This article presents a new theory of subjective probability according to which different descriptions of the same event can give rise to different judgments. The experimental evidence confirms the major predictions of the theory. First, judged probability increases by unpacking the focal hypothesis and decreases by unpacking the alternative hypothesis. Second, judged probabilities are complementary in the binary case and subadditive in the general case, contrary to both classical and revisionist models of belief. Third, subadditivity is more pronounced for probability judgments than for frequency judgments and is enhanced by compatible evidence. The theory provides a unified treatment of a wide range of empirical findings. It is extended to ordinal judgments and to the assessment of upper and lower probabilities.

The distinction between intuitive and analytic thinking is common in psychology. However, while often being quite clear on the characteristics of the two processes ('Type 1' processes are fast, autonomous, intuitive, etc. and 'Type 2' processes are slow, deliberative, analytic, etc.), dual-process theorists have been heavily criticized for being unclear on the factors that determine when an individual will think analytically or rely on their intuition.

An analytic cognitive style denotes a propensity to set aside highly salient intuitions when engaging in problem solving. We assess the hypothesis that an analytic cognitive style is associated with a history of questioning, altering, and rejecting (i.e., unbelieving) supernatural claims, both religious and paranormal. In two studies, we examined associations of God beliefs, religious engagement (attendance at religious services, praying, etc.), conventional religious beliefs (heaven, miracles, etc.) and paranormal beliefs (extrasensory perception, levitation, etc.) with performance measures of cognitive ability and analytic cognitive style. An analytic cognitive style negatively predicted both religious and paranormal beliefs when controlling for cognitive ability as well as religious engagement, sex, age, political ideology, and education. Participants more willing to engage in analytic reasoning were less likely to endorse supernatural beliefs. Further, an association between analytic cognitive style and religious engagement was mediated by religious beliefs, suggesting that an analytic cognitive style negatively affects religious engagement via lower acceptance of conventional religious beliefs. Results for types of God belief indicate that the association between an analytic cognitive style and God beliefs is more nuanced than mere acceptance and rejection, but also includes adopting less conventional God beliefs, such as Pantheism or Deism. Our data are consistent with the idea that two people who share the same cognitive ability, education, political ideology, sex, age and level of religious engagement can acquire very different sets of beliefs about the world if they differ in their propensity to think analytically.

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This article concerns a class of experimental manipulations that require people to generate explanations or imagine scenarios. A review of studies using such manipulations indicates that people who explain or imagine a possibility then express greater confidence in the truth of that possibility. It is argued that this effect results from the approach people take in the explanation or imagination task: They temporarily assume that the hypothesis is true and assess how plausibly it can account for the relevant evidence. From this view, any task that requires that a hypothesis be treated as if it were true is sufficient to increase confidence in the truth of that hypothesis. Such tasks cause increased confidence in the hypothesis at the expense of viable alternatives because of changes in problem representation, evidence evaluation, and information search that take place when the hypothesis is temporarily treated as if it were true.

We review recent evidence revealing that the mere willingness to engage analytic reasoning as a means to override intuitive gut feelings is a meaningful predictor of key psychological outcomes in diverse areas of everyday life. For example, those with a more analytic thinking style are more skeptical about religious, paranormal, and conspiratorial concepts. In addition, analytic thinking relates to having less traditional moral values, making less emotional or disgust-based moral judgments, and being less cooperative and more rationally self-interested in social dilemmas. Analytic thinkers are even less likely to offload thinking to smartphone technology and may be more creative. Taken together, these results indicate that the propensity to think analytically has major consequences for individual psychology.

Recent research has indicated a negative relation between the propensity for analytic reasoning and religious beliefs and practices. Here, we propose conflict detection as a mechanism underlying this relation, on the basis of the hypothesis that more-analytic people are less religious, in part, because they are more sensitive to conflicts between immaterial religious beliefs and beliefs about the material world. To examine cognitive conflict sensitivity, we presented problems containing stereotypes that conflicted with base-rate probabilities in a task with no religious content. In three studies, we found evidence that religiosity is negatively related to conflict detection during reasoning. Independent measures of analytic cognitive style also positively predicted conflict detection. The present findings provide evidence for a mechanism potentially contributing to the negative association between analytic thinking and religiosity, and more generally, they illustrate the insights to be gained from integrating individual-difference factors and contextual factors to investigate analytic reasoning.

The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) is one of the most widely used tools to assess individual differences in intuitive-analytic cognitive styles. The CRT is of broad interest because each of its items reliably cues a highly available and superficially appropriate but incorrect response, conventionally deemed the Bintuitiver esponse. To do well on the CRT, participants must reflect on and question the intuitive responses. The CRT score typically employed is the sum of correct responses, assumed to indicate greater Breflectiveness( i.e., CRT-Reflective scoring). Some recent researchers have, however, inverted the rationale of the CRT by summing the number of intuitive incorrect responses, creating a putative measure of intuitiveness (i.e., CRTIntuitive). We address the feasibility and validity of this strategy by considering the problem of the structural dependency of these measures derived from the CRT and by assessing their respective associations with selfreport measures of intuitive-analytic cognitive styles: the Faith in Intuition and Need for Cognition scales. Our results indicated that, to the extent that the dependency problem can be addressed, the CRT-Reflective but not the CRT-Intuitive measure predicts intuitive-analytic cognitive styles. These results provide evidence that the CRT is a valid measure of reflective but not of intuitive thinking.