Assessing Rational and Intuitive Thinking Styles

Theories of dual cognition assume two distinguishable information processing styles: rational and intuitive. We discuss how the concepts of rationality and intuition are used in these theories, and the relations of these two thinking styles to personality characteristics. With the Rational-Experiential Inventory (REI; Pacini Betsch, 2004 , 2008 ), to a subset of the Dutch sample (n = 405). We briefly describe two small studies in which a preference for rationality or intuition, measured by the REI, was found to be related to task behavior. In the general discussion we consider all results together, and compare them to Pacini and Epstein’s results. We conclude that a dual-process distinction between rationality and intuition is valid cross-culturally and that a proclivity toward either is reliably measured by the REI, not only in the USA but in Europe as well.