагогічному спілкуванні, встановленні більш емоційної взаємодії між вчителем і учнями.Наголошено, що ефективне навчання буде давати свої результати, коли педагоги будуть звертати увагу на важливість сприйняття точки зору учня, його думок, вражень, суджень, мотивів. Головним у цьому аспекті виступає психологічне міркування – некогнітивні фактори, які впливають на навчання. Чим частіше учні почнуть замислюватися над навчальним процесом, результатами своїй дій, успіхами у вивченні тих чи інших тем, категорій, понять – тим ефективнішим, а головне усвідомленим стане процес навчання.Акцентовано увагу на категорії «мислення зростання», яке тлумачиться як переконання, що здібно-сті та інтелект є змінними, і ми можемо підвищити їхній рівень. Досліджені поняття асоціацій, процесу створення образу, на основі яких будується думка. Наголошено на визначній ролі емоційного відгуку вчителя, що має відповідати навчальним цілям і заохочувати учнів на подальші успіхи та результати навчальної діяльності.Розглянуто категорію метапізнання як процесу думання про власні думки, ефективного прийому навчання. Висвітлено теорію американського науковця Карла Роджерса щодо важливих питань, які мають задати собі справжні професійні та мудрі педагоги.Ключові слова:навчання, педагог, мислення зростання, мотивація, емоційний відгук, метапізнання

Defensive behavior is a central aspect of social life and provides benefits to the self and others. Recent evidence reveals that infants evaluate third parties' prosocial and antisocial actions. Three experiments were carried out to assess toddlers' reactions to defensive and non-defensive events (N = 54). In two experiments, infants' looking times and manual choices provided converging evidence that 20-month-olds understand and evaluate defensive actions, by showing that they prefer the defensive puppet over the non-defensive puppet and that they reason on the bystander puppet's disposition. In the third experiment, toddlers rewarded the defensive puppet rather than the non-defensive puppet, revealing how their evaluations guided awarding behaviors of defensive actions toward the third party. The results support the developmental stability and provide evidence of a rich and well-organized prosociality that before the second year of life proves to be based on some moral principles and linked with a sophisticated psychological reasoning. The findings shed light on the claims that human capacities for the social evaluation of defensive behaviors toward third parties are rooted in evolved cooperative systems.

This introduction to the topical collection, Folk Psychology: Pluralistic Approaches reviews the origins and basic theoretical tenets of the framework of pluralistic folk psychology. It places special emphasis on pluralism about the variety folk psychological strategies that underlie behavioral prediction and explanation beyond belief-desire attribution, and on the diverse range of social goals that folk psychological reasoning supports beyond prediction and explanation. Pluralism is not presented as a single theory or model of social cognition, but rather as a big-tent research program encompassing both revisionary and more traditionally inspired approaches to folk psychology. After reviewing the origins of pluralistic folk psychology, the papers in the current issue are introduced. These papers fall into three thematic clusters: Folk-psychological strategies beyond propositional attitude attribution (Section 2.1); Enculturation and regulative folk psychology (Section 2.2); and Defenses of pluralism (Section 2.3).

How does theory of mind become explicit? In this article, we provide a brief overview of theoretical accounts and then review longitudinal findings on the development of theory of mind from infancy to the preschool years. Long‐term predictive relations among conceptually related measures of implicit and explicit theory‐of‐mind reasoning support a conceptual continuity view of the transition from an implicit to an explicit understanding of the mind. We discuss alternative, minimalist accounts of infant psychological reasoning (e.g., two‐systems models, submentalizing theory) and their implications for the development of theory of mind in light of the evidence. Longitudinal findings further support a developmental enrichment view of joint attention as a foundation of theory of mind and early social interaction as a powerful mechanism in the development of this ability. Finally, we highlight the importance of longitudinal data for our understanding of conceptual development from infancy to the preschool years.

