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Reflection and Impulse
A Framework for Basic Research and Applied Science
Roland Deutsch, Bertram Gawronski, and Wilhelm Hofmann
Behaving in ways that optimize the satisfaction of an organismās needs is a challenging task. Not only do organisms face a tremendous degree of uncertainty about what kinds of behaviors will be successful in a given environment; they are also faced with numerous decision dilemmas (Goschke, 2013), one of the most important being the dilemma caused by conflicts between short-term pay-offs and long-term goals. The distinction between impulsive (i.e., short sighted, fast) decisions and behaviors on the one hand and reflected (i.e., far sighted, slow) decisions and behaviors on the other hand is at the core of many everyday problems and captured by multiple psychological theories. Impulsive decisions and behaviors are typically defined as occurring quickly, with little care for accuracy, and without consideration of future outcomes. Reflective decisions and behaviors, on the other hand, are typically defined in terms of the opposite characteristics, involving slower responses that are based on careful consideration of multiple outcomes, including abstract and future consequences (Evenden, 1999; Kagan, 1966).
Is it better to quickly act on the spur of the moment? Or is it better to reflect on things and act in accordance with what the future might bring? There is no universal answer to this question. Being overly future-oriented might come at great risk, because events become more uncertain with increasing temporal distance. Yet, being overly oriented towards short-term outcomes can undermine successful need fulfillment if long-term consequences are ignored (Goschke, 2013; Green & Myerson, 2004). A smart organism must be able to engage in both impulsive and reflective behavior, and to flexibly switch between decision strategies depending on the circumstances. Although there is ample evidence for stable personality differences in terms of impulsivity, it is also evident that peopleās readiness to act reflectively or impulsively varies depending on external and internal conditions. Many behavioral problems in normal and clinical settings involve intense, enduring, and often inadequate calibrations regarding impulsivity and reflectivity. Aggression without considering consequences, overeating, infidelity in committed relationships, drug abuse, and overspending all involve a mis calibrated tendency for impulsive responding. In contrast, rumination, indecision, suppression of emotion expression, and compulsion might be interpreted as involving an overly dominant tendency to engage in reflection. Understanding the psychological underpinnings of impulsive versus reflective responding is therefore of great significance for both basic research and applied research.
In what follows, we will briefly illustrate how the distinction between reflection and impulse, broadly defined, is at the core of many areas in psychology. We will then turn towards describing attempts to integrate and unify the many different findings and theories. As an example of such generalized duality models, we will briefly describe the central assumptions of the ReflectiveāImpulsive Model (Strack & Deutsch, 2004). We will then review the impact that duality models had on the field and discuss two reasons that we deem at least partially responsible for this impact. We close by discussing potential future directions for research in the realm of generalized duality models.
The Ubiquity of the Duality
The duality of reflection versus impulse has entered human thinking long before the advent of scientific psychology. It has been evident in philosophy, religion, and art since ancient times (for reviews, see Hofmann, Friese, MĆ¼ller, & Strack, 2011; Strack & Deutsch, 2015; see also Hofmann & Friese, Chapter 8, this volume). For example, both Plato and Aristotle developed ideas of how passion and reason might be in conflict, and why passion might sometimes overrule reason, resulting in short-sighted behavior. Within psychology, theorizing about impulsive versus reflected behavior occurred relatively early, one example being Le Bonās (1895) crowd-psychology, where crowds were described as being driven by rudimentary emotional impulses. In psychiatry, psychodynamic theory essentially rests on the opposition of a relatively autonomous, impulsively acting psychological system that is determined by primary needs and emotions, and potentially opposing forces that are primarily determined by rational assessments of the world as well as social-normative information (Freud, 1949).
