Large language models (LLMs) solve complex problems yet fail on simpler variants, suggesting they achieve correct outputs through mechanisms fundamentally different from human reasoning. To understand this gap, we synthesize cognitive science research into a taxonomy of 28 cognitive elements spanning reasoning invariants, meta-cognitive controls, representations for organizing reasoning and knowledge, and transformation operations. We introduce a fine-grained evaluation framework and apply it to 192K traces from 18 models across text, vision, and audio, alongside 1,346 human think-aloud traces on a new, domain-agnostic dataset for human-model comparison. We find that models are able to deploy cognitive elements seen in human reasoning but differ in how they use them. Leveraging these patterns, we develop test-time reasoning guidance that automatically scaffolds successful reasoning topologies, improving the accuracy of the strongest models by 9.7 percentage points on ill-structured problems. Meta-analysis of 1.6K LLM reasoning papers reveals the research community concentrates on easily quantifiable elements but rarely targets self-awareness, whose use differs between human and model reasoning. By establishing a shared vocabulary between cognitive science and LLM research, our framework enables diagnosis of reasoning failures and principled development of models that reason through robust cognitive mechanisms rather than spurious shortcuts, while providing tools to test theories of human cognition at scale.
People increasingly share personal goals online and invite others to forecast them. Research on the planning fallacy finds that observers predict a person's behavior less optimistically than the person does, and prediction markets aggregate such judgments, harnessing the wisdom of crowds. We study 6,150 prediction markets on Manifold in which 1,660 users asked about their own futures ("Will I ...?"), reconstruct every order and execution, and compare these self-markets with markets about external events. Self-markets resolved YES 4.4 percentage points less often than their final prices implied, whereas external markets were nearly calibrated (0.9 points); the difference was 2.2 points at the same price level and 1.9 points within creators who made both kinds of market. Absent when markets opened, the overstatement emerged within a day of trading, even where the person never traded, and peaked in the week before close. In a market's first day, observers moved external-market prices down toward the base rate, but moved self-market prices 3.6 points further toward YES, except in markets naming an outcome the person would not want, which were not overpriced. The correction came late and largely from the person, whose orders supplied 38% of the eventual movement toward the outcome in self-markets, against 9% in external markets. Because self-market prices mainly failed to separate successes from failures, a recalibration learned from earlier markets improved later forecasts by only 1.5%. Crowds believe in the futures people pose for themselves, and the information that would correct them lies with the person.