An easy fix for reasoning errors: Attention capturers improve reasoning performance

Abstract

Research on problem-solving, judgement, and decision making documents systematic reasoning errors. Such errors are often attributed to reasoning shortcomings, an inability to think properly. However, recent research suggests another cause for those errors: insufficient attention to the critical premises in a problem, resulting in miscomprehension, such that, even if a person is capable of reasoning properly, she will fail to solve the problem correctly if she is operating on wrong premises. The first study in this article provided further evidence for this comprehension account of reasoning errors: Performance on reasoning problems was found to relate to verbal comprehension on a separate task. This suggests that reasoning errors are in part due to lack of comprehension. The upside of this account is that it should be possible to improve reasoning performance by drawing attention to the critical premises. Three additional studies provided consistent evidence for this hypothesis, showing that the same participants who at first proved unable to solve certain problems correctly were able to overcome this inability and performed better when simple attention-capturing devices drew their attention to the critical premises.