Is early reasoning about an agent's knowledge best characterized by a mentalistic stance, a teleological stance, or both? In this research, 5-month-old infants (N = 64, 50% female, 83% White) saw a novel eyeless agent consistently approach object-A as opposed to object-B. Although infants could always see both objects, a screen separated object-B from the agent. When object-B protruded above the screen, infants interpreted the agent's actions as revealing a preference for object-A over object-B. When object-B did not protrude above the screen, however, infants refrained from attributing such a preference: Consistent with mentalistic accounts, they reasoned that the agent's representation of the scene did not include object-B, and they used the agent's incomplete representation, non-egocentrically, to interpret its actions.

The Wason selection task is one of the most prominent paradigms in the psychology of reasoning, with hundreds of published investigations in the last fifty odd years. But despite its central role in reasoning research, there has been little to no attempt to make sense of the data in a way that allows us to discard potential theoretical accounts. In fact, theories have been allowed to proliferate without any comprehensive evaluation of their relative performance. In an attempt to address this problem, Ragni et al. (Psychological Bulletin, 144, 779–796 2018) reported a meta-analysis of 228 experiments using the Wason selection task. This data corpus was used to evaluate sixteen different theories on the basis of three predictions: (1) the occurrence of canonical selections, (2) dependencies in selections, and (3) the effect of counter-example salience. Ragni et al. argued that all three effects cull the number of candidate theories down to only two, which are subsequently compared in a model-selection analysis. The present paper argues against the diagnostic value attributed to some of these predictions. Moreover, we revisit Ragni et al.’s model-selection analysis and show that the model they propose is non-identifiable and often fails to account for the data. Altogether, the problems discussed here suggest that we are still far from a much-needed theoretical winnowing.

The psychology of reasoning and argumentation studies how people reason and persuade others using language. Influenced by analytic philosophy, much early work focused on the degree to which verbal reasoning is captured by or diverges from classical deductive logic. From this viewpoint, human thinking can seem prone to substantial and systematic bias. Since 1994, verbal reasoning has been set in the context of uncertain, common-sense reasoning rather than deduction, and reasoning has been seen as continuous with the social challenge of real-world argumentation. From this perspective, the human ability to reason and argue with words is better considered not as flawed logical reasoning, but as often highly competent reasoning and persuasion in an uncertain and contested world.

Dados da psicologia são relevantes na abordagem de alguns problemas em filosofia da lógica mesmo que não se assuma, de antemão, uma posição psico-logista. Para ilustrar um método de abordar problemas na filosofia da lógica que faz largo uso de dados da psicologia, neste artigo considero a questão sobre a metafísica da lógica—qual o objeto de estudo da lógica?—à luz de resultados da psicologia do pensamento e da psicologia do desenvolvimento. Estes resultados nos permitem concluir que sistemas lógicos não são meramente descritivos de aspectos gerais da linguagem natural, do mundo ou da racionalidade humana. Os dados são consistentes com a hipótese de que sis-temas lógicos dedutivos sejam conjuntos de regras de caráter primordialmente não-descritivo, criadas mediante reflexão ativa de filósofos, matemáticos e lógicos, visando garantir inferências dedutivas em certos contextos.

For most its history, the psychology of reasoning was dominated by binary exten-sional logic. The “new paradigm” instead puts subjective degrees of belief centre stage, often represented as probabilities. The term “new paradigm” refers to Thomas Kuhn’s popular theory of science, which describes scientific progress as discontinues process of alternating "normal" and "revolutionary" phases. We argue that the “new paradigm” is too vaguely defined and therefore does not allow a clear decision on what falls within its scope and what does not. We also show that before the new de-velopments, the psychology of reasoning was neither in a phase of normal science, nor is the alleged new paradigm as revolutionary as the term suggests. Based on this analysis, we argue that the supposed opposition between a “new” and “old” para-digms hinders progress in the field. A more productive view is that current progress is developing in continuities where rival research programs stimulate each other in a fruitful way. The article closes with some topics where further connections between competing research programs are likely to promote progress in the psychology of reasoning.

