Heuristic Bias, Conflict, and Rationality in Decision-Making

B.M. Glatzeder et al. (eds.), Towards a Theory of Thinking, On Thinking, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-03129-8_2, © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010 Abstract Half a century of reasoning and decision-making research has shown that human thinking is often biased. People seem to over-rely on intuitions and gut feelings instead of on more demanding, deliberative reasoning when making decisions. The omnipresence of this bias has led to the questioning of human rationality. In this chapter I clarify that the crucial question for our view of human rationality is whether or not people detect that their intuitions conflict with more normative considerations when they are biased. In the first section I review recent conflict detection studies that started addressing this issue. The second section discusses the implications of the conflict detection work for the debate on human rationality. The key message is that focusing on the conflict detection process shows that people are far more rational and normative than their actual responses show.