Intuitive and deliberate judgments are based on common principles

At times, people’s judgments seem intuitive: They come to mind quickly and effortlessly, seemingly popping out of nowhere, without much conscious awareness of their origins or of the manner of their formation. Other judgments seem deliberate: They arise from a lengthy and painstaking thought process that is transparent and accessible to awareness. These two types of judgments have been treated separately in the cognitive sciences, with analytic philosophy, economics, and decision theory focused on deliberate, reflective decisions and psychoanalysis and social psychology dealing also with intuitive, spontaneous behavior. Following this division of labor among disciplines, psychologists have proposed that the mind is similarly divided. Over the last 3 decades, a considerable number of models have been premised on the assumption that judgments can be formed via two qualitatively distinct processes or systems. ¹ Such dual-systems models characterized intuitive and deliberate judgments in terms of several, presumably aligned, aspects: Intuitive judgments have been assumed to be associative, quick, unconscious, effortless, heuristic, and error-prone. Deliberative judgments have been assumed to be rule based, slow, conscious, effortful, analytic, and rational. The claims for the existence of two separate systems (or processes) ² of judgment were buttressed by a variety of empirical findings interpreted in support of the dualistic distinction (for reviews see Evans, 2008; Kruglanski & Orehek, 2007).