The Head, Heart, and Soul: Lay Theories of Decision Conflict and the Role of the True Self
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Which mental process reveals one’s authentic preference—deliberative reasoning or one’s gut impulses? The existing literature offers conflicting answers to this question: Some research suggests that people generally see deliberation as more fundamental, while other work suggests that people see intuition as more fundamental. This paper argues that belief in a true self provides a unifying framework to explain when participants will attribute one’s authentic preference to either System 1 or System 2. In line with predictions made by our theory, the results from four experiments (N=3,399 American adults) show that attributions about others’ authentic preferences vary predictably across normative and non-normative contexts. Further, we show that the more participants report believing in a good true self, the more their judgments about others adhere to a predictable pattern; and, directly manipulating information about a target’s true self changes people’s judgments about a target’s authentic preferences. By integrating theories of decision conflict and existing research on the true self, this work advances our understanding of how people reason about others’ minds, revealing how lay theories about identity can systematically shape social prediction and judgment.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".