Rolf Reber

People use their commonsense thinking about the past to inform their decisions. Intuitive historical thinking is therefore pervasive in the social and cognitive lives of humans. This type of cognition, however, has not been systematically researched. Recent philosophical psychology is dominated by works that investigate cognitive tools used by intuitive historical thinking – such as episodic memory, mental time travel, causal reasoning, and time-related concepts – without directly studying intuitive historical thinking. To remediate this lacuna, we investigate intuitive historical thinking, referred to as “intuitive history.” We argue against the view that intuitive history can be reduced to any one of the cognitive tools used by intuitive history. The processes and phenomenology of intuitive history, we suggest, are linked to three types of interrelated activities routinely conducted by intuitive historians: managing historical information perceived as significant, which includes searching, gathering, storing, and updating information about the past; the interpretation of historical information, which may include the intuitive historian’s distinctive experiences, assumptions, emotions, and evaluations; and the use of historical information. Interpretative processes can be influenced by the assumption of pastness, singularity, reality, connectivity or causation, and significance. We review evidence suggesting that intuitive historians routinely and spontaneously use these assumptions to develop their inquiries into past entities. The evidence we discuss concerns identification, kinship and other social lineages, contamination, ownership, causation and counterfactual reasoning, and cooperation. We conclude with future directions in research and philosophical theorizing about intuitive history.

Information is more likely believed to be true when it feels easy rather than difficult to process. An ecological learning explanation for this fluency-truth effect implicitly or explicitly presumes that truth and fluency are positively associated. Specifically, true information may be easier to process than false information and individuals may reverse this link in their truth judgments. The current research investigates the important but so far untested precondition of the learning explanation for the fluency-truth effect. In particular, five experiments (total N = 712) test whether participants experience information known to be true as easier to process than information known to be false. Participants in Experiment 1a judged true statements easier to read than false statements. Experiment 1b was a preregistered direct replication with a large sample and again found increased legibility for true statements—importantly, however, this was not the case for statements for which the truth status was unknown. Experiment 1b thereby shows that it is not the actual truth or falsehood of information but the believed truth or falsehood that is associated with processing fluency. In Experiment 2, true calculations were rated as easier to read than false calculations. Participants in Experiment 3 judged it easier to listen to calculations generally known to be true than to calculations generally known to be false. Experiment 4 shows an effect of truth on processing fluency independent of statement familiarity. Discussion centers on the current explanation for the fluency-truth effect and the validity of processing fluency as a cue in truth judgments.