The smart intuitor: Cognitive capacity predicts intuitive rather than deliberate thinking

Raoelison, Matthieu; Thompson, Valerie A.; Neys, Wim De

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104381

Cited by 98 publications

(111 citation statements)

References 57 publications

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“…Additionally, approximately half of participants who correctly identified the meaningless, pseudo-profound statements as "not profound" also reported using intuition when making these judgments. These results align with theoretical accounts of Stage 1 "smart intuitors"people with levels of cognitive sophistication, experiences, and knowledge structures (i.e., mindware) sufficient to intuitively arrive at correct responses when evaluating certain types of information (Bago & De Neys, 2019;Raoelison et al, 2020;Stanovich, 2018). Conversely, roughly 50% of participants who rated bullshit statements as "profound" reported using intuition to evaluate these statements, suggesting that they lack the requisite knowledge structures and analytic thinking framework to detect bullshit at the instantiation of intuition (Stage 1) or conflict monitoring (Stage 2).…”

Section: Dual Process Theories and Bullshit Detectionsupporting

confidence: 79%

“…According to this model, higher bullshit receptivity is strongly driven by a lack of engagement in critical, reflective thinking processes. However, a growing body of work has provided strong evidence not only that scores on the CRT may not be a reliable indicator of state or trait engagement in reflective thinking (e.g., Blacksmith et al, 2019;Patel et al, 2019), per se, but that higher scores on the CRT can actually be indicative of "smart intuition" rather than cognitive reflection (Bago & De Neys, 2019;Raoelison et al, 2020). This may help to explain the finding that low performers on the CRT tended to overreport that they were "dispositionally analytic" thinkers (Pennycook et al, 2017).…”

Section: Overplacement Biasmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Bullshit blind spots: The roles of miscalibration and information processing in bullshit detection

Littrell¹,

Ja²

2021

Preprint

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The growing prevalence of misinformation (i.e., bullshit) in society carries with it an increased need to understand the processes underlying many people’s susceptibility to falling for it. Though several cognitive and metacognitive variables have been found to be associated with a greater propensity to falling for bullshit, little attention has been paid to people’s perceptions of and confidence in their own ability to detect it and the phenomenology of the thinking processes they employ when evaluating misleading information. Here we report two studies (N = 412) examining the associations between bullshit detection accuracy, confidence in one’s bullshit detection abilities, and the metacognitive experience of evaluating potentially misleading information. We find that people with the poorest bullshit detection performance grossly overestimate their detection abilities and significantly overplace those abilities compared to others. Additionally, highly bullshit receptive people reported using both intuitive and reflective thinking processes when evaluating misleading information. These results suggest that some people may have a “bullshit blind spot” and that traditional miserly processing explanations of receptivity to misleading information may be insufficient to fully account for these effects.

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Section: Dual Process Theories and Bullshit Detectionsupporting

confidence: 79%

Section: Overplacement Biasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bullshit blind spots: The roles of miscalibration and information processing in bullshit detection

Littrell¹,

Ja²

2021

Preprint

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“…Furthermore, Baron argued (Baron et al, 2015;Baron, 2017Baron, , 2019 that CRT is, primarily, a measure of a reflection/impulsivity trait, i.e., the amount (but see Raoelison et al, 2020 for a "logical intuitions" perspective) opposed to the direction (fairness of the direction to both sides vs. my side bias) of thinking, which is better tapped by open-minded thinking. The two are related because being actively open to new information and knowledge will result in increased search, he suggested (Baron, 2019).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analytic Thinking and Political Orientation in the Corona Crisis

Maglić¹,

Pavlović²,

Franc³

2021

Front. Psychol.

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With much unknown about the new coronavirus, the scientific consensus is that human hosts are crucial to its spread and reproduction—the more people behave like regular socializing beings they are, the more likely it is that the virus will propagate. Hence, many nations worldwide have mandated physical-distancing measures. In the current preregistered research, we focus on examining two factors that may help explain differences in adherence to COVID-19 preventive behaviors and policy support across different countries—political orientation and analytic thinking. We positioned our research within the dual-process framework of human reasoning and investigated the role of cognitive reflection, open-minded thinking, and political ideology in determining COVID-19 responsible behavior (physical distancing and maintaining hygiene) and support for restrictive COVID-19 policies on a sample of 12,490 participants from 17 countries. We have not been able to detect substantial relationships of political orientation with preventive behaviors and policy support, and overall found no reliable evidence of politicization, nor polarization regarding the issue. The results of structural equation modeling showed that the inclination towards COVID-19 preventive measures and their endorsement were defined primarily by the tendency of open-minded thinking. Specifically, open-minded thinking was shown to be a predictor of all three criteria—avoiding physical contact, maintaining physical hygiene, and supporting COVID-19 restrictive mitigation policies. Cognitive reflection was predictive of lesser adherence to stricter hygiene and only very weakly predictive of lesser policy support. Furthermore, there was no evidence of these effects varying across political contexts. The mediation analysis suggested a partial mediation effect of COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs on the relationships of open-mindedness and cognitive reflection with physical distancing (but not adherence to stricter hygiene) and COVID-19 policy support, albeit very small and significant primarily due to sample size. There was also no evidence of these effects varying across political contexts. Finally, we have not been able to find strong evidence of political orientation modifying the relationship between analytical thinking and COVID-19 behaviors and policy support, although we explored the pattern of these effects in the US and Canadian samples for exploratory purposes and comparison with other similar studies.

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“…Although it is generally thought that people scoring higher on cognitive sophistication scales are better at deliberation than people scoring lower on these scales, they also tend to differ in many other aspects. For example, they tend to generate different intuitions on many reasoning tasks 37,38 . Thus, because this approach is correlational, it does not allow for the direct identification of causal effects of deliberation on polarization versus accuracy.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Reasoning about climate change

Bagó¹,

Rand

Pennycook³

2020

Preprint

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Why is disbelief in anthropogenic climate change widespread despite broad scientific consensus to the contrary? A widely-held explanation involves politically motivated (“system 2”) reasoning: Rather than helping uncover truth, people use their reasoning abilities to protect their partisan identities and reject beliefs that threaten those identities. Despite the popularity of this account, the evidence supporting it (i) does not account for the fact that partisanship is confounded with prior factual beliefs, and (ii) is entirely correlational with respect to the effect of reasoning. Here, we address these shortcomings by (i) measuring prior factual beliefs and (ii) experimentally manipulating participants’ extent of reasoning using cognitive load and time pressure while they evaluate arguments for or against anthropogenic global warming. The results challenge the politically motivated system 2 reasoning account: Rather than exacerbating the impact of partisanship per se, engaging in more reasoning led people to have greater coherence between judgments and their prior factual beliefs about climate change - a process that can be consistent with rational (unbiased) Bayesian reasoning. Thus, we challenge the dominant cognitive account of climate disbelief, and suggest that interventions aimed at providing accurate information about climate change may be effective in the long run.

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The smart intuitor: Cognitive capacity predicts intuitive rather than deliberate thinking

Cited by 98 publications

References 57 publications

Bullshit blind spots: The roles of miscalibration and information processing in bullshit detection

Bullshit blind spots: The roles of miscalibration and information processing in bullshit detection

Analytic Thinking and Political Orientation in the Corona Crisis

Reasoning about climate change

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