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Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Cognitive Reflection. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cognitive Reflection. Show all posts

Thursday, August 18, 2022

Dunning–Kruger effects in reasoning: Theoretical implications of the failure to recognize incompetence

Pennycook, G., Ross, R.M., Koehler, D.J. et al. 
Psychon Bull Rev 24, 1774–1784 (2017). 
https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-017-1242-7

Abstract

The Dunning–Kruger effect refers to the observation that the incompetent are often ill-suited to recognize their incompetence. Here we investigated potential Dunning–Kruger effects in high-level reasoning and, in particular, focused on the relative effectiveness of metacognitive monitoring among particularly biased reasoners. Participants who made the greatest numbers of errors on the cognitive reflection test (CRT) overestimated their performance on this test by a factor of more than 3. Overestimation decreased as CRT performance increased, and those who scored particularly high underestimated their performance. Evidence for this type of systematic miscalibration was also found on a self-report measure of analytic-thinking disposition. Namely, genuinely nonanalytic participants (on the basis of CRT performance) overreported their “need for cognition” (NC), indicating that they were dispositionally analytic when their objective performance indicated otherwise. Furthermore, estimated CRT performance was just as strong a predictor of NC as was actual CRT performance. Our results provide evidence for Dunning–Kruger effects both in estimated performance on the CRT and in self-reported analytic-thinking disposition. These findings indicate that part of the reason why people are biased is that they are either unaware of or indifferent to their own bias.

General discussion

Our results provide empirical support for Dunning–Kruger effects in both estimates of reasoning performance and self-reported thinking disposition. Particularly intuitive individuals greatly overestimated their performance on the CRT—a tendency that diminished and eventually reversed among increasingly analytic individuals. Moreover, self-reported analytic-thinking disposition—as measured by the Ability and Engagement subscales of the NC scale—was just as strongly (if not more strongly) correlated with estimated CRT performance than with actual CRT performance. In addition, an analysis using an additional performance-based measure of analytic thinking—the heuristics-and-biases battery—revealed a systematic miscalibration of self-reported NC, wherein relatively intuitive individuals report that they are more analytic than is justified by their objective performance. Together, these findings indicate that participants who are low in analytic thinking (so-called “intuitive thinkers”) are at least somewhat unaware of (or unresponsive to) their propensity to rely on intuition in lieu of analytic thought during decision making. This conclusion is consistent with previous research that has suggested that the propensity to think analytically facilitates metacognitive monitoring during reasoning (Pennycook et al., 2015b; Thompson & Johnson, 2014). Those who are genuinely analytic are aware of the strengths and weaknesses of their reasoning, whereas those who are genuinely nonanalytic are perhaps best described as “happy fools” (De Neys et al., 2013).

Friday, October 8, 2021

Can induced reflection affect moral decision-making

Daniel Spears, et al. (2021) 
Philosophical Psychology, 34:1, 28-46, 
DOI: 10.1080/09515089.2020.1861234

Abstract

Evidence about whether reflective thinking may be induced and whether it affects utilitarian choices is inconclusive. Research suggests that answering items correctly in the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) before responding to dilemmas may lead to more utilitarian decisions. However, it is unclear to what extent this effect is driven by the inhibition of intuitive wrong responses (reflection) versus the requirement to engage in deliberative processing. To clarify this issue, participants completed either the CRT or the Berlin Numeracy Test (BNT) – which does not require reflection – before responding to moral dilemmas. To distinguish between the potential effect of participants’ previous reflective traits and that of performing a task that can increase reflectivity, we manipulated whether participants received feedback for incorrect items. Findings revealed that both CRT and BNT scores predicted utilitarian decisions when feedback was not provided. Additionally, feedback enhanced performance for both tasks, although it only increased utilitarian decisions when it was linked to the BNT. Taken together, these results suggest that performance in a numeric task that requires deliberative thinking may predict utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas. The finding that feedback increased utilitarian decisions only in the case of BNT casts doubt upon the reflective-utilitarian link.

From the General Discussion

Our data, however, did not fully support these predictions. Although feedback resulted in more utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas, this effect was mostly attributable to feedback on the BNT.  The effect was  not  attributable to differences in baseline task-performance. Additionally, both CRT and BNT scores predicted utilitarian responses when feedback was not provided. That  performance in the CRT predicts  utilitarian decisions is in agreement with a previous study linking cognitive reflection to utilitarian choice (Paxton et al., 2012; but see Sirota, Kostovicova, Juanchich, & Dewberry, pre-print, for the absence of effect when using a verbal CRT without numeric component).

Wednesday, June 16, 2021

Lazy, Not Biased: Susceptibility to Partisan Fake News Is Better Explained by Lack of Reasoning Than by Motivated Reasoning

Pennycook, G. & Rand, D. G.
Cognition. (2019)
Volume 188, July 2019, Pages 39-50

Abstract

Why do people believe blatantly inaccurate news headlines (“fake news”)? Do we use our reasoning abilities to convince ourselves that statements that align with our ideology are true, or does reasoning allow us to effectively differentiate fake from real regardless of political ideology? Here we test these competing accounts in two studies (total N = 3,446 Mechanical Turk workers) by using the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) as a measure of the propensity to engage in analytical reasoning. We find that CRT performance is negatively correlated with the perceived accuracy of fake news, and positively correlated with the ability to discern fake news from real news – even for headlines that align with individuals’ political ideology. Moreover, overall discernment was actually better for ideologically aligned headlines than for misaligned headlines. Finally, a headline-level analysis finds that CRT is negatively correlated with perceived accuracy of relatively implausible (primarily fake) headlines, and positively correlated with perceived accuracy of relatively plausible (primarily real) headlines. In contrast, the correlation between CRT and perceived accuracy is unrelated to how closely the headline aligns with the participant’s ideology. Thus, we conclude that analytic thinking is used to assess the plausibility of headlines, regardless of whether the stories are consistent or inconsistent with one’s political ideology. Our findings therefore suggest that susceptibility to fake news is driven more by lazy thinking than it is by partisan bias per se – a finding that opens potential avenues for fighting fake news.

Highlights

• Participants rated perceived accuracy of fake and real news headlines.

• Analytic thinking was associated with ability to discern between fake and real.

• We found no evidence that analytic thinking exacerbates motivated reasoning.

• Falling for fake news is more a result of a lack of thinking than partisanship.