Psychologists are beginning to uncover the rational basis for many of the biases revealed over the last 50 years in deductive and causal reasoning, judgment, and decision making. In this article, it is argued that a manipulation, experiential learning, shown to be effective in judgment and decision making, may elucidate the rational underpinning of the implicit negation effect in conditional inference. In three experiments, this effect was created and removed by using probabilistically structured contrast sets acquired during a brief learning phase. No other theory of the implicit negations effect predicts these results, which can be modeled using Bayes nets as in causal approaches to category structure. It is also shown how these results relate to a recent development in the psychology of reasoning called "inferentialism." It is concluded that many of the same cognitive mechanisms that underpin causal reasoning, judgment and decision making may be common to logical reasoning, which may require no special purpose machinery or module. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

To make sense of others’ actions, we generally consider what information is available to them. This information may come from different sources, including perception and inference. Like adults, young infants track what information agents can obtain through perception: If an agent directly observes an event, for example, young infants expect the agent to have information about it. However, no investigation has yet examined whether young infants also track what information agents can obtain through inference, by bringing to bear relevant general knowledge. Building on the finding that by 4 months of age most infants have acquired the physical rule that wide objects can fit into wide containers but not narrow containers, we asked whether 5-month-olds would expect an agent who was searching for a wide toy hidden in her absence to reach for a wide box as opposed to a narrow box. Infants looked significantly longer when the agent selected the narrow box, suggesting that they expected her (a) to share the physical knowledge that wide objects can fit only into wide containers and (b) to infer that the wide toy must be hidden in the wide box. Three additional conditions supported this interpretation. Together, these results cast doubt on two-system accounts of early psychological reasoning, which claim that infants’ early-developing system is too inflexible and encapsulated to integrate inputs from other cognitive processes, such as physical reasoning. Instead, the results support one-system accounts and provide new evidence that young infants’ burgeoning psychological-reasoning system is qualitatively similar to that of older children and adults.

There is an ongoing dispute in the psychology of reasoning about how people interpret disjunctions, p or q. In the original mental models theory (MMT1) people interpret p or q as the disjunction of three possibilities (possibly p¬q, or possibly ¬pq, or possibly pq, where “¬” = not). p or q is true if one disjunct is actually true. In a recent revision of mental models theory (MMT2), people interpret p or q as a conjunction of the three possibilities, and they treat it as true only if each is possible and ¬p¬q is impossible. Two experiments investigated possibility and truth judgments about disjunctions given sets consisting of one or more of the four cases (p¬q, ¬pq, pq, and ¬p¬q). The results showed that in both possibility and truth judgments, participants' interpretations of disjunctions were only consistent with MMT1. Inclusive disjunctions imply the disjunction of the three possibilities, and they are true when one of the three cases (p¬q, ¬pq, and pq) is actual. These findings support MMT1, but not MMT2. In conclusion, the revised mental models theory may be unnecessary for disjunctions.

In this paper, new evidence is presented for the assumption that the reason-relation reading of indicative conditionals ('if A, then C') reflects a conventional implicature. In four experiments, it is investigated whether relevance effects found for the probability assessment of indicative conditionals (Skovgaard-Olsen, Singmann, & Klauer, 2016a) can be classified as being produced by (a) a conversational implicature, (b) a (probabilistic) presupposition failure, or (c) a con- ventional implicature. After considering several alternative hypotheses, and the accumulating evidence from other studies as well, we conclude that the evidence is most consistent with the Relevance Effect being the outcome of a conventional implicature. This finding indicates that the reason-relation reading is part of the semantic content of indicative conditionals, albeit not part of their primary truth-conditional content.

