Psychology Today

After a long break, I'm returning to my @PsychToday blog. My first piece back is about the central argument of my new book with @AdilSaribay, Reflection and Intuition in a Crisis-Ridden World: Thinking Hard or Hardly Thinking? (Routledge, 2025). The claim is uncomfortable. Slow, careful reasoning is not the cognitive virtue we've been sold. For decades, dual-process research promised that thinking harder would rescue us from bad judgment. I no longer believe that promise holds up. The trouble isn't that people refuse to think. They think constantly. Much of that reasoning is simply in service of conclusions already chosen. Psychologists call this motivated reasoning: assembling arguments for what we already want to believe, like a lawyer building a case. A generation of research shows that analytically skilled people are often better at rationalizing their existing beliefs, not freer from them. More cognitive horsepower mostly produces more elegant rationalization. What actually produces sound judgment? We propose three orientations that reflection alone cannot provide: (1) Intellectual humility: treating your current view as a hypothesis that must keep earning its place. (2) Active open-mindedness: seeking evidence against your position as hard as you'd defend it. (3) Holistic thinking: holding multiple causal pathways in mind, especially when problems cross domains. These are not a checklist but one capacity working from different angles. Finding the most plausible account that ties the evidence together, and revising it when new evidence fails to fit. Humility makes revision possible. Open-mindedness drives the search for disconfirming evidence. Holistic thinking helps you see when new information belongs to a different system than you first assumed. This is what distinguishes strong diagnosticians: their core skill is not knowledge but the ability to update quickly when the leading hypothesis fails. Why this matters across sectors: (1) Education: curricula still assume that stacking isolated competencies eventually produces judgment. It rarely does. (2) Policy and public health: climate, polarization, and pandemics reward integrative thinkers. (3) AI: LLMs produce competent answers cheaply. The scarce human skill is defensible synthesis across domains. (4) Leadership: Executives who make the worst calls under uncertainty are rarely the least intelligent. They're the most committed to being right. (5) Medicine and finance: where the cost of elegantly defending the wrong hypothesis is measured in lives or billions. Reflection becomes useful only when a person seriously entertains the possibility of being wrong. Until then, it mostly helps us be wrong more effectively. Full piece: psychologytoday.com/us/blog/moral-… Subscribe to the Moral Intuitions blog: psychologytoday.com/us/contributor…