Human Reasoning and Complex Cognition

Full course description

The present course is concerned with theoretical (psychological) and empirical perspectives on human reasoning and decision making. Reasoning involves making deductive or inductive inferences and judging them according to current goals, beliefs and knowledge. Decision making refers to choosing between alternatives (e.g. different mental models). Both topics are of central importance to humans and even though some seem to reason better than others or their decisions seem more sound, thinking remains an important and for some uniquely human feature. Studying humans thought (both reasoning and decision making) belongs to the field of Cognitive Psychology. Like most topics studied by psychologists, both reasoning and decision making include a wide range of explanatory models that emphasize different aspects of human thought.

Eleven topics of the (cognitive) psychology of reasoning and decision making are discussed using a Problem Based Learning format. The topics are: (hypothetical) reasoning, the mental imagery-debate, the psychology of decision making, Signal Detection Theory and vigilance, emotions and reasoning, emotions and decision making (the Somatic Marker hypothesis), subliminal perception, deductive and inductive reasoning (heuristics and biases) and socio-economical decision making (pro-social behavior: risk and trust).