In modern academic psychology, theories and research relating to impulse versus reflection are ubiquitous and prevalent in nearly every sub-discipline. In research on personality, impulsivity was long recognized as important, either as a particular trait (Kagan, 1966) or as part of more complex theories of personality (Eysenck & Eysenck, 1969; Gray, 1981). In developmental psychology, the ontogenetic trajectory of acquiring the ability to forego a small, immediate reward in favor of a larger, delayed reward has received a tremendous amount of attention (e.g., Mischel, 1974; Mischel, Ebbesen, & Zeiss, 1972). Social psychologists have studied impulsive behavior in various domains, such as impulsive aggression (Berkowitz, 1974), emotional (Mackie & Smith, 2004) and automatic (Devine, 1989) determinants of discrimination, submission to authorities (Milgram, 1975), or spontaneous and reflected paths from attitudes to behavior (Fazio, 1990). In cognitive psychology, multiple lines of research include components of the reflectiveāimpulsive duality (cf. Payne & Gawronski, 2010), the most important being the distinction between automatic and controlled cognitive processes (Schneider & Schiffrin, 1977). Likewise, theories of executive function (Botvinick, Braver, Barch, Carter, & Cohen, 2001; Norman & Shallice, 1986) and self-control (Baumeister, Heatherton, & Tice, 1994) address the goal-dependent adjustment of automatic or habitual responses. Expanding on these ideas, some cognitive neuroscientists assume that the forces underlying automatic and controlled responses can be linked to distinct neuroanatomical systems (Lieberman, 2007). In clinical psychology, conflicts between rational insights and emotional responses are a common topic. For example, anxiety disorders are characterized by intense emotional responding that may overpower pre-existing beliefs about the harmlessness of the situation (Ouimet, Gawronski, & Dozois, 2009). Addiction and compulsion are phenomena where people engage in self-harming behaviors against their better knowledge. Research on the psychological underpinnings of economic behavior has devoted much attention to the phenomenon of impulsive buying (Vohs & Faber, 2007). This brief, and certainly incomplete, review suggests that the reflection-impulse duality is central for theory and research within and outside of academic psychology. It also demonstrates that it is prevalent in a very broad range of research areas, with each area having an idiosyncratic interpretation and application of the duality.
Duality Models: The Quest for Commonalities
A central goal of science is to identify laws or regularities at the most general level possible. Duality models in psychology (for reviews, see Gawronski & Creighton, 2013; Sherman, Gawronski, & Trope, 2014; Strack & Deutsch, 2015) have been designed to serve this goal. Content-specific variants of these models aim to integrate existing theory and research within one particular field (Gawronski & Creighton, 2013; Strack & Deutsch, 2015). For example, Metcalfe and Mischel (1999) proposed their Hot/Cool Model to integrate and explain empirical patterns of impulsivity in the realm of delayed gratification. Fazioās (Fazio, 1990) MODE model was designed to integrate findings on the relation between attitudes and behavior. As another prominent example, Haidtās (2001) Social Intuitionist Model seeks to explain observations in the realm of emotional and cognitive influences on moral judgments.
Going beyond content-specific applications, generalized duality models seek to integrate theory and research across various domains of psychological functioning. Striving for higher levels of generality, such models aim to explain phenomena in multiple content-domains by postulating the operation of a limited set of general psychological processes. According to these theories, the multiple dualities proposed by domain-specific theories (e.g., heuristic vs. systematic, automatic vs. controlled, affective vs. cognitive) can be linked to clusters of more basic processes that serve as the foundation of these dualities. For example, Slomanās (1996) systems of reasoning theory proposes a parallel, interactive operation of associative and rule-based processes. Based on the specifications of these processes, the theory assumes that the associative system is more heavily engaged in intuition and creativity, whereas the rule-based system is assumed to be more heavily engaged during deliberation. That is, instead of postulating a duality of intuition versus deliberation, the systems of reasoning theory specifies a duality of processes from which intuition and deliberation emerge.
Another feature of generalized duality-models is that they often import concepts from other well-established psychological theories, which further bolsters their generality. For example, Smith and DeCosterās (2000) integrative theory of dual-process models incorporates the idea of two complementary memory systems that was established in cognitive psychology (McClelland, McNaughton, & OāReilly, 1995). As another example, Strack and Deutschās (2004) Reflectiveā Impulsive Model, incorporates the concept of a supervisory system (Norman & Shallice, 1986) that modulates the activation of behavioral schemata. As a final example, Liebermanās (2007) neurocognitive reflexiveāreflective model incorporates the idea of a conflict-detector module that mobilizes cognitive control (Botvinick et al., 2001).
