The Reasonable, the Rational, and the Good: On Folk Theories of Deliberative Judgment

Judgment is often described in terms of an intuitive (System 1) versus deliberative (System 2) dichotomy, yet sound deliberation itself can take more than one form. Building on philosophical traditions and distinctions in treatment of sound judgment in economics and law, we propose that lay conceptions revolve around two distinct types of deliberate judgment: rational, emphasizing rule-based and utility-focused reasoning for well-defined problems, and reasonable, prioritizing context-sensitive and socially conscious reasoning for ill-defined problems. Across four studies in English-speaking Western samples (Studies 1-4; N = 2,130) and a Mandarin-speaking Chinese sample (Study 4; N = 697), participants described their notions of "sound" and "good" judgment, evaluated social scenarios, chose between candidates with distinct judgmental profiles, and categorized non-social objects. Results consistently showed that people view both rationality and reasonableness as common forms of deliberate sound judgment, while treating them as distinct. Participants preferred rational deliberation for algorithmic social roles linked to well-defined tasks and reasonable deliberation for interpretive roles linked to ill-defined tasks. Moreover, framing decisions as rational vs. reasonable influenced whether participants relied on rule-based vs. overall-similarity strategies in classification tasks. These findings suggest that lay understanding of sound judgment does not rely on a single standard of judgmental competence. Instead, people recognize that both rationality and reasonableness are critical for competent deliberation on different types of problems in life.