Over the last 10 years we have been exploring the implications of considering legal and everyday decision making in terms of the role of parallel constraint satisfaction processes in a network of cognitive and emotional elements. With Dan Simon we are extending our earlier work to the role of hot cognition (motivation and emotion) in coherence-based reasoning.
We have argued that coherence-based reasoning is a general mechanism of human cognition and that classic cognitive consistency theories in social psychology, including Cognitive Dissonance, can be understood in terms of coherence-based processing.