Reasoning Unbound: Thinking about

Morality, Delusion and Democracy 1st

Edition Jean-François Bonnefon (Auth.)
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://textbookfull.com/product/reasoning-unbound-thinking-about-morality-delusion-
and-democracy-1st-edition-jean-francois-bonnefon-auth/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Biota Grow 2C gather 2C cook Loucas

https://textbookfull.com/product/biota-grow-2c-gather-2c-cook-
loucas/

The Power of Critical Thinking: Effective Reasoning

about Ordinary and Extraordinary Claims (6th Ed.) 6th
Edition Lewis Vaughn

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-power-of-critical-thinking-
effective-reasoning-about-ordinary-and-extraordinary-claims-6th-
ed-6th-edition-lewis-vaughn/

International Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning 1st

Edition Linden J. Ball

https://textbookfull.com/product/international-handbook-of-
thinking-and-reasoning-1st-edition-linden-j-ball/

Arguments about Abortion: Personhood, Morality, and Law

First Edition Kate Greasley

https://textbookfull.com/product/arguments-about-abortion-
personhood-morality-and-law-first-edition-kate-greasley/
Critical Thinking An Introduction to Reasoning Well
Watson

https://textbookfull.com/product/critical-thinking-an-
introduction-to-reasoning-well-watson/

Thinking Space Promoting Thinking about Race Culture

and Diversity in Psychotherapy and Beyond 1st Edition
Frank Lowe

https://textbookfull.com/product/thinking-space-promoting-
thinking-about-race-culture-and-diversity-in-psychotherapy-and-
beyond-1st-edition-frank-lowe/

Thinking about the emotions : a philosophical history

1st Edition Cohen

https://textbookfull.com/product/thinking-about-the-emotions-a-
philosophical-history-1st-edition-cohen/

Hypothetical Thinking Classic Edition Dual Processes in

Reasoning and Judgement Jonathan St B.T. Evans

https://textbookfull.com/product/hypothetical-thinking-classic-
edition-dual-processes-in-reasoning-and-judgement-jonathan-st-b-
t-evans/

On Reasoning and Argument Essays in Informal Logic and

on Critical Thinking 1st Edition David Hitchcock
(Auth.)

https://textbookfull.com/product/on-reasoning-and-argument-
essays-in-informal-logic-and-on-critical-thinking-1st-edition-
david-hitchcock-auth/
Reasoning
Unbound
Thinking about Morality,
Delusion and Democracy

Jean-François Bonnefon
Reasoning Unbound
 Jean-François Bonnefon

Reasoning Unbound
Thinking about Morality, Delusion
and Democracy
Jean-François Bonnefon
Toulouse School of Economics
Toulouse, France

ISBN 978-1-137-60048-6 ISBN 978-1-137-60049-3 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60049-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017955071

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse
of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and
transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar
or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or
the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any
errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional
claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: © Yagi Studio/gettyimages and vaver anton / Alamy Stock Vector

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom
 Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Is Reasoning Useful? 7
2.1 Outreach Publications 9
2.1.1 Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9
2.1.2 Psychological Science in the Public Interest 13
2.2 Policymaking 18
2.2.1 The Credibility Problem 18
2.2.2 Behaviorally Informed Policies 19
2.3 Making Reasoning Relevant 22
2.3.1 A New Language 23
2.3.2 A New Toolbox 32
References 36

3 What Is Special About Human Reasoning? 45

3.1 Protoreasoning Among Nonhuman Primates 47
3.1.1 Causality 47
3.1.2 Logic 49
3.1.3 Comparative Ontogeny 51

v
vi Contents

3.2 Our Uniquely Cooperative Mind 54

3.2.1 Coordination 54
3.2.2 Division of Labor 56
3.2.3 Cumulative Culture 59
3.3 Our Special Powers of Reasoning 63
3.3.1 More Than Social Context 65
3.3.2 More Than (One) Social Function 67
References 71

4 Decisions 77
4.1 The Rationality Assumption 78
4.2 Rational Doers 80
4.2.1 The Naïve Utility Calculus Model 81
4.2.2 Reasoning About What People Do 84
4.3 Rational Talkers 91
4.3.1 The Rational Speech Act Model 92
4.3.2 Reasoning About What People Say 95
4.4 Do We Intuit Utility Maximization? 101
4.4.1 Intuitions About Doers 102
4.4.2 Intuitions About Talkers 104
References 107

5 Morality 113
5.1 Moral Character and Its Components 114
5.2 Other-Regarding Preferences 120
5.2.1 Inferences from Behavior 120
5.2.2 Inferences from Processing 129
5.3 Doing Culture Right 134
5.3.1 The Impure and the Bizarre 135
5.3.2 From Conformity to Morality 138
References 141
 Contents vii

6 Delusions 149
6.1 Motivated Beliefs 150
6.1.1 Feeling and Doing Better 151
6.1.2 Cooperation-Motivated Beliefs 153
6.2 Self-Deluded Reasoning 156
6.2.1 Biased Evaluations 157
6.2.2 Conjuring Premises 158
6.3 Reasoning About Delusions 162
6.3.1 How Hard Should It Be to Detect
Self-Deceivers? 163
6.3.2 What Counts as Detecting Self-Deceivers? 165
References 171

7 Democracy 177
7.1 Reasoning About Issues 179
7.1.1 Improving Factual Knowledge 179
7.1.2 Improving Reasoning About Facts 182
7.2 Culture Wars 187
7.2.1 Can Voters Even Understand One Another? 188
7.2.2 Would Voters Want to Understand One
Another? 189
7.3 Reasoning About Other Voters 192
7.3.1 The True Self 193
7.3.2 The Turing Test 194
7.3.3 The Hidden Agenda 195
References 198

