The effects of reflective reasoning on philosophical judgments

Reflective thought is critical to philosophy, but the extent to which it impacts philosophical judgments is unclear. We report five experiments that examine this question. Experiments 1-2 included scenarios about philosophy of mind and metaphysics; Experiments 3-5 included scenarios about moral dilemmas. Some subjects were asked to indicate the extent to which they endorsed a given position (control), whereas others were given a reflective thinking task before making each choice. For Experiments 1-2, the reflective thinking group made less prototypical judgments than the control group, but this effect was topic-specific. Experiments 3-5, however, revealed less consistent findings, as engaging in reflective thinking sometimes led to less typical moral judgments (Experiment 4), whereas in other cases it led to more polarized choices (Experiment 3 and 5). Thus, reflective thinking and reasoning can indeed impact philosophical judgments, but the manner in which this occurs seems to be topic-specific.