Feeling Of Rightness Research Articles

Go with your gut! The beneficial mood effects of intuitive decisions.

People make countless decisions every day. We explored the self-regulatory function of decisions and assumed that the very act of making a decision in everyday life enhances people's mood. We expected that this decision-related mood change would be more pronounced for intuitive decisions than for analytical ones. The ease of making a decision and the feeling of rightness were expected to mediate the effect of intuitive (vs. analytical) decisions on participants' mood. In a preregistered experimental experience sampling study, participants from the general population were asked to report when they were about to make an everyday decision over the course of 14 days (N = 256 participants, 6,779 decisions). For each decision, participants were randomly instructed to decide either based on their intuition or based on careful analysis. We assessed several variables before and immediately after the decision. Participants also reported retrospectively on their choices in voluntary follow-up assessments. Making a decision per se immediately enhanced participants' mood. This mood enhancement was stronger for intuitive compared to analytic decisions and persisted until follow-up. Ease of decision, but not feeling of rightness, mediated this effect. Intuitive decisions compared to analytic decisions were more likely to be implemented and led to greater satisfaction and pleasantness of the chosen option. Having more options for a particular decision led to generally higher mood improvement and satisfaction. This is the first empirical demonstration showing that using one's gut has beneficial effects in everyday life. Study limitations and implications for theory and practice are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Thomas Wolfe: Modo and the Potential for Renaissance

In Thomas Clayton Wolfe (1900-1938) and his work, the Modernist tension between neophilia and neophobia was apparent and ultimately redirected into a restoration of vital force of writing. He felt that the American writer had to uncover the new, to “learn to speak the tongue that no one in this land has spoken yet.” Yet he drew inspiration from the classical and European literature of the past while experimenting with Modernist techniques and themes, as he sought permanence in a changing world. He was associated with writers of the various “renaissances” – the English Renaissance, the American Renaissance, and more particularly the Southern Renaissance. The ambient “neophilia” and “neophobia” caused his work to be viewed as both virtuous and unfortunate – “bad Modernism,” to use Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz’s term for daring art which becomes imperiled when it achieves wide acceptance. To Wolfe’s conservative publishers, his excessive and emotionally intense style, running the gamut between lyrical and terse, seemed cutting edge. Yet his professional associations affected his radically independent image and his contemporaries; the Southern Agrarians, who became the New Critics, rejected his artistic choices. Central to Modernism is the tension between Wolfe’s preoccupation with degeneration and decay and his emphasis on the modo, or “just now,” the fraught, often glorious fleeting instant. Wolfe recreates the moments of intensity Pater called for in his Conclusion to “The Renaissance” both in the poetry of his prose and in the political “conversions” he describes. The modo contains neophilia and neophobia and dispels them through a feeling of rightness and communion; it makes Wolfe’s work exceptionally dynamic for it heralds a vita nova.

Wallace Stevens

Abstract This paper hopes to show that, for Wallace Stevens, God and human imagination are closely identified. Moreover, the feeling of rightness, which for so long a time existed with the old religious idea of God, may be accessed once again. His notion of the “supreme fiction” will compare with Descartes’ “idea of the Infinite” as interpreted by Emmanuel Levinas. This epistemological reality, central to our being, can also become contemporary to our lives, in a way that the old religious idea of God can never again be. With access to this “right idea,” we may again find the sort of solace that we once found in old religious beliefs.

Cultural orientations and their influence on social behaviour: Catalysation and suppression

AbstractIt is argued that the model of frame selection as a specific version of the dual‐process perspective provides a clear theoretical conceptualisation of the mechanisms by which cultural orientations such as values, attitudes, and internalised norms influence social behaviour. In particular, the model of frame selection allows the derivation of two fundamental action‐theoretical principles. According to the principle of catalysation, situationally relevant cultural orientations have a greater impact on social behaviour, if the behaviour comes about in an intuitive rather than a reflective manner. The principle of suppression states that external factors of the objective situation, which lack salience with respect to situationally relevant cultural orientations, have a greater impact on reflective rather than intuitive behaviour. These two principles can be combined with the so‐called logic of mode selection to derive a multitude of empirically testable hypotheses regarding the question of how motivational factors such as thinking dispositions and feeling of rightness as well as cognitive resources such as time for reflection and availability of working memory moderate the influence of cultural orientations on behaviour.

