Correlations of cognitive reflection with judgments and choices

Abstract

AbstractWe investigated the role of individual differences in cognitive reflection in decision making. We measured the performance of 157 participants in the cognitive reflection test (Frederick, 2005) and a number of decision-making tasks. We examined the relation of cognitive reflection with performance in tasks that assess correspondence (as distinct from coherence), such as predicting the ratings of chess players. We found significant correlations between cognitive reflection and all the estimation measures in correspondence tasks. Our results suggest that cognitive reflection is a thinking disposition that includes more characteristics than originally proposed by Frederick (2005). We proposed that cognitive reflection is related to the concept of actively open-minded thinking (Baron, 1985, 2008). We concluded that cognitive reflection is a thinking disposition that interacts with knowledge, domain-specific heuristics and characteristics of the environment and that it may play an essential role in the adaptation of the decision maker to different environments and situations.