Conflict detection predicts the temporal stability of intuitive and deliberate reasoning

Abstract

Although the susceptibility to reasoning biases is often assumed to be a stable trait, the temporal stability of people’s performance on popular heuristics-and-biases tasks has been rarely directly tested. The present study addressed this issue and examined a potential determinant for answer change. Participants solved the same set of “bias” tasks twice in two test sessions, two weeks apart. We used the two-response paradigm to test the stability of both initial (intuitive) and final (deliberate) responses. We hypothesized that participants who showed higher conflict detection in their initial intuitive responses at session 1 (as indexed by a relative confidence decrease compared to control problems), would be less stable in their responses between session 1 and 2. Results showed that performance on the reasoning tasks was highly, but not entirely, stable two weeks later. Notably, conflict detection in session 1 was significantly more pronounced in those cases that participants changed their answer between session 1 and 2 than when they did not change their answer between sessions. We discuss practical and theoretical implications.

Keywords:

• Dual-process theory
• conflict detection
• two-response paradigm
• heuristics-and-biases

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Open data statament

Data for this study are publicly available at OSF: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/QZM2T

Notes

1 When we refer to the “logical”, “normative”, or “correct” response we are referring to the response that has traditionally been considered to be correct according to standard logic and probability theory.

2 Since the dominance of two intuitions of similar strength can be reversed by random noise, we should note that this reversal can go both ways. More specifically, a participant’s heuristic response at the first test session can be turned into a logical response at the re-test session and vice versa (i.e., a logical response at the test session can become a heuristic response at the re-test session).

3 Note that we used only the dominant no-conflict “11” category for this contrast, as responses in the other no-conflict direction of change categories cannot be interpreted unequivocally.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a research grant (DIAGNOR, ANR16-CE28-0010-01) from the Agence Nationale de la Recherche, France. Aikaterini Voudouri was supported by an IdEx doctoral fellowship from the University of Paris.