Resistance to cognitive biases: Longitudinal trajectories and associations with cognitive abilities and academic achievement across development

Abstract

Cognitive failures on several reasoning and judgment tasks can be explained by miserly information processing tendencies. These tasks have been examined in child and youth samples, and we extend this work by examining the developmental trajectory of performance on these cognitive bias tasks and their association with other markers of cognitive sophistication. A longitudinal design was used to examine the development of resistance to cognitive biases in a sample of 204 typically developing children and youth. These youth were 8-14 years of age at first assessment and were assessed at three measurement occasions separated by 3 years. Resistance to cognitive biases as represented by performance on five reasoning and judgment tasks, including ratio bias, belief-bias syllogisms, attribute framing problems, base-rate sensitivity, and temporal discounting. The developmental trajectory of resistance to cognitive biases was examined. We also estimated associations between trajectories of resistance to cognitive biases and measures of cognitive abilities, actively openminded thinking, and superstitious thinking to examine how individual differences in other measures of cognitive sophistication were associated with the development of resistance to cognitive biases. Cognitive ability measures included intelligence (verbal and nonverbal) and executive function tasks (interference control and set-shifting). Growth modeling results showed that resistance to cognitive biases increased linearly from 8 to 15 years of age, followed by a flat mean trajectory up to age 20. Cognitive ability, actively open-minded thinking, and superstitious thinking predicted individual differences in resistance to cognitive biases, but not changes in resistance to cognitive biases. Performance on resistance to cognitive biases tasks was positively correlated with self-and parent-reported academic achievement.

A framework for understanding reasoning errors: From fake news to climate change and beyond

“…These beliefs tend to be correlated (Lindeman & Svedholm, 2012;Lobato et al, 2014) and they often share similar psychological antecedents (Čavojová et al, 2019;Erceg et al, 2019;Šrol, 2022). More importantly given the present topic, there are a large number of studies showing that intuitive people tend to hold more epistemically suspect beliefs in several cultures (e.g., Ballová Mikušková & Čavojová, 2020; Bouvet & Bonnefon, 2015;Gervais, 2015;Majima, 2015;Pennycook, Cheyne, et al, 2012Pennycook, McPhetres, et al, 2021;Pennycook, Bago, et al, 2022;Shtulman & McCallum, 2014;Šrol, 2022;Ståhl & van Prooijen, 2018;Svedholm & Lindeman, 2013;Swami et al, 2014;Toplak & Flora, 2021;van Elk, 2019;van Prooijen et al, 2022) (but see Majima et al, 2022). To simplify the summary of these findings, I will break these epistemically suspect beliefs into five categories that represent most (but not all) of the research on the topic relating to analytic thinking.…”

Age effects on delay discounting across the lifespan: A meta-analytical approach to theory comparison and model development.

“…Different influence diagnostics convergently identified four influential cases from three studies (Rozek et al, 1977; Toplak & Flora, 2020; Yu et al, 2021). Removing influential cases had a minor impact on the relationship between age and the delay discounting rate, z = −.045, 95% CI [−.076, −.015], p = .004.…”

Measuring Rational Thinking in Adolescents: The Assessment of Rational Thinking for Youth (ART‐Y)

“…Finally, two items measured the ability to avoid inferring causation from correlational evidence, three items tapped the tendency to use control-group reasoning (Lehman et al 1988), and two items assessed covariation detection. Developmentally suitable versions of these tasks have been studied in youth samples (Toplak 2022;Toplak et al 2014a;Toplak and Flora 2021).…”

“…We utilized many of these tasks when constructing our Comprehensive Assessment of Rational Thinking (CART; Stanovich et al 2016)-a very broad-based instrument for assessing rational thinking for adults. Here, drawing on our past work with the CART and developmental studies of younger subjects (Toplak 2022;Toplak et al 2014a;Toplak and Flora 2021), we present a parallel rational assessment designed for youth called the Assessment of Rational Thinking for Youth (ART-Y). Rational thinking includes epistemic and instrumental rationality, referring respectively to the determination of what is true and what to do (Stanovich 2009;Stanovich et al 2016).…”