“A little shiny gender breakthrough”: Community understandings of gender euphoria

Background Gender euphoria is an important experience and concept for many, especially transgender and/or nonbinary individuals, but has not received much attention from psychological and clinical research. In contrast to gender dysphoria, which originates in psychiatry, the term “gender euphoria” has been mobilized by some LGBTQ people to describe the powerfully positive emotions that can come from one’s gender/sex. As such, researchers and clinicians may benefit from conceptual clarity as to what gender euphoria is and what kinds of experiences might result in gender euphoria. Aim We aimed to better understand how trans community members and others conceptualize the term “gender euphoria,” including its relationship to gender dysphoria, as well as the contexts and behaviors that elicit gender euphoria. Method We administered an online qualitative survey to participants (N = 47) of diverse sexualities and gender/sexes (including transgender, cisgender, and/or nonbinary participants) who had heard of or used the term “gender euphoria.” Participants answered open-ended questions about where they had heard the term being used, how they would define gender euphoria and gender dysphoria, the relation between these terms, and their gender euphoric experiences. Results Analyses resulted in five themes: (1) gender euphoria describes a joyful feeling of rightness in one’s gender/sex, (2) gender euphoric experiences can be external, internal, and/or social, (3) “gender euphoria” originated in and circulates in online and in-person gender/sex minority communities, (4) dysphoria describes a negative feeling of conflict between gender/sexed aspects of one’s self, and (5) the relationship between euphoria and dysphoria is complex. Discussion These results can inform qualitative and quantitative research, gender affirmative clinical practice, political fights for transgender rights, and understandings of gendered experiences for people of all identities.

The Levels of Students’ Feeling of Rightness (FOR) in Solving Polygon Perimeter Problems

The Levels of Students’ Feeling of Rightness (FOR) in Solving Polygon Perimeter Problems

Metacognition in moral decisions: judgment extremity and feeling of rightness in moral intuitions

This research investigated the metacognitive underpinnings of moral judgment. Participants in two studies were asked to provide quick intuitive responses to moral dilemmas and to indicate their feeling of rightness about those responses. Afterwards, participants were given extra time to rethink their responses, and change them if they so wished. The feeling of rightness associated with the initial judgments was predictive of whether participants chose to change their responses and how long they spent rethinking them. Thus, one’s metacognitive experience upon first coming up with a moral judgment influences whether one sticks to that initial gut feeling or decides to put more thought into it and revise it. Moreover, while the type of moral judgment (i.e., deontological vs. utilitarian) was not consistently predictive of metacognitive experience, the extremity of that judgment was: Extreme judgments (either deontological or utilitarian) were quicker and felt more right than moderate judgments.

Fluency and Feeling of Rightness

Feeling of Rightness (FOR) is a metacognitive experience accompanying people's intuitive answers that predicts the probability of subsequently changing answers (Thompson, Prowse Turner, & Pennycook, 2011). Previous research suggested FOR judgments are influenced by cues such as fluency, i.e., the ease with which an answer comes to mind. In the current paper, we examine the relationship between FOR, fluency, and answer changes; in particular, we were interested in whether answer fluency drives the effect of FOR on subsequent behaviours pertaining to answer changes. Reasoners (N = 64) in each of four experiments were asked to determine the validity of 32 syllogisms that consisted of single-model and multiple-model problems. In addition, each problem was randomly paired with a question containing either a high anchor value (80% or 90%) or a low anchor value (10% or 20%). In the first two experiments, reasoners then provided a FOR rating on a scale from 0 to 100 and indicated whether they would like to attempt to re-answer the question. The last two experiments served as the control experiments in which the FOR judgements were removed. The anchoring manipulation affected FOR judgments but not re-answer choices; it also did not affect answer fluency. Thus influencing FOR without affecting answer fluency had no effect on people's subsequent re-answer choices. In contrast, fluency was a reliable predictor of both FOR and re-answer choices. That is, when answers came to mind slowly, FORs were lower and people were more likely to choose to re-answer the problems. Thus, fluency appears to mediate the relationship between FOR and re-answer choices.

