Slower is not always better: response-time evidence clarifies the limited role of miserly information processing in the Cognitive Reflection Test

Antonietti, A, Stupple, EJN, Pitchford, M, Ball, LJ, Hunt, TE and Steel, R ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5633-3259, 2017. Slower is not always better: response-time evidence clarifies the limited role of miserly information processing in the Cognitive Reflection Test. PLOS ONE, 12 (11): e0186404. ISSN 1932-6203

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Abstract

We report a study examining the role of ‘cognitive miserliness’ as a determinant of poor performance on the standard three-item Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT). The cognitive miserliness hypothesis proposes that people often respond incorrectly on CRT items because of an unwillingness to go beyond default, heuristic processing and invest time and effort in analytic, reflective processing. Our analysis (N = 391) focused on people’s response times to CRT items to determine whether predicted associations are evident between miserly thinking and the generation of incorrect, intuitive answers. Evidence indicated only a weak correlation between CRT response times and accuracy. Item-level analyses also failed to demonstrate predicted response-time differences between correct analytic and incorrect intuitive answers for two of the three CRT items. We question whether participants who give incorrect intuitive answers on the CRT can legitimately be termed cognitive misers and whether the three CRT items measure the same general construct.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	PLOS ONE
Creators:	Antonietti, A., Stupple, E.J.N., Pitchford, M., Ball, L.J., Hunt, T.E. and Steel, R.
Publisher:	Public Library of Science
Date:	3 November 2017
Volume:	12
Number:	11
ISSN:	1932-6203
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1371/journal.pone.0186404 DOI
Rights:	© 2017 Stupple et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Divisions:	Schools > School of Social Sciences
Record created by:	Jonathan Gallacher
Date Added:	08 Jul 2019 08:58
Last Modified:	08 Jul 2019 08:58
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/37048

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