Dual process theory
Encyclopedia
In psychology
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...

, a dual process theory provides an account of how a phenomenon
Phenomenon
A phenomenon , plural phenomena, is any observable occurrence. Phenomena are often, but not always, understood as 'appearances' or 'experiences'...

 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 mind is a term coined by the 18th century German romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling and later introduced into English by the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge...

 process and an explicit (controlled), conscious
Consciousness
Consciousness is a term that refers to the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind...

 process. Verbalized explicit processes or attitudes and actions may change with persuasion or education; though implicit process or attitudes 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 psychologist and philosopher who was trained as a physician. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and on the philosophy of pragmatism...

. He believed that there were two different kinds of thinking: associative and true reasoning. James theorized that empirical thought was used for things like art and design work. For James, images and thoughts 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 associative 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 associative system. He also believed that the Rule based system had control over the associative system, though it could only suppress it.

Daniel Kahneman
Daniel Kahneman
Daniel Kahneman is an Israeli-American psychologist and Nobel laureate. He is notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, behavioral economics and hedonic psychology....

 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 bonds included in the reasoning process. Kahneman 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 scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. By this definition, scientific refers to the empirical method of investigation. The terms thoughts, feelings, and behaviors include all...

 variables, such as attitude
Attitude (psychology)
An attitude is a hypothetical construct that represents an individual's degree of like or dislike for something. 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 that was developed by R. E. Petty and J. T. Cacioppo in the early 1980s . Central to this model is the "elaboration continuum", which ranges from low elaboration to high elaboration...

 and Chaiken's Heuristic Systematic Model
Heuristic-systematic model of information processing
Heuristic-Systematic Model of Information Processing, or HSM, is a widely recognized communication model by Shelly Chaiken that attempts to explain how people receive and process persuasive messages. The model states that individuals can process messages in one of two ways: heuristically or...

. According to these models, persuasion may occur after either intense scrutiny or extremely superficial thinking. In cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology is a subdiscipline of psychology exploring internal mental processes.It is the study of how people perceive, remember, think, speak, and solve problems.Cognitive psychology differs from previous psychological approaches in two key ways....

, attention and working memory have also been conceptualized as relying on two distinct processes.

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
-In music:* Clarion , a type of trumpet used in the Middle Ages* Clarion register of clarinets, ranging from B4 to C6-Places:* Clarion, Illinois, USA* Clarion, Iowa, USA...

) 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.

Dual coding

Using a somewhat different approach, Allan Paivio
Allan Paivio
Allan Urho Paivio is an emeritus professor 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.-Early life:...

 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...

 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
Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...

. 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.

External Links

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