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Dual process theory



 
 
In psychology
Psychology

Psychology is an academic and applied science discipline involving the science study of human mental functions and behavior. Occasionally it also relies on symbolic hermeneutics and critical theory, although these traditions are less pronounced than in other social sciences such as sociology....
, a dual process theory provides an account of how a phenomenon
Phenomenon

A phenomenon is any observation occurrence. In popular usage, a phenomenon often refers to an extraordinary event. In physics, a phenomenon may be a feature of matter, energy, or spacetime....
 can occur in two different ways, or as a result of two different processes. Often, the two processes consist of an implicit (automatic), unconscious
Unconscious mind

The Unconscious is a term invented by the 18th century German philosophy romanticism philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and later introduced into English by the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge....
 process and a explicit (controlled), conscious
Consciousness

Consciousness is a difficult term to define, because the word is used and understood in a wide variety of ways, so that it frequently happens that what one person sees as a definition of consciousness is seen by others as about something else altogether....
 process. Verbalized explicit processes or attitudes and actions may change with persuasion or education; though implicit process or attitudes are usually take a long amount of time to change with the forming of new habits.






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In psychology
Psychology

Psychology is an academic and applied science discipline involving the science study of human mental functions and behavior. Occasionally it also relies on symbolic hermeneutics and critical theory, although these traditions are less pronounced than in other social sciences such as sociology....
, a dual process theory provides an account of how a phenomenon
Phenomenon

A phenomenon is any observation occurrence. In popular usage, a phenomenon often refers to an extraordinary event. In physics, a phenomenon may be a feature of matter, energy, or spacetime....
 can occur in two different ways, or as a result of two different processes. Often, the two processes consist of an implicit (automatic), unconscious
Unconscious mind

The Unconscious is a term invented by the 18th century German philosophy romanticism philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and later introduced into English by the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge....
 process and a explicit (controlled), conscious
Consciousness

Consciousness is a difficult term to define, because the word is used and understood in a wide variety of ways, so that it frequently happens that what one person sees as a definition of consciousness is seen by others as about something else altogether....
 process. Verbalized explicit processes or attitudes and actions may change with persuasion or education; though implicit process or attitudes are usually take a long amount of time to change with the forming of new habits. Dual process theories can be found in social, personality, cognitive, and clinical psychology.

History


The foundations of dual process theory likely comes from William James
William James

William James was a pioneering American psychology and philosophy trained as a medical doctor. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religion experience and mysticism, and the philosophy of pragmatism....
. He believed that there were two different kinds of thinking: associative and true reasoning. James theorizes that empirical thought was used for things like art and design work. For James, Images and thought would come to mind of past experiences, providing ideas of comparison or abstractions. He claimed that associative knowledge was only from past experiences describing it as “only reproductive”. James believed that true reasoning was useful for “unprecedented situations” in which using reasoning to overcome obstacles such as navigation could be overcome with reasoning power of being able to use a map.

Steven Sloman produced another interpretation on dual processing. He believed that associate reasoning takes stimuli and divides it into logical clusters of information based on statistical regularity. He proposed that how you associate is directly proportional to the similarity of past experiences, relying on temporal and similarity relations to determine reasoning rather than an underlying mechanical structure. The other reasoning process in Sloman's opinion was of the Rule based system. The system functioned on logical structure and variables based upon rule systems to come to conclusions different from that of the associate system. He also believed that the Rule based system had control over the associate system, though it could only suppress it.

Daniel Khaneman provided further interpretation by differentiating the two styles of processing more, calling them intuition and reasoning. Intuition (or system 1), similar to associative reasoning, were determined to be fast and automatic, usually with strong emotional bods included in the reasoning process. Khaneman said that this kind of reasoning was based on formed habits and very difficult to change or manipulate. Reasoning, or system 2 was slower, and much more volatile, being subject to conscious judgments and attitudes.