Index 201
 List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Articles published between 2010 and 2015 in the

Science & Society section of Trends in Cognitive
Sciences, sorted as a function of their cognitive
focus. Black dots denote articles on decision or
morality, white dots denote articles on reasoning,
and gray dots denote articles on other topics 10
Fig. 4.1 I am looking at the gray object. Which object am
I talking about? 93
Fig. 5.1 From spite to costly punishment. The Dictator
decided to keep all the goods G to herself,
without sharing with the Subject S, in front of a
disinterested Observer O. Destroying the goods
G would harm the Dictator, but as discussed in
the main text, what we think of the person who
destroys G depends on whether this person is S or
O and whether other options are available besides
destroying G 124
Fig. 6.1 Four theoretical possibilities for the difficulty
of detecting others who engage in self-deluded
reasoning 164

ix
 List of Tables

Table 4.1 Four basic situations in which the action of

the Actor impacts both her outcomes and the
outcomes of the Recipient 90
Table 5.1 Judgments about the moral character of an agent
who takes a short or long time to decide to return
or to keep a cash-filled wallet 131

xi
 1
Introduction

Abstract As a psychologist who studied reasoning for a living, I always

struggled to explain why my work was important, compared to that of my
colleagues who studied decision making or morality. One reason for this
struggle, I believe, is that the psychology of reasoning has always tended
to eschew the form of reasoning that we most often engage in: figuring
out other people. This book makes the argument that focusing on the way
people reason about other people is key for the psychology of reasoning
to unlock its full potential.

As I was growing up in the early 1980s, I used to read my father’s

war-gaming magazines for the logical puzzles. Mostly they were metad-
eduction problems, of the knights and knaves variety. In these problems,
people can be knights (who always say the truth) or knaves (who always
lie). They tell you stuff, but since you don’t know who is a knight and
who is a knave, you have to be careful with your logic to reconstruct the
truth. For example:
(1) a. Either Aeris or Bob is a knave.

© The Author(s) 2017 1

J.-F. Bonnefon, Reasoning Unbound,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60049-3_1
2 Reasoning Unbound

b. Aeris tells you that Bob is a knight.

c. Bob confirms that he is a knight.
d. Who is the knave?
(They both are.) It was a lot of fun, but I soon got into other things.
What I did not expect is that logical puzzles were to come back into my
life a decade later. During my third year at university, I took a cognitive
psychology class that was all about reasoning—and I discovered that
psychologists who studied reasoning were paid to come up with fancy
logical puzzles, give them to people, and theorize about how people solved
them. I was sold. I did a master’s in reasoning, then a PhD, and soon got
a research job in which I continued to come up with logical puzzles based
on conditional syllogisms.
It was a good job, and I especially enjoyed meeting and befriending all
the wonderful people who formed the international community of the
psychology of reasoning. As years went by, though, I was nagged by what
I can only call impact envy. It looked like the psychology of reasoning,
or at least the one I was doing, garnered very little attention, compared
to the psychology of judgment and decision making. Psychologists who
studied decision making were good at identifying pitfalls in human
thinking, with large practical consequences. Psychologists who studied
moral judgment dissected thinking in a way that was not only fascinating
but also immediately relevant to important social issues. Both these fields
enjoyed broad public recognition and immediate applied relevance—
while I struggled to explain the interest of my own work.
The problem, I started to think, was that I, and perhaps others in my
field, was too strict about what qualified as “reasoning.” Even though
the field was in flux, it still looked like the psychology of reasoning was
mostly about relations, in a mathematical sense: logical relations between
propositions, causal relations between events, spatial relations between
objects, and so forth. Understanding how people reason about these
relations and their formal properties is a hard task, and the literature was
accordingly deep and subtle. It did not fully resonate, though, with my
experience of everyday reasoning.
Indeed, stop reading for a moment and try to remember a recent
occasion in which you reasoned. Better still, try to think of an occasion
 1 Introduction 3

in which you reasoned that was not job-related (because, for all I know,
you may prove theorems for a living). I find this exercise particularly
hard, perhaps because I am primed to think of reasoning as some kind of
abstract manipulation of premises, a mental demonstration of some point
or another. My everyday life does not seem ripe with occasions in which
I try to figure something out by making hypotheses and deductions.
But let us slightly change focus. Can you think of a recent occasion in
which you tried to figure someone out? An occasion in which you tried
to understand what someone was thinking, what she wanted, or the kind
of person he was? Now we are talking. I guess that, just like me, you can
think of myriad occasions in which you did just that. We reason about
people all the time. True, this kind of reasoning is messy, or at least not
as beautifully arrayed as a set of equations or a conditional syllogism. But
it is full of implications: Do I trust you to do what you promised? Does
she find me attractive? Will people blame me for what I am about to do?
Answers to all these questions imply reasoning about what other people
do, say, want, or believe.
Understanding this kind of reasoning is not only relevant to our
everyday life; it can also make us better persons, living in better societies.
In Percy Shelley’s play Prometheus Unbound, the titan Prometheus is, as
tradition says, shackled by Zeus for giving the secret of fire to human-
ity. More than fire, Prometheus gave humans all their arts and crafts:
medicine, mathematics, agriculture, all technological progress stemmed
from Prometheus’s first gift. But it is only when Prometheus is unbound
from his rock that he can finally deliver his second gift: enlightenment.
With Prometheus unbound, humankind becomes
Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless,
Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king
Over himself: just, gentle, wise: but man
Passionless; no, yet free from guilt or pain
This is the lofty goal that we can assign to the psychology of reasoning,
unbound. Reasoning presumably gave us all our arts and crafts. It led
us to astounding technological achievements and an unparalleled under-
standing of the physical world. But we still have a long way to go to
reason ourselves into equal, just, gentle, and wise beings. For this, we
4 Reasoning Unbound

