Psychological essentialism is the belief that some internal, unseen essence or force determines the common outward appearances and behaviors of category members. We investigated whether reasoning about transplants of bodily elements showed evidence of essentialist thinking. Both Americans and Indians endorsed the possibility of transplants conferring donors' personality, behavior, and luck on r...

The role of intuition in software development was discussed in a most original fashion by Peter Naur in 1984. Yet there has been little subsequent interest in elaborating on Naur’s ideas. In seeking to explain this neglect, we argue that the accepted views of software development, both within the formal and pragmatic traditions, are deeply influenced by a conceptual framework inherited from com...

Mullainathan, Schwartzstein, & Shleifer [Quarterly Journal of Economics, May 2008] put forward a model of coarse thinking. The essential idea behind coarse thinking is that agents put situations into categories and then apply the same model of inference to all situations in a given category. We extend the argument to strategies in a game-theoretic setting and propose the following: Agents split...

Anew usability inspection technique based on metaphors of human thinking has been experimentally compared to heuristic evaluation (HE). The aim of metaphors of thinking (MOT) is to focus inspection on users’ mental activity and to make inspection easily applicable to different devices and use contexts. Building on classical introspective psychology, MOT bases inspection on metaphors of habit fo...

Undergraduate students often start their academic course of studies with inadequate learning and thinking skills. Our college has a policy of setting high standards and demands, while supporting students' learning in a variety of ways. In this paper we present a distinctive course designed to aid students develop algorithmic problem-solving skills. The course is taught in parallel to a CS1 cour...

The resources framework provides a useful and generative model of student thinking and learning. In particular, it suggests various strategies for instruction such as priming resources and refining intuition that allow students to build on knowledge they already have. In this paper, we describe the affordances of the resources framework in guiding the design, assessment, and refinement of inter...

—M. TED BOREN AND JUDITH RAMEY, ASSOCIATE MEMBER, IEEE Abstract—Thinking-aloud protocols may be the most widely used method in usability testing, but the descriptions of this practice in the usability literature and the work habits of practitioners do not conform to the theoretical basis most often cited for it: Ericsson and Simon’s seminal work PROTOCOL ANALYSIS: VERBAL REPORTS AS DATA [1]. Af...

This editorial suggests moving beyond relying on the dominant logic of multiple regression analysis (MRA) toward thinking and using algorithms in advancing and testing theory in accounting, consumer research, finance, management, and marketing. The editorial includes an example of testing an MRA model for fit and predictive validity. The same data used for the MRA is used to conduct a fuzzy-set...

Deductive reasoning shares with other forms of thinking a reliance on strategies, as shown by the results of three experiments on the nature and development of control strategies to solve suppositional deductions. These puzzles are based on assertors who may or may not be telling the truth, and their assertions about their status as truthtellers and liars. The first experiment shows that reason...

Placing the future center stage as a way of understanding cognition is gaining attention in psychology. The general modern label for this is "prospection" which refers to the process of representing and thinking about possible future states of the world. Several theorists have claimed that episodic and prospective memory, as well as hypothetical thinking (mental simulation) and conditional reas...