The Relationship between Consistency and Consensuality in Syllogistic Reasoning

In this study, we examined the effects of response consensuality in syllogistic reasoning on patterns of answer change by using the two-response paradigm. Participants evaluated 24 syllogistic problems previously found to differ in consensuality, including consensually correct (CC), consensually wrong (CW), and nonconsensual (NC) items. Each problem was presented two times and participants were required to provide an initial quick answer to the first presentation, to rethink the problem, and to provide their second and final response without time limits to the second presentation. Participants reported the feeling-of-rightness (FOR) following the initial response, and the final judgment of confidence (FJC) after the final response. Following the assumptions of Koriat's (2012) Self-Consistency Model of confidence, we expected higher probability of answer change for initial nonconsensual responses than for initial consensual responses. The results showed that patterns of answer change, as well as metacognitive judgments and response times, were related to item consensus and response consensuality. Nonconsensual responses were more likely to be changed than consensual responses, and the probability of answer change correlated negatively with item consensus. Faster response times and higher FORs and FJCs were obtained for consensual and consistent responses than for nonconsensual and inconsistent responses. The obtained results indicate that answer change may in part be a consequence of random fluctuations in representation sampling, or in generating evidence that supports each of the two response options.

The asymmetric effect of regulatory fit on moral judgments of other-oriented lies.

We examined whether regulatory fit effects are asymmetric-namely, whether they occur only among individuals with a promotion focus or a prevention focus. We adopted a task where individuals make moral judgments of other-oriented lies and conducted three studies. The results indicated that prevention-focused individuals judged other-oriented lies based on a vigilant strategy as more moral than lies based on an eager strategy (Studies 1 and2). Meanwhile for promotion-focused individuals, there were no differences between eager and vigilant strategies on moral judgments of other-oriented lies. Additionally, the results suggested that the feeling of rightness is an underlying mechanism of the regulatory fit effects of prevention focus (Study 3).

The Politics of Revelation: Unveiling Negativity in the Work of Lee Edelman and Georges Bataille

The Politics of Revelation: Unveiling Negativity in the Work of Lee Edelman and Georges Bataille Kent L. Brintnall In the immediate aftermath of Donald J. Trump's election as the forty‐fifth President of the United States, many relied on the hashtag #notnormal to describe his policies, actions, and statements. This moniker emphasized the sense of disorientation and unfamiliarity in the air, but it disavowed, by characterizing as unprecedented, the racism, misogyny, militarism, erotophobia, and Christian imperialism that constitutes American history and culture. Others relied on evaluative language: “catastrophic,” “terrifying,” “paralyzing.” Still participating in an imaginary of novelty, this language also invoked anxiety about imminent disaster (and positioned the language‐user in a specific relation to the onslaught). As Leo Bersani helpfully observes, however, when we conceptualize violence “as a subject unique in itself, a subject easily identifiable and easily isolated … in terms of historically locatable events; that is, as a certain eruption against a background of generally nonviolent human experience,” it magnifies our fascination with spectacles of violence, with explosive, climactic scenes of violence, thus making it harder, rather than easier, to dissipate violence. Of course, “apocalyptic” has also been bandied by some as a modifier for the moment we occupy. Something about the American character—oft‐denied, somewhat restrained, kept on the margins and under wraps—has revealed itself and taken center stage. This monstrous presence, adored by some and vilified by others, promises to radically and rapidly transform the entire social order. As much as “apocalyptic” may feel right to many, it is precisely the feeling of rightness, the feeling of being right, the feeling of being in the right that apocalyptic discourse provides that worries me. Mindful that apocalyptic discourse—whether deployed by those on the Right or the Left—is designed to convince its audience that there is a crisis, that the audience is the target of potentially catastrophic violence, and that there is a Manichaean struggle for the future justifying the audience's delight in the imminent destruction of its foes, I worry about how comfortably contemporary political discourse is spoken in an apocalyptic idiom. I want to consider this dimension of apocalyptic thinking by engaging some of the apocalyptic features of the work of American queer theorist Lee Edelman and French social theorist Georges Bataille. Edelman and Bataille, in very different—albeit overlapping and related—terms, challenge the dualistic vision that informs much apocalyptic thinking with an insistence on an unacknowledged, even unwelcome, monism. They emphasize structural limitations to change rather than the promise of radical transformation. But, consistent with many apocalyptic texts, they contend that the most meaningful response to the violence that defines the present order—as well as any hope of “escaping” from the worst and most devastating consequences of that violence—depends on a proper understanding of and alignment with fundamental reality, with what is “really” going on. Bataille and Edelman, then, articulate a politics of revelation—an unobscured vision of the forces of cataclysmic disruption and destruction without end or remainder. Only when we recognize that our attempts to resist this cataclysmic energy, only when we understand that our efforts to preserve ourselves, our communities, and those we love and for whom we feel responsible, are, in fact, part of the destructive machinery that we purportedly oppose, will we truly be seeing aright. Lest there be any misunderstanding, the politics of revelation—the revolution in ethical thinking to be found in Edelman and Bataille, quite unlike the politics of redemption built on a promise of a life after (catastrophic) realignment found in apocalyptic texts—is an impossible politics. It cannot be lived; it is not a guide to action; it is not programmatic. It is instead a diagnosis of our situation and our efforts to improve it. The problem to be solved, the situation to be transformed, after all, is the state of being human. The politics of revelation are both tragic and imperative because the failure to grapple in a deep way with the constraint on our political efforts fuels the catastrophes we seek to allay. In many ways, it is absurd to introduce Edelman and Bataille into a conversation about apocalyptic thinking, imaginaries, and texts. Taking...