Dual process models are very common in the study of social psychological
Social psychology

Social psychology is the study of how people and groups interact. Scholars in this interdisciplinarity area are typically either psychology or sociology, though all social psychologists employ both the individual and the group as their Unit of analysis....
 variables, such as attitude
Attitude (psychology)

An attitude is a hypothetical construct that represents an individual's degree of like or dislike for an item. Attitudes are generally positive or negative views of a person, place, thing, or event-- this is often referred to as the attitude object....
 change. Examples include Petty and Cacioppo's Elaboration Likelihood Model
Elaboration likelihood model

The elaboration likelihood model of persuasion is a model of how attitudes are formed and changed . Central to this model is the "elaboration continuum", which ranges from low elaboration to high elaboration ....
 and Chaiken's Heuristic Systematic Model. According to these models, persuasion may occur after either intense scrutiny or extremely superficial thinking. In cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology

Cognitive psychology is a branch of psychology that investigates internal mental processes such as problem solving, memory, and language.The school of thought arising from this approach is known as cognitivism which is interested in how people mentally represent information processing....
, attention and working memory have also been conceptualized as relying on two distinct processes.

Theories


Dual process learning model


Ron Sun
Ron Sun

Ron Sun is a cognitive scientist and currently Professor of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and formerly the James C. Dowell Professor of Engineering and Professor of Computer Science at University of Missouri....
 proposed a dual process model of learning (both implicit learning and explicit learning). The model (named CLARION
Clarion

A Wiktionary:clarion is a type of trumpet used in the Middle Ages."Clarion" may also refer to a number of other things....
) re-interpreted voluminous behavioral data in psychological studies of implicit learning and skill acquisition in general. The resulting theory is two-level and interactive, based on the idea of the interaction of one-shot explicit rule learning (i.e., explicit learning) and gradual implicit tuning through reinforcement (i.e. implicit learning), and it accounts for many previously unexplained cognitive data and phenomena based on the interaction of implicit and explicit learning.

Duplex model


Roy Baumeister
Roy Baumeister

Dr. Roy F. Baumeister is Francis Eppes Professor of Psychology at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida. He is a social psychologist that is known for his work on the self, social rejection, belongingness, sexuality, self-control, self-esteem, self-defeating behaviors, motivation, and aggression....
 recently surveyed the research literature and proposed a dual process or "duplex model" of the mind. According to this model, humans typically operate on two levels, conscious
Consciousness

Consciousness is a difficult term to define, because the word is used and understood in a wide variety of ways, so that it frequently happens that what one person sees as a definition of consciousness is seen by others as about something else altogether....
 and automatic
Automaticity

Automaticity is the ability to do things without occupying the mind with the low level details required. It is usually the result of learning, repetition , and practice....
. The conscious mind is effortful and limited in capacity, whereas the automatic mind processes many things simultaneously and independently of each other. An example would be walking and chewing gum (automatic), while having a conversation with a friend (conscious). Automatic events are often but not necessarily outside of conscious awareness. Baumeister's approach is noteworthy as a broad attempt to integrate different areas of research into a unified model of psychology.

Dual coding


Using a somewhat different approach, Allan Paivio
Allan Paivio

Allan Paivio born in December 1, 1941 is an Professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Western Ontario. He earned his Ph.D. from McGill University in 1959 and taught at the University of Western Ontario from 1963 until his retirement....
 has developed a dual-coding theory
Dual-coding theory

Dual-coding theory, a theory of cognition, was first advanced by Allan Paivio of the University of Western Ontario. The theory postulates that both visual and verbal information are processed differently and along distinct channels with the human mind creating separate representations for information processed in each channel....
 of information processing. According to this model, cognition involves the coordinated activity of two independent, but connected systems, a nonverbal system and a verbal system that is specialized to deal with language. The nonverbal system is hypothesized to have developed earlier in evolution
Evolution

In biology, evolution is change in the heritability trait of a population of organisms from one generation to the next. These changes are caused by a combination of three main processes: variation, reproduction, and selection....
. Both systems rely on different areas of the brain. Paivio has reported evidence that nonverbal, visual images are processed more efficiently and are approximately twice as memorable. Additionally, the verbal and nonverbal systems are additive, so one can improve memory by using both types of information during learning.