Jonathan St. B. T. Evans

Jonathan St B. T. Evans (born 30 June 1948) is a British cognitive psychologist, currently Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Plymouth. In 1975, with Peter Wason, Evans proposed one of the first dual-process theories of reasoning, an idea later developed and popularized by Daniel Kahneman. In a 2011 Festschrift, Evans' peers described him as "one of the most influential figures in the psychology of human reasoning".

Early life and career

Evans began his academic career studying psychology (with a philosophy minor) at University College London in 1966, graduating in 1969 with a first-class honours degree. The same year, he began a Ph.D. on human inference titled "Deductive reasoning and linguistic usage (with special reference to negation)", supervised by Peter Cathcart Wason, which he completed in 1972. He is "widely considered the godfather of the standard dual process model that has come to dominate the field", an idea later popularized by Malcolm Gladwell, in Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, and Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking Fast and Slow. Evans' work combines experimental research and theoretical analysis and also covers human rationality, deductive reasoning, decision making and judgements, conditional reasoning, and the study of heuristics and biases.

Selected publications

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