People spontaneously create counterfactual alternatives to reality when they think “if only” or
“what if” and imagine how the past could have been different. The mind computes …

Reasoning is generally seen as a means to improve knowledge and make better decisions.
However, much evidence shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor …

Reason, we are told, is what makes us human, the source of our knowledge and wisdom. If
reason is so useful, why didn't it also evolve in other animals? If reason is that reliable, why …

In my personal chapter contribution I present the basic dual process model that I believe to
be supported by my own empirical findings and the work of many of the contributors to this …

Abstract Thinking about what might have been—counterfactual thinking—is a common
feature of the mental landscape. Key questions about counterfactual thinking center on why …

This article reviews a diverse set of proposals for dual processing in higher cognition within
largely disconnected literatures in cognitive and social psychology. All these theories have …

Ecosystem service research covers a challenging socio-ecological complexity and
simultaneously copes with a high policy demand for decision support in sustainable …

To be rational is to be able to reason. Thirty years ago psychologists believed that human
reasoning depended on formal rules of inference akin to those of a logical calculus. This …

Researchers in thinking and reasoning have proposed recently that there are two distinct
cognitive systems underlying reasoning. System 1 is old in evolutionary terms and shared …

Counterfactuals are thoughts about alternatives to past events, that is, thoughts of what
might have been. This article provides an updated account of the functional theory of …