Interactions between inferential strategies and belief bias.

The dual strategy model of reasoning proposed by Verschueren, Schaeken, and d'Ydewalle (Thinking & Reasoning, 11(3), 239-278, 2005a; Memory & Cognition, 33(1), 107-119, 2005b) suggests that people can use either a statistical or a counterexample-based strategy to make deductive inferences. Subsequent studies have supported this distinction and investigated some properties of the two strategies. In the following, we examine the further hypothesis that reasoners using statistical strategies should be more vulnerable to the effects of conclusion belief. In each of three studies, participants were given abstract problems used to determine strategy use and three different forms of syllogism with believable and unbelievable conclusions. Responses, response times, and feeling of rightness (FOR) measures were taken. The results show that participants using a statistical strategy were more prone to the effects of conclusion belief across all three forms of reasoning. In addition, statistical reasoners took less time to make inferences than did counterexample reasoners. Patterns of variation in response times and FOR ratings between believable and unbelievable conclusions were very similar for both strategies, indicating that both statistical and counterexample reasoners were aware of conflict between conclusion belief and premise-based reasoning.

A boost of confidence: The role of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in memory, decision-making, and schemas

The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) has been implicated in a wide array of functions across multiple domains. In this review, we focus on the vmPFC's involvement in mediating strategic aspects of memory retrieval, memory-related schema functions, and decision-making. We suggest that vmPFC generates a confidence signal that informs decisions and memory-guided behaviour. Confidence is central to these seemingly diverse functions: (1) Strategic retrieval: lesions to the vmPFC impair an early, automatic, and intuitive monitoring process (“feeling of rightness”; FOR) often associated with confabulation (spontaneous reporting of erroneous memories). Critically, confabulators typically demonstrate high levels of confidence in their false memories, suggesting that faulty monitoring following vmPFC damage may lead to indiscriminate confidence signals. (2) Memory schemas: the vmPFC is critically involved in instantiating and maintaining contextually relevant schemas, broadly defined as higher level knowledge structures that encapsulate lower level representational elements. The correspondence between memory retrieval cues and these activated schemas leads to FOR monitoring. Stronger, more elaborate schemas produce stronger FOR and influence confidence in the veracity of memory candidates. (3) Finally, we review evidence on the vmPFC's role in decision-making, extending this role to decision-making during memory retrieval. During non-mnemonic and mnemonic decision-making the vmPFC automatically encodes confidence. Confidence signal in the vmPFC is revealed as a non-linear relationship between a first-order monitoring assessment and second-order action or choice. Attempting to integrate the multiple functions of the vmPFC, we propose a posterior-anterior organizational principle for this region. More posterior vmPFC regions are involved in earlier, automatic, subjective, and contextually sensitive functions, while more anterior regions are involved in controlled actions based on these earlier functions. Confidence signals reflect the non-linear relationship between first-order, posterior-mediated and second-order, anterior-mediated processes and are represented along the entire axis.

