Principles of Cognitive System Presumed within the Psychology of Rational Thinking

Numerous psychological models of the rationality of human thinking have been developed since the middle of the last century within the line of research known as the heuristics and biases approach, descriptive theory of rationality or decision-making, complex cognition, or the psychology of rational thinking. The focal processes or phenomena are reasoning, decision-making, judging, and inferencing. Families of models revolve around the formal (cumulative) prospect theory, the cognitivist fuzzy trace theory, ecological rationality, and dual process theories. Regarding complex cognitive processing, there is a limited set of principles that researchers in the psychology of rationality implicitly, and sometimes uncritically, attribute to the human cognitive system. These principles may be called “boundary conditions” of the validity of psychological rationality theories, meaning that all psychological models of rational thinking, including currently dominant dual process theories, belong to a set constrained by the postulated qualities of the cognitive system's architecture. Those principles that have not yet been explicitly stated in the literature are as follows: cognitive miserliness, cognitive processing dependence on the environment, knowledge structures, probabilism, and the challenge of individual differences. The paper presents the mentioned principles and their historical antecedents and a proposal for future research questions based on such a juxtaposition.