How does reasoning work in cognitive psychology?

The psychology of reasoning examines how people draw conclusions to solve problems and make decisions, overlapping with fields like philosophy, artificial intelligence, and logic. Cognitive psychology studies this as a mental process, exploring information perception, understanding, and thought formulation. Research in this area also addresses whether humans possess the capacity for full rationality.

What we know

• The psychology of reasoning is defined as the study of how people draw conclusions to inform problem solving and decision making. [2]
• Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of human mental processes, including attention, memory, perception, language use, creativity, problem solving, and reasoning. [3]
• Cognitive psychology originated in the 1960s as a break from behaviorism, using models of mental processing to explain human behavior. [3]
• Psychological experiments on how humans and other animals reason have been conducted for over a century. [2]

Still open

• An enduring question in the psychology of reasoning is whether or not people actually have the capacity to be rational.

Where to go next

• whenHow did cognitive psychology break away from behaviorism?
• what followedHow do cognitive biases affect human judgment?
• a case in pointWhat is emotional reasoning in psychology?
• the bigger pictureWhat role does cognitive science play in understanding the mind?
• how it workedHow do heuristics allow for faster human decisions?
• an unexpected connectionHow are cognitive biases linked to pseudoscientific beliefs?Cognitive biases can incline individuals toward endorsing pseudoscientific beliefs by requiring less evidence for claims that confirm prior preconceptions.

Sources

• [1]psychology of reasoning (Wikidata Q7256422) · CC0 1.0
• [2]Psychology of reasoning · CC BY-SA 4.0
• [3]Cognitive psychology · CC BY-SA 4.0
• [4]Emotional reasoning · CC BY-SA 4.0
• [5]Cognitive bias · CC BY-SA 4.0