Blink or think: can further reflection improve initial diagnostic impressions?

Experienced clinicians derive many diagnoses intuitively, because most new problems they see closely resemble problems they've seen before. The majority of these diagnoses, but not all, will be correct. This study determined whether further reflection regarding initial diagnoses improves diagnostic accuracy during a high-stakes board exam, a model for studying clinical decision making. Keystroke response data were used from 500 residents who took the 2010 American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) Internal Medicine Certification Examination. Data included time to initial response on each question, whether the answer was correct, and whether or not the resident changed her or his initial response. The focus was on 80 diagnosis questions that comprised realistic clinical vignettes with multiple-choice single-best answers. Cognitive skill (ability) was measured using overall exam scores. Case complexity was determined using item difficulty (proportion of examinees that correctly answered the question). A hierarchical generalized linear model was used to assess the relationship between time spent on initial responses and the probability of correctly answering the questions. On average, residents changed their responses on 12% of all diagnosis questions (or 9.6 questions out of 80). Changing an answer from incorrect to correct was almost twice as likely as changing an answer from correct to incorrect. The relationship between response time and accuracy was complex. Further reflection appears to be beneficial to diagnostic accuracy, especially for more complex cases.

Conflict, metacognition, and analytic thinking

One hundred and three participants solved conflict and non-conflict versions of four reasoning tasks using a two-response procedure: a base rate task, a causal reasoning task, a denominator neglect task, and a categorical syllogisms task. Participants were asked to give their first, intuitive answer, to make a Feeling of Rightness (FOR) judgment, and then were given as much time as needed to rethink their answer. They also completed a standardized measure of IQ and the actively open-minded thinking questionnaire. The FORs of both high- and low-capacity reasoners were responsive to conflict, such that FORs were lower for conflict relative to non-conflict problems. Consistent with the quantity hypothesis, high-capacity reasoners made a greater distinction between conflict and non-conflict items on measures of Type 2 thinking, namely, rethinking time and probability of changing answers. In contrast to the quality hypothesis, however, this rethinking time did not advantage the ability of the high-capacity group to produce normative answers, except for the base rate task. Indeed, we observed that the correlation between capacity and the probability of normative answers emerged at the initial response, rather than after rethinking.

Matching bias on the selection task: It's fast and feels good

We tested the hypothesis that choices determined by Type 1 processes are compelling because they are fluent, and for this reason they are less subject to analytic thinking than other answers. A total of 104 participants completed a modified version of Wason's selection task wherein they made decisions about one card at a time using a two-response paradigm. In this paradigm participants gave a fast, intuitive response, rated their feeling of rightness (FOR) for that response, and were then allowed free time to reconsider their answers. As we predicted, answers consistent with a matching heuristic (i.e., selecting cards named in the rule) were made more quickly than other answers, were given higher FOR ratings, and received less subsequent analysis as measured by rethinking time and the probability of changing answers. These data suggest that reasoning biases may be compelling because they are fluently generated; this is turn creates a strong FOR, which acts as a signal that further analysis is not necessary.