A growing body of evidence suggests that children succeed in nontraditional false-belief tasks in the first years of life. However, few studies have examined individual differences in infants' and toddlers' performance on these tasks. Here we investigated whether parental use of mental-state language (i.e. think, understand), which predicts children's performance on elicited-response false-belief tasks at older ages, also predicts toddlers' performance on a nontraditional task. We tested 2.5-year-old children in a verbal nontraditional false-belief task that included two looking time measures, anticipatory looking and preferential looking, and measured parents' use of mental-state language during a picture-book task. Parents' use of mental-state language positively predicted children's performance on the anticipatory-looking measure of the nontraditional task. These results provide the first evidence that social factors relate to children's false-belief understanding prior to age 3 and that this association extends to performance on nontraditional tasks. These findings add to a growing number of studies suggesting that mental-state language supports mental-state understanding across the lifespan.

According to the Bayesian paradigm in the psychology of reasoning, the norms by which everyday human cognition is best evaluated are probabilistic rather than logical in character. Recently, the Bayesian paradigm has been applied to the domain of argumentation, in which the fundamental norms are traditionally assumed to be logical. Here, we present a major generalization of extant Bayesian approaches to argumentation that (a) utilizes a new class of Bayesian learning methods that are better suited to modeling dynamic and conditional inferences than standard Bayesian conditionalization, (b) is able to characterize the special value of logically valid argument schemes in uncertain reasoning contexts, (c) greatly extends the range of inferences and argumentative phenomena that can be adequately described in a Bayesian framework, and (d) undermines some influential theoretical motivations for dual function models of human cognition. We conclude that the probabilistic norms given by the Bayesian approach to rationality are not necessarily at odds with the norms given by classical logic. Rather, the Bayesian theory of argumentation can be seen as justifying and enriching the argumentative norms of classical logic. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Lockhart and Keil have written an interesting monograph focusing on the development of reasoning about medicine, a relatively underexplored area of research with potentially broad implications with respect to the design of more-effective medical interventions. In a set of 15 studies with well over 2,200 participants, they examine how children and adults combine aspects of biological and psychological reasoning to create working models of medicine. Lockhart and Keil explore developmental changes in reasoning about illness and its treatment using medicines in terms of dualism (e.g., psychological vs. physical), spatial proximity, differential timing of effects, potential side effects, and treatment tradeoffs. This commentary highlights the novel contributions of this monograph, examines issues that need additional considerations, and makes suggestions for future research.

A substantive body of literature has been dedicated to explaining Locke's crucial role in the development of a new logic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, commonly referred to as the "logic of ideas" or "facultative logic." I examine Locke's relation to logic from a different angle. I focus on two philosophical issues that permeate his remarks about logic in various texts. One is about what grounds the alleged authority of putative logical rules. The other concerns the relation between logic and the psychology of reasoning. These issues are not only historically significant but also continuous with an ongoing modern discourse in philosophy of logic.

Language provides information about our psychological states. For instance, adults can use language to convey information about their goals or preferences. The current research examined whether 14- and 12-month-old infants could interpret a change in an agent’s word as signaling a change in her goals. In two experiments, 14-month-olds (Experiment 1) and 12-month-olds (Experiment 2) were first familiarized to an event in which an agent uttered a novel word and then reached for one of two novel objects. During the test trials, the agent uttered a different novel word (different-word condition) or the same word (same-word condition) and then reached for the same object or the other object. Both 14- and 12-month-olds in the different-word condition expected the agent to change her goal and reach for the other object. In contrast, the infants in the same-word condition expected the agent to maintain her goal. In Experiment 3, 12-month-olds who heard two distinct sounds instead of the agent’s novel words expected the agent to maintain her goal regardless of the change in the nonlinguistic sounds. Together, these results indicate that by 12 months of age infants can use an agent’s verbal information to detect a change in her goals.

Clinical reasoning is a complex process required for effective therapeutic encounters. Its development is poorly understood. The clinical reasoning process is placed in a historical context based on the occupational therapy literature. An emerging model of clinical reasoning is proposed. This model of clinical reasoning provides a unique perspective in order to compartmentalize the person, environment, and occupation constructs around the person’s life story, connect it directly to the occupational therapy practice framework, and determine treatment priorities, emphasizing a client-centered perspective. A client-centered model of clinical reasoning supports efforts to provide effective intervention.