need to shift our energy toward understanding how we reason about each
other, more than toward understanding how we reason about physical
events or abstract propositions. This is the project I describe in this book.
As a consequence, this book is part review and part program. I review
domains of thinking that seem to make inferences about other people.
These domains of thinking could be, but are not quite yet, colonized
by the psychology of reasoning—and thus I point out what specialists
of reasoning might do, for us to understand these domains better.
Chapter 2 starts with a hard question: Has the psychology of reasoning
made a difference yet to the way we live? Has it made us better, or better
off? I argue that, if we want to be honest, the answer is probably no
(although recent developments give us reasons to be more optimistic for
the future).
In Chap. 3, I ask what is so special about human reasoning anyway. I
suggest (in good company) that whatever were the fitness benefits that
helped reasoning to take off, the unique acceleration of its evolution in
humans was arguably the result of our hypercooperative social life. Sure
enough, we then proceeded to use our powers of reasoning to conquer
the physical world—but to understand the full potential of these powers,
we need to turn back to what they gave us in the first place: an exquisite
ability to figure out other people.
Chapter 4 considers the first building block of this ability: our infer-
ences about how other people make decisions. It introduces the “rational-
ity assumption”—that is, the way we simply expect other people to make
what they believe to be the best decision. The problem, of course, is to
define what we mean by the “best” decision. As we will see, doing this
implies going straight into the hard problem of what we believe about
the way people value the welfare of others, both when it does and does
not conflict with their own—in other words, what we believe to be the
other-regarding preferences of the people we reason about.
The concept of other-regarding preferences also plays a large role in
Chap. 5, which explores the inferences we make about the moral character
of other people. I suggest (once more, in good company) that inferences
about moral character are first and foremost inferences about cooperative
potential: What we do when we reason about the moral virtues of someone
is really to assess her dispositions and capacities to engage in future
 1 Introduction 5

cooperative enterprises. The two things we look for in order to assess these
capacities and dispositions are other-regarding preferences and cultural
competence. As a result, the purpose of Chap. 5 is to explore the chains of
inferences that go from observable actions and unobservable processing,
to conclusions about moral character, through intermediate conclusions
about prosociality and cultural conformity.
Chapter 6 starts with a detour, in order to consider the inferences we
make about ourselves, for a change. It introduces the notion of “motivated
beliefs,” that is, beliefs that respond to incentives rather than evidence.
Among these beliefs are delusions that we entertain about ourselves and,
in particular, about our moral character. I consider the kind of reasoning
that is required to sustain these delusions as well as the kind of reasoning
that can help us see through the motivated delusions of others.
This discussion sets the stage for Chap. 7, in which I take stock of all the
themes discussed in previous chapters in order to address an unabashedly
hubristic question: Can the psychology of reasoning helps us to save, or at
least improve, democracy? I consider in turn two challenges of democratic
life. The first challenge is that most voters understand essentially nothing
of the policies they vote for. It would seem natural to think that the
psychology of reasoning might be helpful in that respect—that is, that we
could help citizens to vote better. I argue that this is extremely unlikely
to work, because people are incentivized to delude themselves about their
political opinions and likely to subvert reasoning in order to support these
delusions.
The second challenge is that of civic enmity—that is, what happens
when voters needlessly construe other (differently minded) voters as
stupid and malevolent, when they could as easily get along with one
another. There, I argue, the psychology of reasoning has an important
role to play, in order to help citizens realize that there is no moral chasm
between them, whatever the insults and outrage they hurl at each other.
Reasoning can help them realize that citizens, whatever they vote for,
are basically good people who delude themselves into thinking they have
noble moral reasons for their political opinions.
There is a logical progression to this book, and each chapter tends to
build on concepts and phenomena introduced in previous chapters. As
a result, the chapters are best read in order. There is also another kind
6 Reasoning Unbound

of progression to the book: With each chapter, I move a little further

from the standard boundaries of the psychology of reasoning as well as
a little further from my comfort zone as a scholar. As a result, the ideas I
put forward become more speculative and exploratory in later chapters. I
hope you will enjoy that as much as I did. But right now, we start with
a question that, I hope, my colleagues from the psychology of reasoning
will forgive me for asking: Is there any use in studying reasoning?
 2
Is Reasoning Useful?

Abstract Research on reasoning does not inspire public debate or poli-

cymakers. This absence from the public sphere cannot be attributed to
some general problem that would plague all fields concerned with higher
cognition, because research on decision making and morality feature
prominently in public and policy debates. The problem partly stems from
the choice of focusing on highly unusual forms of reasoning (such as
syllogistic deduction), removed from the everyday conditions in which
we reason. Refocusing on uncertainty, preferences, and intuitions allows
specialists of reasoning to tackle social concerns; and it makes research on
reasoning fully interoperable with research on decisions and morality.

