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Registered Report: Cognitive Ability, But Not Cognitive Reflection Predicts Expressing Greater Political Animosity and Favouritism

October 2024

DOI:10.31234/osf.io/sdx3v

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Liberals and conservatives both express political animosity and favouritism. However, less is known about whether the same or different factors contribute to this phenomenon among liberals and conservatives. We test three different relationships that could emerge between cognitive ability and cognitive reflection, and political group-based attitudes. Analyzing two nationally representative surveys of US Americans (N= 9,035) containing a measure of cognitive ability, we find evidence that compared to people lower in cognitive ability, people higher in cognitive ability express more animosity towards ideologically discordant groups, and more favouritism towards ideologically concordant groups. This pattern was particularly pronounced among liberals. In a registered report study, we then test whether the same is true of cognitive reflection in another large dataset (N = 3,498). In contrast to cognitive ability, we find no relationship between cognitive reflection and political animosity and favouritism. Together, these studies provide a comprehensive test of how cognitive ability and cognitive reflection are related to political animosity and favouritism for liberals and conservatives in the United States.

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Children's cognitive reflection predicts successful interpretations of covariation data

September 2024 · Frontiers in Developmental Psychology

Introduction Cognitive reflection is the ability and disposition to reflect on one's own thinking, allowing a person to identify and correct judgments grounded in intuition rather than logic. Cognitive reflection strongly predicts school-aged children's understanding of counterintuitive science concepts. Here, we asked whether children's cognitive reflection similarly predicts a domain-general ... [Show full abstract] scientific skill: the interpretation of covariation data. Method Five- to 12-year-olds ( N = 74) completed a children's Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT-D) and measures of executive functioning. They also interpreted covariation data presented in 2 x 2 contingency tables. Results and discussion CRT-D performance predicted children's overall accuracy and the strategies they used to evaluate the contingency tables, even after adjusting for their age, set-shifting ability, inhibitory control, and working memory. Thus, the relationship between cognitive reflection and statistical reasoning emerges early in development. These findings suggest cognitive reflection is broadly involved in children's scientific thinking, supporting domain-general data-interpretation skills in addition to domain-specific conceptual knowledge.

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Registered report: Cognitive ability, but not cognitive reflection, predicts expressing greater poli...

November 2024 · British Journal of Social Psychology

Liberals and conservatives both express political animosity and favouritism. However, less is known about whether the same or different factors contribute to this phenomenon among liberals and conservatives. We test three different relationships that could emerge among cognitive ability, cognitive reflection and political group‐based attitudes. Analysing two nationally representative surveys of ... [Show full abstract] US Americans ( N = 9035) containing a measure of cognitive ability, we find evidence that compared to people lower in cognitive ability, people higher in cognitive ability express more animosity towards ideologically discordant groups and more favouritism towards ideologically concordant groups. This pattern was particularly pronounced among liberals. In a registered report study, we then test whether the same is true of cognitive reflection in another large dataset ( N = 3498). In contrast to cognitive ability, we find no relationship between cognitive reflection, political animosity and favouritism. Together, these studies provide a comprehensive test of how cognitive ability and cognitive reflection are related to political animosity and favouritism for liberals and conservatives in the United States.

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Cognitive Reflection Predicts Real-Life Decision Outcomes, but Not Over and Above Personality and De...

May 2015 · Journal of Behavioral Decision Making

The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), designed to assess the ability to inhibit intuition to process a problem analytically, predicts people's performance in many normative judgement and decision-making tasks (e.g., Bayesian reasoning, conjunction fallacy and ratio bias). However, how the CRT predicts normative decision-making performance is unclear, and little is known about the extent to which ... [Show full abstract] the CRT predicts real-life decision outcomes. We investigate the role of the CRT in predicting real-life decision outcomes and examine whether the CRT predicts real-life decision outcomes after controlling for two related individual differences: the Big Five personality traits and decision-making styles. Our results show that greater CRT scores predict positive real-life decision outcomes measured by the Decision Outcome Inventory. However, the effect size was small, and the relationship became non-significant after statistically controlling for personality and decision-making styles. We discuss the limited predictive role of cognitive reflection in real-life decision-making outcomes, along with the roles of personality and decision-making styles. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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16-24 Cognitive Reflection Predicts Decision Quality in Individual and Strategic Decisions

January 2016

Cognitive reflection has been shown to be an important trait which is correlated with the propensity to: take risks, delay gratification, and form accurate beliefs about others’ behavior. However, previous research has not cleanly identified whether reflective thinkers make ‘better’ decisions than intuitive thinkers, since inferences of decision quality are confounded by inferences regarding risk ... [Show full abstract] preferences, time preferences, and beliefs. We directly test for differences in decision quality between reflective thinkers and intuitive thinkers in both individual and strategic decisions using a design which makes it possible to objectively rank risky and strategic choices, independent of one’s attitudes toward risk or one’s beliefs about the strategic sophistication or altruism of other decision makers. Employing a lottery choice task involving a dominant and a dominated alternative, and implementing multiple rounds of a second price auction, we find that the tendency to cognitively reflect has strong predictive power across domains (reasoning tasks, choices between lotteries, bidding behavior in auctions), and across time (as the tasks were administered on separate dates). In particular, the same subjects who engaged in reflective thinking on simple reasoning problems were also more likely to choose optimally in the lottery choice task and to bid closer to the dominant strategy equilibrium in second price auctions. We also find that experience helps to narrow the gap in performance between reflective and intuitive thinkers.

Last Updated: 22 Oct 2024