Theories advanced to explain conditional reasoning range from those that invoke inference systems that evolved for specific domains (such as social exchange, precautions, or deontic regulations) to relevance theory, a relatively domain-general account that invokes conversational pragmatics. The present research utilized a novel extension of repetition priming, in conjunction with the Wason selection task (a widely known and used task to test people's conditional reasoning), to evaluate alternative theories of human reasoning. Across five experiments, testing over 600 participants, consistent priming across selection tasks was demonstrated. The pattern of priming effects supports models of human reasoning based on specific evolved reasoning abilities, and was inconsistent with general conditional reasoning models such as relevance theory. These results also converge with neurological and clinical evidence of divided psychological processes for reasoning about relatively specific domains, based on functionally distinct inference systems.

Intense controversy surrounds the question of when children first understand that others can hold false beliefs. Results from traditional tasks suggest that false-belief understanding does not emerge until about 4 years of age and constitutes a major developmental milestone in social cognition. By contrast, results from nontraditional tasks, which have steadily accumulated over the past 10 years, suggest that false-belief understanding is already present in infants (under age 2 years) and toddlers (age 2-3 years) and thus forms an integral part of social cognition from early in life. Here we first present an overview of the findings from nontraditional tasks. We then return to traditional tasks and argue that processing difficulties, rather than limitations in false-belief understanding, account for young children's failure at these tasks.

In the psychology of reasoning, spatial reasoning capacities are often explained by postulating models in the mind. According to the Space To Reason theory, these models only consist of the spatial qualities of the considered situation, such as the topology or the relative orientation, without containing any quantitative measures. It turns out that a field of computer science, called Qualitative Spatial Reasoning, is entirely dedicated to formalizing such qualitative representations. Although the formalism of qualitative spatial reasoning has already been used in the space to reason theory, it has not yet entirely been exploited. Indeed, it can also be used to formally characterize spatial models and account for our reasoning on them. To exemplify this claim, two typical problems of spatial reasoning are exhaustively analyzed through the framework of qualitative constraint networks (QCN). It is shown that for both problems every aspect can be formally captured, as for example the integration of premises into one single model, or the prediction of alternative models. Therefore, this framework represents an opportunity to completely formalize the space to reason theory and, what is more, diversify the type of spatial reasoning accounted by it. The most substantial element of this formal translation is that a spatial model and a satisfiable atomic QCN - a scenario - turn out to have exactly the same conditions of possibility.

Psiholozi su počeli da se eksperimentalno bave deduktivnim zaključivanjem početkom 20. veka. Ipak, zbog načina na koji su eksperimenti bili osmišljeni, nije bilo značajnih pomaka u toj oblasti sve do relativno skoro. Smatramo da postoje dva glavna razloga zbog kojih dedukcija često nije bila ispitivana na adekvatan način. Prvi je taj što su psiholozi u velikoj meri ignorisali razvoj matematičke logike i bazirali svoja istraživanja na silogizmima. Drugi razlog je uticaj gledišta, koje i dalje preovladava u semantici i logici uopšte, da su kategorički pojmovi, kao što je pojam istine, važniji od hipotetičkih pojmova, kao što je pojam dedukcije. Uticaj te dogme na psihološka istraživanja je bio dvostruk. U studijama koje su se bavile shvatanjem logičkih veznika kod odraslih i kod dece, mnogo više značaja je pridavano semantičkim aspektima veznika - istinosnim funkcijama, dok su dedukcije stavljane u drugi plan. Sa druge strane, dogma je uticala čak i na istraživanja koja su pomoću formalnih sistema ispitivala deduktivno zaključivanje na taj način što je uslovljavala izbor sistema. Istraživači su uglavnom preferirali aksiomatske formalne sisteme naspram sistema prirodne dedukcije, iako su se za izučavanje dedukcije potonji pokazali kao daleko adekvatniji. Psychologists have experimentally studied deductive reasoning since the beginning of the 20 th century. However, as we will argue, there has not been much improvement in the field until relatively recently, due to how the experiments were designed. We deem the design of the majority of conducted experiments inadequate for two reasons. The first one is that psychologists have, for the most part, ignored the development of mathematical logic and based their research on syllogistic inferences. The second reason is the influence of the view, which is dogmatically still prevalent in semantics and logic in general, that the categorical notions, such as the notion of truth, are more important than the hypothetical notions, such as the notion of deduction. The influence of this dogma has been twofold. In studies concerning logical connectives in adults and children, much more emphasis has been put on the semanti-cal aspects of the connectives-the truth functions, than on the deductive inferences. And secondly, even in the studies that investigated deductive inferences by using formal systems, the dogma still influenced the choice of the formal system. Researchers , in general, preferred the axiomatic formal systems over the systems of natural deduction, even though the systems of the second kind are much more suitable for studying deduction.

