Thought must be studied, observed, and understood.
Thought is the instrument through which human beings approach knowledge, relationship, culture, conflict, and the future itself. Yet our understanding of thought’s actual operation remains limited: how it forms images, defends conclusions, binds itself to emotion, divides people into opposing camps, and then tries to solve the very problems it has helped create. Thought Studies collects work that can make this process more visible, because understanding thought is not a narrow academic question; it is essential to the well-being and survival of our species.
Recent posts
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Language facilitates introspection: Verbal mind-wandering has privileged access to consciousness. Paper: 2017Posted:Summary: This study argues that verbal mind-wandering, as a form of inner speech, provides privileged access to conscious thought, highlighting the role of language in facilitating introspection and self-awareness.
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Confirmation bias in information search, interpretation, and memory recall: evidence from reasoning about four controversial topics Paper: 2022Posted:Summary: This study examines how confirmation bias operates across information search, interpretation, and memory recall when individuals reason about controversial topics, providing empirical evidence on the persistence of biased reasoning and its implications for belief formation and revision.
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Summary: This study examines whether financial incentives can increase meta-awareness of mind wandering, addressing the challenge that people rarely notice their own task-unrelated thoughts. The findings inform understanding of metacognitive processes and attention regulation.
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Updating, Evidence Evaluation, and Operator Availability: A Theoretical Framework for Understanding Belief Paper: June 3, 2022Posted:Summary: This paper argues that belief is best understood as the outcome of multiple processes, including rational updating and heuristic evidence evaluation, and proposes a hierarchical framework to localize irrationality in belief formation.Editor’s comments: Quote from the abstract: "Decades of findings in psychology appear to indicate that human belief is thoroughly irrational. At best, beliefs might be formed by heuristic processes that predictably lead to suboptimal outcomes. At worst, they are slaves to motivated reasoning, which allows people to come to whichever conclusions they prefer."
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The skeptical import of motivated reasoning: a closer look at the evidence Paper: 2024Posted:Summary: This paper challenges the assumption that belief-consistent reasoning phenomena, such as biased assimilation and belief polarization, necessarily indicate motivated irrationality. It argues that the non-normativity of these processes is not well established, offering a nuanced perspective on the epistemic status of motivated reasoning.
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(PDF) Meta-Awareness Paper: UnknownPosted:Summary: This study examines the developmental trajectories of spontaneous and deliberate mind wandering and their dynamic associations with metacognition, offering insights into the relationship between attention and self-awareness across development.
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Intentionality and meta-awareness of mind wandering: Are they one and the same, or distinct dimensions? Paper: 2004Posted:Summary: This entry examines whether intentionality and meta-awareness are distinct dimensions of mind wandering, presenting initial evidence that they are dissociable and thereby contributing to a more nuanced understanding of spontaneous thought.
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Mind-wandering as spontaneous thought: a dynamic framework Paper: 2018Posted:Summary: This study examines how transcranial stimulation of the frontal lobes increases the propensity for mind-wandering without altering meta-awareness, contributing to the understanding of spontaneous thought processes and the dynamics of attention.
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Ideological Asymmetries and the Determinants of Politically Motivated Reasoning Paper: June 23, 2021Posted:Summary: This study tests ideological asymmetries in politically motivated reasoning and finds no evidence that one political group is more biased than the other, nor that epistemic needs for certainty drive rationalization.
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[PDF] Meta-awareness, perceptual decoupling and the wandering mind Paper: UnknownPosted:Summary: This paper examines the roles of meta-awareness and perceptual decoupling in mind wandering, linking these processes to default network activity and executive control to clarify the mechanisms underlying spontaneous thought.
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Towards a computational phenomenology of mental action: modelling meta-awareness and attentional control with deep parametric active inference Paper: August 26, 2021Posted:Summary: Develops a formal model of meta-awareness and attentional control using active inference, simulating mind-wandering and its regulation, providing a computational framework for how we notice and govern our own cognitive states.
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The dynamic framework of mind wandering revisited: How mindful meta-awareness affects mental states’ constraints Paper: August 19, 2021Posted:Summary: This paper empirically examines how mindful meta-awareness reshapes the constraints that govern mind wandering, offering a dynamic framework that bridges spontaneous thought and conscious observation. The findings deepen understanding of how meta-awareness can interrupt automatic cognitive patterns, a mechanism directly relevant to the study of thought's proprioception.
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Confirmation bias optimizes reward learning Paper: March 1, 2021Posted:Summary: This study examines how confirmation bias in reinforcement learning may benefit learners by reducing decisional and environmental noise, finding through human experiments and simulations that asymmetric learning from choice-confirming outcomes can maximize rewards when disconfirming feedback is not entirely ignored.
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Motivated formal reasoning: Ideological belief bias in syllogistic reasoning across diverse political issues Paper: February 12, 2022Posted:Summary: Shows that people are less accurate in logical reasoning when conclusions conflict with their political ideology, especially on hot-button issues, and analytical thinking helps leftists more than rightists.
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Disconfirmation of confirmation bias: the influence of counter-attitudinal information Paper: 2022Posted:Summary: This study examines whether counter-attitudinal information can alter pre-existing attitudes and associated confirmation biases in children, finding that such information reduces negative biases and shifts information-seeking patterns. The findings contribute to understanding belief revision and cognitive bias malleability.
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Thinking vs. Thought in the context of David Bohm: The Awakening of Creativity as Opposed to Arbitrariness and Fragmentation of Scientific Knowledge Paper: 2021Posted:Summary: This doctoral thesis examines David Bohm's distinction between thinking and thought, arguing that genuine creative thinking fosters freedom, while habitual thought leads to fragmentation and arbitrariness in scientific knowledge. It explores Bohm's use of metaphor and analogy to illuminate how affective bonds and contexts shape a physicist's worldview, and traces the enduring influence of these ideas on contemporary research.
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Meditation, Meta-Awareness, and Spontaneous Thought: Neurocognitive Mechanisms Paper: June 29, 2020Posted:Summary: This article presents a neurocognitive framework for how meditation cultivates meta-awareness and influences spontaneous thought, examining the roles of attention, emotion regulation, and perceptual decoupling. It offers insights into the mechanisms by which contemplative practice shapes conscious awareness and cognitive flexibility.
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Hypothesized drivers of the bias blind spot—cognitive sophistication, introspection bias, and conversational processes Paper: November 1, 2022Posted:Summary: This study investigates why people exhibit the bias blind spot—the tendency to see oneself as less biased than others—testing cognitive sophistication, introspection bias, and conversational processes as explanations, with direct implications for understanding self-deception and failures in metacognitive awareness.
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Actively Open-Minded Thinking and Its Measurement Paper: January 28, 2023Posted:Summary: A review of the 25-year development of the actively open-minded thinking (AOT) construct and its measurement, highlighting its strong prediction of rational performance yet paradoxical failure to reduce myside bias, shedding light on the limits of metacognitive self-awareness.
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Affective Polarization and Misinformation Belief Paper: January 18, 2023Posted:Summary: Investigates how emotional attachment to political groups (affective polarization) shapes belief in misinformation, highlighting the fusion of emotion and erroneous belief.