The role of answer fluency and perceptual fluency as metacognitive cues for initiating analytic thinking

Although widely studied in other domains, relatively little is known about the metacognitive processes that monitor and control behaviour during reasoning and decision-making. In this paper, we examined the conditions under which two fluency cues are used to monitor initial reasoning: answer fluency, or the speed with which the initial, intuitive answer is produced (Thompson, Prowse Turner, & Pennycook, 2011), and perceptual fluency, or the ease with which problems can be read (Alter, Oppenheimer, Epley, & Eyre, 2007). The first two experiments demonstrated that answer fluency reliably predicted Feeling of Rightness (FOR) judgments to conditional inferences and base rate problems, which subsequently predicted the amount of deliberate processing as measured by thinking time and answer changes; answer fluency also predicted retrospective confidence judgments (Experiment 3b). Moreover, the effect of answer fluency on reasoning was independent from the effect of perceptual fluency, establishing that these are empirically independent constructs. In five experiments with a variety of reasoning problems similar to those of Alter et al. (2007), we found no effect of perceptual fluency on FOR, retrospective confidence or accuracy; however, we did observe that participants spent more time thinking about hard to read stimuli, although this additional time did not result in answer changes. In our final two experiments, we found that perceptual disfluency increased accuracy on the CRT (Frederick, 2005), but only amongst participants of high cognitive ability. As Alter et al.’s samples were gathered from prestigious universities, collectively, the data to this point suggest that perceptual fluency prompts additional processing in general, but this processing may results in higher accuracy only for the most cognitively able.

Analytic thinking: do you feel like it?

A major challenge for Dual Process Theories of reasoning is to predict the circumstances under which intuitive answers reached on the basis of Type 1 processing are kept or discarded in favour of analytic, Type 2 processing (Thompson 2009). We propose that a key determinant of the probability that Type 2 processes intervene is the affective response that accompanies Type 1 processing. This affective response arises from the fluency with which the initial answer is produced, such that fluently produced answers give rise to a strong feeling of rightness. This feeling of rightness, in turn, determines the extent and probability with which Type 2 processes will be engaged. Because many of the intuitions produced by Type 1 processes are fluent, it is common for them to be accompanied by a strong sense of rightness. However, because fluency is poorly calibrated to objective difficulty, confidently held intuitions may form the basis of poor quality decisions.

Metacognition and Decision Making: between First and Third Person Perspective

The aim of the article is firstly, to show how metacognitive monitoring, control (regulation) and metaknowledge are important in guiding decision making and secondly, to argue that researching experience is necessary for a more complete understanding of the role of metacognition in decision making. In the context of dual process theories of cognition it is sometimes proposed that people usually do not deliberate or reflect on their judgments and decisions, but rather follow their intuitions. Some metacognition researchers propose that metacognitive experiences (such as feeling of rightness or difficulty) play an important role in determining whether we change our intuitive responses for more deliberate, reflective reasoning and decision making. Although metacognition researchers’ contribution to understanding the role of metacognitive experiences in decision making is valuable, their studies face some serious problems. Furthermore, it is not only our experiences, but also our evaluations of those experiences (metacognitive judgments) and our metacognitive knowledge that influence our judgments and choices. I argue that if we want to understand how and why people decide, we should be studying the entanglement of all these influencing factors from first and third person perspective. We should also conduct more thorough first person research. I conclude the article by arguing that first and third person perspective on metacognition and decision making should mutually constrain and inform each other about insights and contradictions that arise between them.

Intuition, reason, and metacognition

Dual Process Theories (DPT) of reasoning posit that judgments are mediated by both fast, automatic processes and more deliberate, analytic ones. A critical, but unanswered question concerns the issue of monitoring and control: When do reasoners rely on the first, intuitive output and when do they engage more effortful thinking? We hypothesised that initial, intuitive answers are accompanied by a metacognitive experience, called the Feeling of Rightness (FOR), which can signal when additional analysis is needed. In separate experiments, reasoners completed one of four tasks: conditional reasoning ( N = 60), a three-term variant of conditional reasoning ( N = 48), problems used to measure base rate neglect ( N = 128), or a syllogistic reasoning task ( N = 64). For each task, participants were instructed to provide an initial, intuitive response to the problem along with an assessment of the rightness of that answer (FOR). They were then allowed as much time as needed to reconsider their initial answer and provide a final answer. In each experiment, we observed a robust relationship between the FOR and two measures of analytic thinking: low FOR was associated with longer rethinking times and an increased probability of answer change. In turn, FOR judgments were consistently predicted by the fluency with which the initial answer was produced, providing a link to the wider literature on metamemory. These data support a model in which a metacognitive judgment about a first, initial model determines the extent of analytic engagement.