By synthesizing the argumentation theory of new rhetoric with research on heuristics and motivated reasoning, we develop a conceptual view of argumentation based on reasoning motivations that sheds new light on the morality of decision-making. Accordingly, we propose that reasoning in eristic argumentation is motivated by psychological (e.g., anxiety reduction) or material (e.g., vested interests) gains that do not depend on resolving the problem in question truthfully. Contrary to heuristic argumentation, in which disputants genuinely argue to reach a practically rational solution, eristic argumentation aims to defeat the counterparty rather than seeking a reasonable solution. Eristic argumentation is susceptible to arbitrariness and power abuses; therefore, it is inappropriate for making moral judgments with the exception of judgments concerning moral taboos, which are closed to argumentation by their nature. Eristic argumentation is also problematic for strategic and entrepreneurial decision-making because it impedes the search for the right heuristic under uncertainty as an ecologically rational choice. However, our theoretical view emphasizes that under extreme uncertainty, where heuristic solutions are as fallible as any guesses, pretense reasoning by eristic argumentation may be instrumental for its adaptive benefits. Expanding the concept of eristic argumentation based on reasoning motivations opens a new path for studying the psychology of reasoning in connection to morality and decision-making under uncertainty. We discuss the implications of our theoretical view to relevant research streams, including ethical, strategic and entrepreneurial decision-making.

Reasoning is generally seen as a means to improve knowledge and make better decisions. However, much evidence shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests that the function of reasoning should be rethought. Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade. Reasoning so conceived is adaptive given the exceptional dependence of humans on communication and their vulnerability to misinformation. A wide range of evidence in the psychology of reasoning and decision making can be reinterpreted and better explained in the light of this hypothesis. Poor performance in standard reasoning tasks is explained by the lack of argumentative context. When the same problems are placed in a proper argumentative setting, people turn out to be skilled arguers. Skilled arguers, however, are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views. This explains the notorious confirmation bias. This bias is apparent not only when people are actually arguing, but also when they are reasoning proactively from the perspective of having to defend their opinions. Reasoning so motivated can distort evaluations and attitudes and allow erroneous beliefs to persist. Proactively used reasoning also favors decisions that are easy to justify but not necessarily better. In all these instances traditionally described as failures or flaws, reasoning does exactly what can be expected of an argumentative device: Look for arguments that support a given conclusion, and, ceteris paribus, favor conclusions for which arguments can be found.

This chapter takes as its starting point the widespread view that logic and reasoning are closely related. It briefly surveys the historical developments leading to this view, and then discusses empirical findings pertaining to the question of whether deductive logic is an adequate descriptive model for human reasoning. This body of research suggests that there are significant, systematic discrepancies between the canons of deductive logic and human reasoning, and thus that logic does not offer an adequate description of human reasoning.