Everyone appeals to reason when human beings are required to think and reflect in order to reach various conclusions or judgments of a certain situation. The reason is the argument that a person has to be able to prove something or to persuade another person of their arguments. Everyone wants to be right in a dispute and sometimes, it is not always like that and they are wrong.
Reason and pride also go hand in hand. On many occasions when people want to be right at all costs, pride does not allow them to see other possibilities and they close in band without being able to look into perspective. The reason can also be the determining cause of a behavior in a person. In this case we would be talking about reasoning and it can be deductive (the conclusion is included in the premises) or inductive (there are conclusions about something particular).
The reason
When a person appeals to reason, he uses principles and assumes that what he believes is true. Use logic to discover the rules of reason, such as taking into account the principle of identity (a concept is a concept), the principle of non-contradiction (the same concept can be and not be at the same time) or the principle of the excluded third (that between being and not being of a concept, there is no room for an intermediate situation). In this sense, what human reason wants is to give coherence to things through logic.
Reasoning is often thought to be the exact opposite of intuition. A typical example of intuition is the first impression we create when we meet someone new. It comes to mind spontaneously and quickly and, in many cases, we cannot pinpoint why we think this person is good, while this person probably is not. On the contrary, when people think of reasoning, they think, for example, of solving math problems in the classroom: a slow, effortful and conscious process. People, at least Westerners, also think that reasoning is usually more efficient than intuition; after all, why go through all that trouble to reason if the result is no better than intuitions?
Intuitions are friends of reason
Intuitions are supposed to be quick, effortless, unconscious, with little dependence on working memory, and prone to errors and biases. Reasoning is supposed to be slow, with effort, and in full consciousness.
While the characterization of intuitions is more or less in situ, that of reasoning is based on a highly artificial use of reasoning. Imagine that you have to characterize the memory. You can think of the conscious and strenuous exercise of trying to remember a long series of random numbers. Or you can think of the automatic memory of how to get to your house or what your name is.
Most intuitions can be made to be mindful, straining, and demanding for working memory: read if you are trying to decipher very poor handwriting, a visual search if you are looking for a particular face among a large number of people, etc. The form of intuition is what we should focus on. It is the mechanism that makes the most demanding version possible. In fairness to the reasoning, we must also consider its simplest expression, the smallest step that can still qualify as reasoning.
To understand it better
Lucia and Marcos disagree about the movie they should see tonight. Lucia says, "You chose the movie last week, so this week it's my turn." Marcos responds: "Fair enough, your turn to choose." This exchange is quite trivial, but it still requires reasoning. Lucia has to be able to find a reason why she should be the one to decide which movie to watch. Marcos has to be able to evaluate this reason and decide that he is good enough for him to grant the turn.
Looking at this minimal display of reasoning, we realize that it does, in fact, look a lot like intuition. It happens very quickly: neither Lucía nor Marcos need to stop for a few minutes to reflect on the force of "Last week you chose the movie, so this week it's my turn." It doesn't take much effort or working memory to gather such a discussion, much less to evaluate it. Importantly, people don't really know why this argument is persuasive. It is based on intuitions of fairness that we cannot easily spell out, and that psychologists are still trying to understand. Even though reason is consciously processed, the way it is processed is kept under the unconscious.
Beyond the fact that it can be quick, effortless, and partially unconscious, reasoning shares another crucial trait with intuitions: its performance pattern. Far from being infallible, the reason is subject to systematic bias, more importantly, confirmation bias. In fact, the reasoning is so much like intuition that it is more accurate to say that the reasoning is mostly intuitive. Or, rather, that reasoning is based on a set of intuitions: the reasoning draws on intuitions about what is a good reason to accept a given conclusion. We have the intuition that if Marcos chose the movie last week, Lucia can use that as a reason for choosing the movie this week.
In any case, reason and intuition can be friends who hold hands, since both are necessary to be able to respond to an argument where different types of thoughts must be justified through reasoning. In interpersonal relationships it should be noted that always being right is not a good idea, because sometimes, living peacefully and in harmony with oneself is much more valuable than enter into word games to find out who is right on a certain issue.