It may seem bizarre to devote a whole chapter to the question of whether

reasoning is useful. After all, it goes without saying that reasoning must be
important, right? I should confess, though, that I have often felt nagging
doubts about how useful my research was. Sometimes my family would
ask what my current research was about, and I had to explain what a
Modus Ponens argument was (if x then y, x is true, therefore y is true).
They rarely got excited about it, and their typical reaction was to ask

© The Author(s) 2017 7

J.-F. Bonnefon, Reasoning Unbound,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60049-3_2
8 Reasoning Unbound

“Why? Why do you care about that?” Things changed when I started to
branch out into decision making and morality. Suddenly everyone could
see the point of what I was doing: Experiments that involved choices
with actual stakes, or thought-provoking moral dilemmas, that interested
people, more than experiments about conditional syllogisms.
Perhaps the problem was just that my research on reasoning looked
irrelevant or boring and that research on reasoning, in general, was more
exciting than mine. So I decided to look for evidence that research
on reasoning was “useful,” in the sense that it could be interesting or
important to people outside of academia. True, research does not have to
be interesting to nonspecialists; scientists do not have to find applied value
in everything they do; and they actually should exercise caution before
they make recommendations based on preliminary findings. But still: It
would be good to find at least a couple of high-profile examples where
research on reasoning was fruitfully brought to the attention of the public
or the policymakers.
What I did was to look for research on reasoning in various places
that specialized in doing just that. I started with high-profile outreach
publications, such as the Science & Society section of the journal Trends in
Cognitive Sciences, and the monographs published in the journal Psycholog-
ical Science in the Public Interest. Then I looked at the reports published by
various political institutions that described how recent behavioral research
had informed their policies and programs.
The first part of this chapter describes what I found, and it is not very
encouraging. Whereas research on decision making and moral judgment
is all over the places I looked at, research on reasoning is almost entirely
absent. In the second part of the chapter, I consider possible reasons for
this state of affairs, and I conclude on a more optimistic note. I suggest
that the deep changes that the psychology of reasoning has seen in the last
decade or so have tremendously improved its potential to tackle high-
stakes social problems. By refocusing on uncertainty, preferences, and
intuitions, the psychology of reasoning now shares a theoretical language
and an experimental toolbox with the psychology of decision making and
the psychology of morality. By leveraging this language and this toolbox,
the psychology of reasoning can tackle people’s personal challenges and
 2 Is Reasoning Useful? 9

societies’ greater ambitions, just as the psychology of decision and morality

already does.

2.1 Outreach Publications

2.1.1 Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Trends in Cognitive Sciences, or TiCS, is an academic journal that mostly

publishes short literature reviews and opinion pieces on issues related to
the mind and the brain. By all metrics, TiCS is an extremely influential
journal. Of course, literature reviews tend to be cited more than primary
research, and one may quibble about the validity of impact factors as a
measure of influence, but an impact factor of 20 to 22 means that TiCS
articles get a lot of exposure.
Since 2010, TiCS has featured a special section titled Science & Society,
aimed at a broad audience and meant to stimulate public debate. Articles
published in the Science & Society section are expected to discuss “impor-
tant issues at the interface of academic research and society.” They are also
expected to show how academic research can inform or inspire public
discussions of consequential issues. Accordingly, the Science & Society
section of TiCS is a good place to search for evidence of the social value
of reasoning research. After all, Science & Society is a special section on
issues of social importance, in a journal with a strong focus on cognition,
whose outreach is among the best in the field. So, how many papers in
the Science & Society section of TiCS were devoted to reasoning research,
as compared to decision or moral research?
The response is: few to none. Of the 34 papers published in the
Science & Society section between January 2010 and December 2015,
only two referenced reasoning research. This is actually a generous count,
given that one of them only made a passing reference to a reasoning
phenomenon (confirmation bias) while addressing the phenomenon of
motivated cognition (Hughes & Zaki, 2015). The other article examined
the kind of reasoning that could explain biases against vaccination (Miton
& Mercier, 2015). For reasons that will be discussed at length in this book,
10 Reasoning Unbound

Fig. 2.1 Articles published between 2010 and 2015 in the Science & Society
section of Trends in Cognitive Sciences, sorted as a function of their cognitive
focus. Black dots denote articles on decision or morality, white dots denote
articles on reasoning, and gray dots denote articles on other topics

it is interesting to note that these two articles focused on valued beliefs,

that is, propositions whose truth is intrinsically valuable for the reasoner.
Two other articles addressed issues that could be construed as linked
to reasoning: math anxiety (Maloney & Beilock, 2012), and cognitive
training (Moreau & Conway, 2014), but these two articles did not
reference reasoning research. In sum, reasoning research is almost entirely
absent from the pages of the Science & Society section. But could this
merely reflect a quirk of the journal, or a bias against high-level cognition,
that would extend to decision and morality research? Hardly. As shown
in Fig. 2.1, nearly half of the articles published in the Science & Society
section between 2010 and 2015 dealt with either decision or morality, a
 2 Is Reasoning Useful? 11

proportion that has remained stable from the creation of the section to
today.
For example, a recurring theme in that section is that of the impact
of cognitive science in the courtroom, and this is especially true of
articles that deal with research on morality or decision. Several TiCS
Science & Society articles explored the ways in which cognitive science
can suggest that a defendant is not morally responsible for her actions,
given her age, her genes, or the state of her brain (Cohen & Casey,
2014; Morse, 2011; Roskies, Schweitzer, & Saks, 2013). Other articles
discussed whether defendants with untrustworthy facial features may be
unfairly discriminated against in guilty verdicts or sentencing decisions
(Bonnefon, Hopfensitz, & De Neys, 2015; Olivola, Funk, & Todorov,
2014; Todorov, Funk, & Olivola, 2015; Wilson & Rule, 2015, contains
impressive empirical data on this issue). No article, though, reviewed
reasoning research that may bear on the thinking of jurors or the fate
of defendants. Once again, this state of affairs serves to highlight the
apparent lack of impact of reasoning research, which does not seem to
be called upon in legal contexts.