The ReflectiveāImpulsive Model
As a prominent example of dual-system models that inspired the chapters in this volume, we will briefly describe the core assumptions of the ReflectiveāImpulsive Model (RIM) (Strack & Deutsch, 2004). At its core, the RIM contains a number of hypotheses about how the human mind can be divided into two clusters of psychological processes and mental structures that form two distinct, yet mutually interacting, processing systems.
The Impulsive System (IS) is assumed to contain a universal associative memory store that is connected to perceptual units as well as a motoric pathway to behavior. The core contents of the associative memory store are clusters of associated representations. Representations can refer to concrete states of the world, cognitive abstractions, inner psychological responses, such as affect, as well as motor responses. For example, an associative cluster related to broccoli might contain representations of how it looks, smells, and tastes, verbal labels (e.g., broccoli), fragments of the feelings associated with eating it, as well as eating-related motor codes. The RIM also postulates a special form of associative clusters: behavioral schemata. These schemata contain motor representations (e.g., chewing) along with typical triggers (e.g., sensation of food in the mouth) and consequences (e.g., softening of food; swallowing). Motor schemata are the structures that directly control behavior, and they do so if they are activated above an execution threshold.
The IS is also characterized by a set of processes: activation processes, learning processes, and motivational processes. Representations in the IS can be in different states of activation. They receive activation from external input (e.g., perception, reflection), but also from associatively connected representations. More specifically, elements are assumed to be connected via associative links of varying strength, and if one representation gets activated, the activation will spread to associated representations proportional to the strength of their association. Learning processes modulate or create associative links according to the principle of contiguity: the more often representations are activated simultaneously, the stronger will be the association. Motivational processes are assumed to change the readiness of certain classes of behaviors depending on inner and outer conditions. Valenced stimuli, affective states, and compatible behavioral schemata are thought to mutually activate each other, thereby creating states of motivational orientations towards approach and avoidance. Deprivation of needs is predicted to pre-activate behavioral schemata that contain need satisfaction as a typical outcome. The IS is also assumed to generate states of core affect, which vary in valence and arousal. Given that the processes in the IS mainly depend on a simple spread of activation or modulations of activation potentials as a function of motivational factors, the IS is claimed to operate under a higher degree of automaticity than its counterpart, the Reflective System (RS).
Like the IS, the RS is characterized by structural- and process-assumptions. Structurally, the RS is conceptualized as a short-term memory store in which information can be represented for a brief time. Rehearsal processes are necessary to maintain the information in the RS for longer periods. According to the RIM, the RS transforms activated representations in the IS into a propositional format. Propositional representations in the RS capture more complex relations between elements than the simple mutual activation in the IS, and they come with a subjective representation of the truth of the represented relation. Core processes in the RS are the construction of propositional representations, the generation of inferences based on syllogistic reasoning, the generation of decisions based on anticipated consequences and their evaluation, as well as intending. The process of intending translates behavioral decisions into behavioral readiness. More specifically, intending in the RS is assumed to activate behavioral schema in the IS that are relevant to the decision, and the activation is hypothesized to last until the behavior was executed. Based on attributions or categorizations performed in the RS, core-affective states generated in the IS can be transformed into specific emotions. Another way to describe the RS is to characterize it as a meta-representational system that operates on the basis of the IS. Because of its more complex mental operations (e.g., construction of propositions, maintenance through rehearsal, reasoning based on multiple elements), the RS is hypothesized to operate less automatically than the IS. The RS is also endowed with a core motivational principle, which is epistemic in nature: it strives for consistency among propositions.
Although the IS and the RS are characterized by distinct functional properties, the RIM suggests a mutually interactive relation between two systems, in that the components of propositional representations in the RS are assumed to be based on...
