We propose extrapolating Conviction Narrative Theory (CNT) to clinical psychology and psychiatry. We demonstrate how CNT principles may benefit assessment, therapy, and possibly even modify public health views of neuropsychiatric disorders. Our commentary focuses on hoarding disorder as a model, elaborates on discrepancies in the scientific literature and suggests how the CNT may resolve them.

I encourage Johnson et al. to ground Conviction Narrative Theory in more detail in foundational, earlier decision-making research – first and foremost in Herbert Simon's work. Moreover, I wonder if and how further reflections about narratives could aid tackling two interrelated grand challenges of the decision sciences: To describe decision-making environments; to understand how people select among decision-strategies in environments.

We connect Conviction Narrative Theory to an account that views people as intuitive scientists who can flexibly create, evaluate, and modify representations of decision problems. We argue that without understanding how the relevant complex narratives (or indeed any representation, simple to complex) are themselves constructed, we also cannot know when and why people would rely on them to make choices.

This commentary focuses on affective structures and the main adaptive functions of shared narratives to fill the gaps of the Conviction Narrative Theory. The transmission of narratives among individuals in highly uncertain situations is irrevocably tainted by affects and anchored in collective memory. Narratives have important evolutionary functions for human beings under threat and act as the social glue that creates and strengthens social bonds among individuals.

Conviction Narrative Theory holds that reasoners adopt “a narrative that feels ‘right’ to explain the available data” and use “that narrative to imagine plausible futures” (target article, Abstract). Drawing on feelings-as-information theory, this commentary reviews the role of metacognitive experiences of ease or difficulty and highlights that fluently processed narratives are more likely to “feel right.”

Education often relies on an implicit assumption that decisions are made rationally, and focuses on situations in which there are correct answers that can be known with certainty. The proposal that decision-making is often narrative, especially in contexts of radical uncertainty, suggests important changes to education practice and new questions for education research.

In his ‘script theory,' Tomkins first proposed that people unconsciously organize their life experiences in terms of narrative structures he termed “scripts.” I use a clinical vignette to illustrate how the psychotherapeutic process of “making the unconscious conscious” involves becoming aware of the maladaptive scripts that people unwittingly live by, and developing them into the “conviction narratives” proposed by the authors.

Convincing narratives are not confabulations. Presumably they “feel right” to decision-making agents because the probabilities they assign intuitively (i.e., implicitly) to potential outcomes are plausible. Can we render explicit the calculations that would be performed by a decision-making agent to evaluate the plausibility of competing narratives? And if we can, what, exactly, makes a narrative “feel right” to an agent?

Conviction Narrative Theory (CNT) is conceptually so multifaceted as to make critical evaluation difficult. It also omits one course of action: Active engagement with the world. Parsing the developmental and mechanistic processes within CNT would allow for a rigorous research programme to put the account under test. I propose a unifying account based on active inference.

Whereas most commentators agree about the centrality of narratives in decision-making, the commentaries revealed little consensus about the nature of radical uncertainty. Here we consider thirteen objections to our views, including our characterization of the uncertain decision environment and associated cognitive, affective, and social processes. We conclude that under radical uncertainty, narratives rather than probabilities are the currency of thought.

Human reasoning is often conceived as an interplay between a more intuitive and deliberate thought process. In the last 50 years, influential fast-and-slow dual-process models that capitalize on this distinction have been used to account for numerous phenomena – from logical reasoning biases, over prosocial behavior, to moral decision making. The present paper clarifies that despite the popularity, critical assumptions are poorly conceived. My critique focuses on two interconnected foundational issues: the exclusivity and switch feature. The exclusivity feature refers to the tendency to conceive intuition and deliberation as generating unique responses such that one type of response is assumed to be beyond the capability of the fast-intuitive processing mode. I review the empirical evidence in key fields and show that there is no solid ground for such exclusivity. The switch feature concerns the mechanism by which a reasoner can decide to shift between more intuitive and deliberate processing. I present an overview of leading switch accounts and show that they are conceptually problematic – precisely because they presuppose exclusivity. I build on these insights to sketch the groundwork for a more viable dual-process architecture and illustrate how it can set a new research agenda to advance the field in the coming years.

This commentary addresses omissions in De Neys's model of fast-and-slow thinking from a metacognitive perspective. We review well-established meta-reasoning monitoring (e.g., confidence) and control processes (e.g., rethinking) that explain mental effort regulation. Moreover, we point to individual, developmental, and task design considerations that affect this regulation. These core issues are completely ignored or mentioned in passing in the target article.

Shortcuts to goals are rewarded by faster attainment and punished by more frequent failure, so selection of the various kinds – heuristics, cached sequences (habits or macros), gut instincts – depends on reward history just like other kinds of choice. The speeds of shortcuts lie on continua along with speeds of deliberation, and these continua have no obvious separation points.

Deliberative thinking often consists of several steps, each involving a switch decision. These decisions may be influenced by confidence in the thinking done so far. Individuals may differ in their tolerance of low confidence and thus may arrive at unjustified high confidence too soon, either from trusting their intuition or by bolstering an initially favored conclusion.

Research on human reasoning has both popularized and struggled with the idea that intuitive and deliberate thoughts stem from two different systems, raising the question how people switch between them. Inspired by research on cognitive control and conflict monitoring, we argue that detecting the need for further thought relies on an intuitive, context-sensitive process that is learned in itself.

Activating relevant responses is a key function of automatic processes in De Neys's model; however, what determines the order or magnitude of such activation is ambiguous. Focusing on recently developed sequential sampling models of choice, we argue that proactive control shapes response generation but does not cleanly fit into De Neys's automatic-deliberative distinction, highlighting the need for further model development.

We applaud De Neys for drawing attention to the interaction between intuiting and deliberating without committing to single- or dual process models. It remains unclear, however, how he conceptualizes the distinction between intuiting and deliberating. We propose several levels at which the distinction can be made and discuss the merits of defining intuiting and deliberating as different types of behavior.

De Neys argues against the exclusivity assumption: That many judgments are exclusively selected by intuition or deliberation. But this is an excessively strong formulation of the exclusivity assumption. We should aim to develop weaker, more plausible formulations that identify which judgments are likely to be selected by intuition or deliberation. This is necessary for empirical comparisons of intuition and deliberation.

We agree with the author's working model, but we suggest that (a) the classical distinction between fast and slow processes as separable processes can be softened, and (b) human performance might result from an interplay between fast and slow processing and these processes may be mediated by systems that evolve to satisfy the need for operation in a complex environment.

De Neys is right to criticize the exclusivity assumption in dual-process theories, but he misses the original sin underlying this assumption, which his working model continues to share. Conflict paradigms, in which experimenters measure how one cognitive process interferes (or does not interfere) with another, license few inferences about how the interfered-with process works on its own.