Let us linger for a while on one article in particular, and especially
on the way it challenged psychologists who study decision making—and
let us see whether we can extend this challenge to reasoning researchers.
Meder, Le Lec, and Osman (2013) bluntly ask how psychologists who
study decision should react to an economic crisis, when their methods
and theories proved unable to anticipate (let alone prevent) this crisis.
Should these psychologists admit failure and revise their conceptual and
empirical tools? This is an interesting thought (for related ideas in the
moral domain, see Rottman, Kelemen, & Young, 2015; Williams, 2015),
and one that prompts these questions: What would be the equivalent of
an economic crisis for the field of reasoning? What kind of global event
could we blame specialists of reasoning for not anticipating? What kind
of catastrophic outcome would make us turn to specialists of reasoning,
for them to help us avoid it in the future?
It is not easy to find examples of a collective failure of reasoning that
psychologists could be tasked to anticipate, explain, or prevent. Can
12 Reasoning Unbound

we imagine that in the near future, people will look back and say that
humanity collectively failed to endorse an important conclusion, one that
would have prevented catastrophic outcomes, even though the evidence
was right there in front of us the whole time? Some would say that global
warming provides an interesting context for this discussion, if we assume
that catastrophic climate changes may still be avoided, given a consensus
about the implications of the evidence that is currently available. If
specialists of reasoning understand how people use evidence to reach
conclusions, then they may be able to help, in this context as well as in
the context of others global catastrophic risks, doomsday scenarios, and
paths to human extinction (Bostrom, 2014; Bostrom & Cirkovic, 2011;
Yudkowsky, 2011).
Maybe you are not convinced by these examples—after all, human
extinction scenarios usually play out in a distant future, and it might be
an impossible task to reason about the plausible state of the world several
centuries down the line. But there are other examples of collective failures,
in our close past, which could have been blamed on our (lack of ) scientific
understanding of reasoning. For example, after a major terror attack on
Western soil, such as 9/11 or the Paris attacks of 2015, the intelligence
community is often blamed for having failed to put the pieces together.
The media commonly bring to public attention a series of facts that, in
hindsight, were clear indicators of what was to happen—and yet were not
correctly integrated by the intelligence community. What is definitely not
common, though, is for the media to turn the heat on psychologists and
blame them for the poor quality of their theories of reasoning.
Would it be unfair to be angry at psychologists that way? But if it
is, why are we not shocked when economists are blamed for not fully
understanding the roots of a financial crisis? Is it because we believe that
economists know a lot more about their subject matter than psychologists,
who cannot be blamed because they know so little anyway? Perhaps a
simpler response is that the media and the public know that economists
study finance, whereas it is not common knowledge that psychologists
study reasoning. Even within the psychological community, though,
specialists of decision making seem to react to shocks (such as financial
crises or major intelligence failures) a lot more than specialists of reasoning
do.
 2 Is Reasoning Useful? 13

For example, Tetlock and Gardner (2015) report fascinating findings

on forecasting performance, based on a tournament organized by the
Intelligence Advanced Research Project Activity, an agency whose goal is
to fund research that makes the intelligence community better at what
it does. In this tournament, the challenge was to accurately predict a
vast number of geopolitical events over a period of five years. Thanks
to a large crowdsourcing strategy, the Tetlock team was able to identify
“superforecasters,” individuals whose predictive accuracy was terrific,
and apparently significantly better than that of professional intelligence
analysts with access to classified information. The thinking process of
these superforecasters was scrutinized for years, in the hope that it could be
distilled into practical recommendations for the intelligence community.
The results of this analysis are fascinating, but for the time being, I only
want to point out that this work is not, as far as I can judge, presented as
reasoning research or discussed as such in the reasoning literature. Rather,
this work seems to be construed as falling within the scope of decision
research.
Let us close our examination of the Science & Society section of TiCS.
I have argued that articles driven by reasoning research are essentially
absent from the pages of the Science & Society section of TiCS, whereas
this same section has featured many articles driven by decision and
morality research. The purpose of the Science & Society section, though,
is one of outreach rather than regulation—it is meant to stimulate public
debate more than to guide the thinking of policymakers. To pursue our
investigations, we need to assess the presence of reasoning research in a
psychology journal that explicitly aims at informing policymakers and
stakeholders, and that journal is Psychological Science in the Public Interest.

2.1.2 Psychological Science in the Public Interest

First published in 2000, Psychological Science in the Public Interest, or PSPI

for short, is a rather special scientific journal. It publishes long reviews
about topics of public interest, in areas where psychological research can
guide and improve public policy. These reviews are written by teams of
experts, who aim at producing a consensual, prudent reading of all the
14 Reasoning Unbound

relevant data (Ceci & Bjork, 2000). Ultimately, PSPI reviews aim at
helping legislators, courts, business leaders, and other decision makers
to understand which claims are truly based on scientifically adequate
data. Accordingly, PSPI seems to be a good place to look for a review
of reasoning research, which would highlight its main contributions to
policymaking.
Unfortunately, no such review has been featured in PSPI so far, in 15
years of publication (although see below for a discussion of Lewandowsky,
Ecker, Seifert, Schwarz, & Cook, 2012). Reasoning is hardly ever men-
tioned in the pages of PSPI, and this absence can be perplexing in some
cases. Consider for example the 2002 article that surveyed the evidence
for the cognitive enhancing properties of ginkgo biloba (Gold, Cahill,
& Wenk, 2002). Ginkgo biloba is an herb that is used by some as a
dietary supplement to augment cognitive functions, but the evidence for
this effect is sparse and insufficient, the authors conclude. What is most
interesting for our current purpose, though, is that the authors never
discuss any data investigating improvements in reasoning performance.
They scrutinize the effects of ginkgo biloba on learning, memory, or
attention, but apparently reasoning is not considered to be a cognitive
function that is worth augmenting.
To be fair, this survey did not mention improvements in decision
making, either. But it is not hard, in any case, to find surveys in
Psychological Science in the Public Interest that focus on decision making.
In fact, the very first issue of PSPI was devoted to the way psychological
science could improve diagnostic decisions (Swets, Dawes, & Monahan,
2000). Later monographs focused on helping doctors and patients make
sense of health statistics (Gigerenzer, Gaissmaier, Kurz-Milcke, Schwartz,
& Woloshin, 2007), on understanding adolescent risky decision making
(Reyna & Farley, 2006), or on identifying the role of psychological factors
in the financial crisis of the late 2000s (Gärling, Kirchler, Lewis, & van
Raaij, 2009), to cite just a few examples.
It is not difficult either to find monographs in PSPI that focused on
moral issues. Sometimes these monographs lie on the line between deci-
sion making and morality, for example when they focus on cooperative
or prosocial behavior. One PSPI publication reviewed the psychological
drivers of participation in public goods (Parks, Joireman, & Van Lange,
 2 Is Reasoning Useful? 15

