A Major Impediment of Rational Behavior

s Invited speakers INTUITION, ANALYTIC THINKING, AND THE FEELING OF RIGHTNESS: A METACOGNITIVE REASONING THEORY Valerie Thompson, University of Saskatchewan Amongst educators and psychologists, questions of metacognition have garnered much attention, especially as they pertain to the domains of learning and memory. In this context, it is therefore somewhat surprising that relatively little is known about the cognitive processes involved in the monitoring and control of reasoning and problemsolving. That is, we know little about how reasoners assess their confidence in their conclusions, how this confidence influences subsequent behaviour, nor how reasoning performance is assessed on an ongoing basis. In this talk, I will outline a theory of metareasoning that draws on insights from the learning and memory literature, extending them to a variety of common reasoning tasks. Data will be presented to suggest that monitoring is inferential and based on cues such as the fluency with which answers are brought to mind. Monitoring is proposed to be a continuous processes, and the relationship between monitoring and control processes will be explicated. In addition to corroborating links between the metatmemory and the nascent field of metareasoning, I will also provide evidence that study of metareasoning provides novel insights about both metacognition and reasoning. Friday (May 22), 11:30–12:30 METACOGNITIVE MYOPIA A MAJOR IMPEDIMENT OF RATIONAL BEHAVIOR Klaus Fiedler Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg What I have come to call “meta-cognitive myopia” (MM), using a term once suggested by Robyn Dawes, is the phenomenon that people are pretty accurate in utilizing even large amounts of stimulus information. However, they are uncritical and naïve regarding the history and validity of the given information samples. This uncritical reliance on the information given is most conspicuous when the task context makes it crystal-clear that the stimulus data should not be trusted. I locate MM within a broader framework of meta-cognition research and illustrate the phenomenon with examples from various research paradigms. MM offers an alternative account of many biases in judgment and decision making, which have been traditionally explained in terms of capacity constraints, limited reasoning ability, motivational forces, or severely biased environmental input. The explanatory power of the MM construct, and its theoretical potential to predict new findings, is demonstrated with reference to five paradigms: inability to discard irrelevant information; utilization of selectively sampled information; conditional inference biases; sample-size neglect; and myopia for the impact of aggregation levels. The final discussion is concerned with the learning origins of MM and the question of why evolution did not equip homo sapiens with more effective meta-cognitive tools. An analysis of the costs and benefits will reveal that MM may serve important adaptive functions, and that eliminating MM may have maladaptive effects. Nevertheless, in the context of many real decision problems, the costs and irrational consequences of MM cannot be denied. The final discussion therefore focuses on possible ways to avoid and alleviate MM and its irrational consequences. Friday (May 22), 16:00–17:00 6 METACOGNITION OF CONCEPTS