Associative Intrusion and Rule-Based Suppression

Associative Intrusion and Rule-Based Suppression

These data help us to characterize the interaction between the two systems. In all the demonstrations of simultaneous contradictory belief, associative responses were shown to be automatic in that they persisted in the face of participants’ attempts to ignore them. Despite recognition of the decisiveness of the rule-based argument, associative responses remained compelling (see Allen & Brooks, 1991, for analogous effects in categorization). Both systems seem to try, at least some of the time, to generate a response. The rule-based system can suppress the response of the associative system in the sense that it can overrule it. However, the associative system always has its opinion heard and, because of its speed and efficiency, often precedes and thus neutralizes the rule-based response. Epstein, Lipson, Holstein, and Huh (1992) come to a closely related conclusion. In research directed at a distinction alike in many respects to the current one, they asked participants to consider vignettes describing people’s reactions to negative outcomes. The vignettes described different actors suffering identical consequences for which they were equally responsible. Participants assumed both a self-orientation (e.g., “How foolish would you feel if you had reacted that way?”) and a “rational” orientation (e.g., “How foolishly did the person in the vignette actually behave?”). The rational orientation asked participants to make a more objective response than the self-orientation that asked them to guess only at a subjective feeling. By demanding objectivity, the rational orientation demanded responses that participants could justify; the self-orientation asked only that participants report their impressions. Rules provide a firmer basis for justification than do impressions, and therefore participants were more likely to respond on the basis of rules in the rational than in the self-orientation condition. Epstein et al. found that self-orientation judgments differed for different vignettes, depending on such causally irrelevant factors as whether actors had behaved as usual or unusually. Most pertinent here, judgments made with a rational orientation reduced but failed to eliminate this effect. In conformity with Epstein et al., I conclude that even when one is attempting to be rule-governed, associative responses encroach on judgment. The force of the evidence is to support not only the conclusion that human beings have and use two computationally distinct systems of reasoning, but also that the associative system intrudes on the rule-based one.