2013). Some public goods require people to pool resources in order to

bring a positive collective outcome at a personal cost (e.g., paying taxes to
maintain a public park). Other public goods require people to restrict
their consumption of a resource (e.g., trees, fish) so that the resource
can replenish. These situations pit personal self-interest over collective
interest: Selfish behavior such as not contributing personal resources to
the public good (or overconsuming from the public good) is good for the
individual in the short term but costly to everyone in the long term. As a
result, understanding public good engagement requires consideration of
both the psychology of strategic decision making and the psychology of
morality.
Other pieces published in PSPI had an even greater focus on the
psychology of morality. For example, moral psychology was explored
at length in a monograph on counterterrorism (Kruglanski, Crenshaw,
Post, & Victoroff, 2007). According to the authors, the battle between
terrorism and counterterrorism is in part a fight for the moral high
ground, in which terrorist organizations seek to portray their actions as
morally warranted, against the effort of counterterrorism organizations,
which seek to deny them any moral legitimacy. Accordingly, it becomes
critical to understand the psychological drivers of lay judgments of moral
legitimacy. To give one more example, another PSPI monograph surveyed
what we know of the psychopathic personality (Skeem, Polaschek, Patrick,
& Lilienfeld, 2012), and especially whether psychopaths have an impaired
ability to appreciate the moral difference between right and wrong. This
question has very direct consequences in legal contexts. If psychopaths
find it difficult to appreciate the difference between right and wrong, the
legal treatment of their offenses may be framed in different terms than if
they do appreciate the difference but do not care.

In sum, PSPI has published many pieces on the psychology of decision
making and morality yet still has to publish an article that would introduce
policymakers to the psychology of reasoning. One article came close,
though, and it is interesting to consider it in further detail. This article,
titled “Misinformation and Its Correction: Continued Influence and
Successful Debiasing,” examines how misinformation can spread and
16 Reasoning Unbound

how it can be corrected (Lewandowsky et al., 2012). The article points

out the detrimental effects of misinformation, that is, of people holding
inaccurate beliefs, looks at how they come to hold these inaccurate beliefs,
and considers how these inaccurate beliefs may be successfully corrected
by educational tools and public information campaigns.
This would seem to be the perfect topic for the psychology of reasoning
to help with. Indeed, reasoning partly functions as a belief management
process that helps to recruit and promote accurate beliefs while avoiding
and dismissing inaccurate beliefs. It is quite striking, then, that the article
essentially ignores the cognitive psychology of reasoning. Let us consider
in more detail the three questions raised in the article: Why is it bad
that people are misinformed? How do they end up misinformed in the
first place? and What can we do to help them regain an accurate state of
information?
First, and this will be important later in this chapter, let us note
that we cannot say that misinformation is bad without referencing the
downstream consequences of misinformation for decision making. To
believe that vaccination causes autism is not intrinsically bad, but it
becomes so if it leads parents to forgo the benefits of vaccination for
their children. To believe that homeopathy can cure every ailment is not
intrinsically bad, but it becomes so if it leads people to ignore more
effective treatments. In other words, inaccurate beliefs are undesirable
only to the extent that they lead to bad decisions. If we ignore the
downstream consequences of reasoning for decision making, we cannot
explain why it is desirable to hold one belief rather than another—and
we thus make it hard for ourselves to explain why reasoning can help us
to address important societal questions. I will come back to this point in
the second part of this chapter, in which I argue that, for the psychology
of reasoning to reach its full applied potential, it needs to give center
stage to the notions of utility, preference, and vested interest. Note that
these notions do not only help to understand why misinformation is bad;
they also help to understand why misinformation might be intentionally
generated in the first place. Indeed, Lewandowsky et al. (2012) are careful
to note that an important driver of misinformation can be found in
the vested interests of various groups (politicians, corporations, but also
 2 Is Reasoning Useful? 17

nongovernmental organizations and activist groups) whose agenda may

be served by the dissemination of inaccurate beliefs.
These vested interests may explain why some sources attempt to
expose people to inaccurate beliefs, but why do people then adopt these
inaccurate beliefs? This question would seem to call for an examination of
reasoning processes, but Lewandowsky et al. (2012) do not go that way.
Rather, they express the view that people accept every claim as true by
default, unless it comes from a suspicious source or with clear signs of
intentional deception. In this case, people may attempt to more closely
scrutinize the veracity of the claim, by checking its internal consistency, its
coherence with their other beliefs, and its adoption by other people. Once
more, this process sounds like something the psychology of reasoning
would have a lot to say about, but Lewandowsky et al. (2012) only make a
passing reference to mental model theory (in the form of Johnson-Laird,
2012). Let me be clear here: I am not in the least blaming Lewandowsky
et al. (2012). Rather, I am pointing out that the psychology of reasoning
apparently failed to make itself relevant to solve a problem that should fall
right in its ballpark.
This is even more striking when Lewandowsky et al. (2012) consider the
reasons why it is hard to correct misinformation, and the best techniques
to do so. Here, memory processes are given a more important role than
reasoning processes. For example, the authors explain that attempts at
correcting misinformation may backfire because they repeat the false
information in order to correct it and thus further establish it in memory.
Interestingly, though, the authors also explain that corrections can be
very successful if they explain the vested interests behind the initial
misinformation campaign. This falls in line with what will be a recurring
theme in this book: that people are particularly apt at reasoning about
the motivations of other people and that the psychology of reasoning can
gain broad appeal by focusing on this capacity. But before we turn to
this theme, let us consider one last case study of the (lack of ) societal
impact of the psychology of reasoning: the behavioral insight revolution
in policymaking.
18 Reasoning Unbound

