Rationally irrational: When people do not correct their reasoning errors even if they could

Abstract

Why is it that sometimes people do not correct their reasoning errors? The dominating dual-process theories of reasoning detail how people (fail to) detect their reasoning errors but underspecify how people decide to correct these errors once they are detected. We have unpacked the motivational aspects of the correction process here, leveraging the research on cognitive control. Specifically, we argue that when people detect an error, they decide whether or not to correct it based on the overall expected value associated with the correction—combining perceived efficacy and the reward associated with the correction while considering the cost of effort. Using a modified two-response paradigm, participants solved cognitive reflection problems twice while we manipulated the factors defining the expected value associated with correction at the second stage. In five experiments (N = 5,908), we found that answer feedback and reward increased the probability of correction while cost decreased it, relative to the control groups. These cognitive control critical factors affected the decisions to correct reasoning errors (Experiments 2 and 3) and the corrective reasoning itself (Experiments 1, 4 and 5) across a range of problems, feedbacks, types of errors (reflective or intuitive), and cost and reward manipulations pre-tested and checked in five separate studies (N = 951). Thus, some people did not correct their epistemically irrational reasoning errors because they followed the instrumentally rational principle of the expected value maximisation: they were rationally irrational.

Rationally irrational: When people do not correct their reasoning errors even if they could.

“…Experiments 1, 4 and 5 were not pre-registered; Experiments 2 and 3 were pre-registered. The materials, data sets and pre-registrations are publicly available on the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/hvqa4/ (Sirota et al, 2022).…”

More than two intuitions

“…We cannot deliberate forever so at a certain point we need to stop deliberation even when the uncertainty might not have been resolved. Here we presumably need to take the opportunity cost of deliberation into account (e.g., Boureau, Sokol-Hessner, & Daw, 2015;Sirota, Juanchich, & Holford, 2022). Although in a typical experimental study participants only need to focus on the specific reasoning task at hand, in a more ecologically valid environment we always face multiple tasks or challenges.…”

“Switching” between fast and slow processes is just reward-based branching

“…Here, the decision to engage effortful controlled processing in a cognitive task is modeled as a function of the likelihood that allocation of control will result in the desired outcome and the weighing of the costs and benefits of allocating control to the task. Such a framework might be highly relevant for the integration of an opportunity cost factor in dual-process models of reasoning (Sirota et al, 2022).…”

“…As I noted (sect. 4.6), this "stop" question is specifically examined in work on mental effort allocation and might be especially useful to integrate an opportunity cost factor into the working model (e.g., Sirota et al, 2022). However, is this all we need?…”