Rethinking fast and slow based on a critique of reaction-time reverse inference

Abstract

Do people intuitively favour certain actions over others? In some dual-process research, reaction-time (RT) data have been used to infer that certain choices are intuitive. However, the use of behavioural or biological measures to infer mental function, popularly known as ‘reverse inference', is problematic because it does not take into account other sources of variability in the data, such as discriminability of the choice options. Here we use two example data sets obtained from value-based choice experiments to demonstrate that, after controlling for discriminability (that is, strength-of-preference), there is no evidence that one type of choice is systematically faster than the other. Moreover, using specific variations of a prominent value-based choice experiment, we are able to predictably replicate, eliminate or reverse previously reported correlations between RT and selfishness. Thus, our findings shed crucial light on the use of RT in inferring mental processes and strongly caution against using RT differences as evidence favouring dual-process accounts.

Cooperation, Decision Time, and Culture: Online Experiments with American and Indian Participants

“…In particular, they support theories involving a positive relationship between typically advantageous behavior outside the economic game (e.g., strength of institutions and social capital in one's country of residence) and play in the game context [44][45][46][47][48][49]. Our results also provide additional support for the conflictedness account of decision times [24][25][26][27] by showing that, across cultures, the relative speed of cooperation varies with the absolute level of cooperation a person faces in the game.…”

“…These seemingly contradictory results have been reconciled by an account of decision times based on conflictedness [24][25][26][27]: less conflicted decisions (where one option is strongly preferred over the other) occur quickly, whereas more conflicted decisions (where the difference in preference strength between the options is small) occur slowly. Therefore, in settings where cooperation is attractive to most people (and thus is chosen more frequently than defection), cooperators will tend to be less conflicted than defectors, and cooperation decisions will be faster than defection decisions.…”

Response time in economic games reflects different types of decision conflict for prosocial and proself individuals

“…In this study, we focus on the relationship between response time (RT) and behavior in prosocially and selfishly predisposed individuals. The RT of prosocial and proself decisions is not necessarily an indicator of the intuitive versus deliberative nature of the decision (34,35). In general, the conflict level between two opposing choices causes the more strongly preferred choice to be made more quickly than the weakly preferred choice.…”

“…Players with intermediate levels of prosocial preferences face a strong conflict between prosocial and selfish goals, which are in balance with each other; their decisions are somewhere in-between extremely prosocial and extremely selfish, and it takes longer for them to reach the intermediate level of behavioral decision. These differential levels of conflict will yield an inverted U-shape relationship between behavioral prosociality and the RT: An initial drop in the players' preference from extremely to mildly prosocial is accompanied by a drop in prosocial choices in economic games as well as an increase in RT, and a further drop in their preference from mildly proself to extremely proself is accompanied by a further drop in behavioral prosociality and a drop in RT (34,35). We found exactly this pattern in our data on 443 nonstudent healthy adult (age range: 20-59 y) participants' overall prosocial behavior and the RT in four economic games, including the DG, prisoner's dilemma game (PDG), four-person social dilemma game (SDG), and trust game (TG) in which the participants played the trustee's role.…”

Facial identity and emotional expression as predictors during economic decisions

“…Irrespective of the type of cue, participants needed more time to make their decision when they predicted losses as likely outcome than when they were expecting future winnings. This slowing down could be explained in terms of the mental cost derived from the specific tradeoff of each behavioral choice, i.e., "easier" choices are made faster (see Chabris, Taubinsky, Laibson, & Schuldt, 2009;Krajbich, Bartling, Hare, & Fehr, 2015). Note that the expected payoff of betting over a likely loss was 0.42 EUR (0.17*2.5+0.83*0 = 0.42; for a discussion about the time allocation model see Chabris et al, 2009), which was closer to 1 EUR (that is, the expected payoff associated with not betting) compared to that of betting over a likely win (0.83*2.5+0.17*0 = 2.07; Chabris et al, 2009).…”