2.2 Policymaking
2.2.1 The Credibility Problem

When it comes to informing policies, psychology suffers from a credibility

problem. Consider for example an interesting survey ran by the American
Psychological Association (Penn, Schoen, & Berland Associates, 2008).
A sample of 1000 US respondents was asked which profession was best
suited to understanding economic problems and which profession was
best suited to confront the problems of climate change. Only 2% and
1% selected psychologists, respectively. To be honest, this makes sense. I
would hardly pick psychologists myself as the best professionals to tackle
economic reforms or climate change. In fact, I would certainly not want
to live in a world where only psychologists would be allowed to tackle these
issues. But psychology’s credibility problem goes beyond these statistics.
In essence, psychology is not perceived as a science.
There are multiple reasons for this perception of psychology as being
unscientific. Some are external, and based on misconceptions of what
psychology is and how psychologists work (Lilienfeld, 2012). For exam-
ple, many people seem to think that psychology is merely common
sense—even though they are always happy to read about the latest
counterintuitive finding that gets hyped by the media. Others believe that
psychology is not scientific because it cannot make precise predictions
about every single individual (after all, everyone is unique). It is true
that psychology works with probabilities and can only make uncertain
predictions. But this is also true of fields whose scientific credentials are
undisputed, such as geology.
Other reasons for the disputed scientific status of psychology may be
self-inflicted (Ferguson, 2015). For example, the small size of the effects
that psychologists commonly investigate can discourage policymakers to
take heed of their findings. In parallel, the low replicability of psycho-
logical findings has received astounding publicity. At the moment I am
writing this chapter, the Science paper that reported the (worrying) results
of the Psychology Reproducibility Project (Open Science Collaboration,
2015) has an Altmetric score of 2824. The Altmetric score is a measure
 2 Is Reasoning Useful? 19

of the exposure of an article in traditional and social media. To give

some context, a score of 2824 means that this article is the second-most
publicized of the 33,000 Science articles ever tracked by Altmetric and the
45th most publicized of the 5.2 million scientific articles ever tracked by
Altmetric, period.
The real problem is not that psychological findings do not always
replicate. In fact, experimental economics findings do not do much better
(Camerer et al., 2016). The real problem is why, and what structural
changes must be implemented to improve the situation (e.g., systematic
data sharing, venues for the publication of replications, preregistration of
studies). These changes, however, are unlikely to be discussed at the dinner
table or in policymaking circles. What will be remembered, outside the
field, is that psychological research is unreliable.
This would seem to toll the death knell for applying psychological
research to policymaking. However, this is not true of psychological
research on decision making and morality. In fact, these two fields have
been doing spectacularly well in that respect in recent years. Let us see
how, and whether reasoning research was able to follow suit.

2.2.2 Behaviorally Informed Policies

In the wake of the book Nudge (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008), various
countries recognized the need to incorporate behavioral insights in their
policymaking. At the heart of this movement is the notion that people do
not perfectly respond to incentives as optimally rational agents would and
that providing them with complete information about these incentives
will not be enough to help them make good decisions. Thus, understand-
ing cognitive limitations is key to designing policies that can enable people
to make better choices for themselves and better choices for society.
In 2010 the United Kingdom created the first government entity tasked
with bringing together ideas from behavioral economics, psychology,
and anthropology, in order to test behaviorally inspired interventions
and suggest cost-effective policies based on these data. This Behavioural
Insight Team (BIT) conducted more than 200 randomized controlled
trials, and its success helped establish the behavioral sciences as part of
20 Reasoning Unbound

the policymakers’ toolbox. Indeed, the BIT claimed that it earned back
its initial investment in just two years, not in a small part because of its
interventions aimed at increasing tax compliance. Inspired by the success
of the BIT, the United States created a similar entity in 2013, called the
Social and Behavioral Sciences Team. In 2015, as the team published
its first report, President Obama signed an executive order directing
federal agencies to incorporate insights from behavioral sciences in their
programs. One year later, the European Union produced a 50-page
report titled “Behavioural Insights Applied to Policy” that summarized
the initiatives taken in this domain by its member states.
The reports produced by the BIT, the Social and Behavioral Sciences
Team, and the European Union provide us with a comprehensive outlook
on the influence of psychological science on actual government programs
and policies. Thus, they are a good place to look at in order to assess the
respective impact of research on reasoning, decision making, and morality.
Of course, many of the reports of the BIT deal with issues that are
not grounded in reasoning, decision making, or morality. That being
said, it is easy to find reports that are clearly inspired by decision or
morality research—while it is impossible to find a single report inspired
by reasoning research. For example, one can find reports on the behavioral
science of recruitment decisions; on the decision making of social workers;
or on decision making in the context of energy use and saving. Just as
easily, one can find reports on the behavioral science of charitable giving,
organ donation, or tax evasion; all informed by experimental work on
ethics and morality.
It is harder to find initiatives inspired by morality research in the 2015
report of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Team. A single program
would seem to qualify, one aimed at increasing the accuracy of self-
reported sales by vendors selling goods to the government, by employing
the now-classic technique of having people certify this accuracy before
reporting the figures (Shu, Mazar, Gino, Bazerman, & Ariely, 2012).
There is no shortage of programs inspired by decision research with
a strong focus on improving financial decisions such as signing up to
workplace saving plans; applying for benefits; and applying for, obtaining,
and repaying loans. But once more, one cannot find any program that
would be explicitly or implicitly inspired by reasoning research.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
charged to your card, is now two weeks overdue. Please return it at
your earliest convenience. There is a charge of one cent for each
day overdue."
What on earth were they talking about? Carrie wondered vaguely.
She hadn't been to the library in months. "James," she called, "Did
you ever get me a library book called The Perfect Hostess?"
"Gosh, no, Mom," said James.
 *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DATE OF
PUBLICATION, 2083 A.D ***

Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will
be renamed.

