Dual Process Theories

Definition

Dual process theories are a group of theories in social, personality, and cognitive psychology that describe how people think about information when they make judgments or solve problems. These theories are called dual process because they distinguish two basic ways of thinking about information: a relatively fast, superficial, spontaneous mode based on intuitive associations, and a more in-depth, effortful, step-by-step mode based on systematic reasoning. Dual process theories have been applied in many areas of psychology, including persuasion, stereotyping, person perception, memory, and negotiation. In general, these theories assume that people will think about information in a relatively superficial and spontaneous way unless they are both able and motivated to think more carefully.

Background and History

Dual process theories are built on several key ideas that have a long history in psychology. For instance, the two modes of thinking described by various dual process theories can often be mapped onto a topdown, idea-driven way of understanding the world versus a bottom-up, data-driven way of understanding. The notion that the way people understand the world is critically influenced by the knowledge that they bring to a situation (so that they begin at the top—their heads—in their understanding), as well as by the information provided within the situation itself (the bottom), dates back to Wolfgang Kohler's distinction in the 1930s between perception and sensation. For instance, when a person looks at a book on a table, he or she senses both a pattern of colors and lines with his or her eyes and actively labels the pattern “book” by using his or her knowledge about what a book is like.

Dual process theories also build on Gestalt principles explored by psychologists in the 1930s and 1940s, which suggest that people have a natural tendency to make experiences meaningful, structured, and coherent. By focusing on how one thing relates to the next and seeing patterns in the way that events unfold, a person can understand and predict the social world, which allows him or her to anticipate, plan, and act effectively.

These and other elements were integrated into dual process theories in a variety of fields, beginning in the 1980s, often as an attempt to understand and synthesize conflicting findings or theories in the area. In persuasion, for instance, the development of two dual process theories (the elaboration likelihood model and the heuristic-systematic model) allowed researchers to organize complex findings in the field of attitudes and attitude change and explain why certain variables sometimes lead to attitude change and sometimes do not. For instance, when people are relying on simple, intuitive shortcuts in their thinking, they will be more persuaded by an expert than by a nonexpert, even when the expert's arguments are not very good. However, when people are relying more on systematic, bottomup processing of all available information, they will tend to be more persuaded by good arguments than by someone's title.

Similarly, in the field of person perception, the continuum model of impression formation was developed in an attempt to reconcile two competing viewpoints on how people perceive others: one proposing that individuals form impressions in a bottom-up fashion, adding up lots of specific evaluations about a target person to form an overall average impression, and another claiming that people form impressions based on stereotypes or other social categories (e.g., race, gender). The continuum model suggests that people can use both of these modes, and the model identifies when a perceiver will rely solely on an initial, general categorization and when he or she will go on to think more carefully about another person based on unique information about that individual.

...