Research on motivated reasoning shows careful thinking often defends prior beliefs instead of revising them.

Studies show analytic ability often fuels more sophisticated rationalization, not protection against bias.

Sound judgment emerges when humility, open-mindedness, and holistic thinking work alongside reflection.

For most of my career, I’ve told students a reassuring story: we get into trouble by trusting our gut, and we get out of it by slowing down and thinking more carefully. That story draws on decades of dual-process research, a Nobel Prize, and a small publishing industry built on the promise that slow thinking would do the rescuing.After several years of writing about reflective thinking with my colleagues—work that became our recent book with S. Adil Saribay, Reflection and Intuition in a Crisis-Ridden World: Thinking Hard or Hardly Thinking—I’ve come to think that promise was always overstated. Reflection doesn’t reliably do what we kept claiming it did.

The trouble isn’t that people refuse to think. They think constantly. Look at a comments section, a cable news segment, or a tense dinner conversation about climate policy. People aren’t short on reasoning. Much of that reasoning is simply in the service of conclusions already chosen. Psychologists call this motivated reasoning. In everyday terms, it’s the familiar habit of assembling arguments for what we already want to believe, like a lawyer building a case. Put reflection into that task, and it performs remarkably well. Careful deliberation often reinforces intuitions that would not survive much scrutiny on their own.This is the uncomfortable finding behind a generation of work in........

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