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.

copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in
these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it
in the United States without permission and without paying copyright
royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of
this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™ concept
and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and
may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following the
terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use of
the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as
creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research.
Project Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given
away—you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with
eBooks not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject
to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution.

START: FULL LICENSE

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
 PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK

To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free

distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work (or
any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or online at
www.gutenberg.org/license.

Section 1. General Terms of Use and

Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree
to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your
possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
Project Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be
bound by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from
the person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in
paragraph 1.E.8.

1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be

used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people
who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a
few things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic
works even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.
See paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with
Project Gutenberg™ electronic works if you follow the terms of this
agreement and help preserve free future access to Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the
collection of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the
individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the
United States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in
the United States and you are located in the United States, we do
not claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing,
performing, displaying or creating derivative works based on the
work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of
course, we hope that you will support the Project Gutenberg™
mission of promoting free access to electronic works by freely
sharing Project Gutenberg™ works in compliance with the terms of
this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg™ name
associated with the work. You can easily comply with the terms of
this agreement by keeping this work in the same format with its
attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when you share it without
charge with others.

1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also
govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most
countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside the
United States, check the laws of your country in addition to the terms
of this agreement before downloading, copying, displaying,
performing, distributing or creating derivative works based on this
work or any other Project Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes
no representations concerning the copyright status of any work in
any country other than the United States.

1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:

1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other

immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must
appear prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg™
work (any work on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or
with which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is
accessed, displayed, performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
 This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the
laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.

1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is derived

from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not contain a
notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the copyright
holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in the
United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must
comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through
1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project
Gutenberg™ trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted

with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™ License for all works posted
with the permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of
this work.

1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project

Gutenberg™ License terms from this work, or any files containing a
part of this work or any other work associated with Project
Gutenberg™.

1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this

electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg™ License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form,
including any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you
provide access to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work
in a format other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in
the official version posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ website
(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain
Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the
full Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.

1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,

performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing

access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
provided that:

• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the
method you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The
fee is owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark,
but he has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to
the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty
payments must be paid within 60 days following each date on
which you prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your
periodic tax returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked
as such and sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation at the address specified in Section 4, “Information
about donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation.”

• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who

notifies you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that
s/he does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
 copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and
discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of Project
Gutenberg™ works.

• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of

any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in
the electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90
days of receipt of the work.

• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.

1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg™

electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
forth in Section 3 below.

1.F.

1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend

considerable effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe
and proofread works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating
the Project Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works, and the medium on which they may
be stored, may contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to,
incomplete, inaccurate or corrupt data, transcription errors, a
copyright or other intellectual property infringement, a defective or
damaged disk or other medium, a computer virus, or computer
codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.

1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except

for the “Right of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph
1.F.3, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner
of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party
distributing a Project Gutenberg™ electronic work under this
agreement, disclaim all liability to you for damages, costs and
expenses, including legal fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO
REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT LIABILITY, BREACH OF
WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE
FOUNDATION, THE TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY
DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE LIABLE
TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL,
PUNITIVE OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE
NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you

discover a defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it,
you can receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by
sending a written explanation to the person you received the work
from. If you received the work on a physical medium, you must
return the medium with your written explanation. The person or entity
that provided you with the defective work may elect to provide a
replacement copy in lieu of a refund. If you received the work
electronically, the person or entity providing it to you may choose to
give you a second opportunity to receive the work electronically in
lieu of a refund. If the second copy is also defective, you may
demand a refund in writing without further opportunities to fix the
problem.

1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth in
paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO
OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED,
INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.

1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied

warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted
by the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any
provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the
Foundation, the trademark owner, any agent or employee of the
Foundation, anyone providing copies of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works in accordance with this agreement, and any
volunteers associated with the production, promotion and distribution
of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works, harmless from all liability,
costs and expenses, including legal fees, that arise directly or
indirectly from any of the following which you do or cause to occur:
(a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b)
alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any Project
Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any Defect you cause.

Section 2. Information about the Mission of

Project Gutenberg™
Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.
It exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and
donations from people in all walks of life.

Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the

assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg™’s
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a
secure and permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and future
generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help,
see Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at
www.gutenberg.org.

Section 3. Information about the Project

Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.

The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,

Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website
and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact

Section 4. Information about Donations to

the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without
widespread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can
be freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the
widest array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small
donations ($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax
exempt status with the IRS.

The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating

charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and
keep up with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in
locations where we have not received written confirmation of
compliance. To SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of
compliance for any particular state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.

While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where

we have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no
prohibition against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in
such states who approach us with offers to donate.

International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make

any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.

Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of
other ways including checks, online payments and credit card
donations. To donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.

Section 5. General Information About Project

Gutenberg™ electronic works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could be
freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose network of
volunteer support.

Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed

editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
edition.

Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.

This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,

including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how
to subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.