Gordon Pennycook

Intuition, reason, and metacognition

Dual Process Theories (DPT) of reasoning posit that judgments are mediated by both fast, automatic processes and more deliberate, analytic ones. A critical, but unanswered question concerns the issue of monitoring and control: When do reasoners rely on the first, intuitive output and when do they engage more effortful thinking? We hypothesised that initial, intuitive answers are accompanied by a metacognitive experience, called the Feeling of Rightness (FOR), which can signal when additional analysis is needed. In separate experiments, reasoners completed one of four tasks: conditional reasoning (N=60), a three-term variant of conditional reasoning (N=48), problems used to measure base rate neglect (N=128), or a syllogistic reasoning task (N=64). For each task, participants were instructed to provide an initial, intuitive response to the problem along with an assessment of the rightness of that answer (FOR). They were then allowed as much time as needed to reconsider their initial answer and provide a final answer. In each experiment, we observed a robust relationship between the FOR and two measures of analytic thinking: low FOR was associated with longer rethinking times and an increased probability of answer change. In turn, FOR judgments were consistently predicted by the fluency with which the initial answer was produced, providing a link to the wider literature on metamemory. These data support a model in which a metacognitive judgment about a first, initial model determines the extent of analytic engagement.

Analytic cognitive style predicts religious and paranormal belief.

An analytic cognitive style denotes a propensity to set aside highly salient intuitions when engaging in problem solving. We assess the hypothesis that an analytic cognitive style is associated with a history of questioning, altering, and rejecting (i.e., unbelieving) supernatural claims, both religious and paranormal. In two studies, we examined associations of God beliefs, religious engagement (attendance at religious services, praying, etc.), conventional religious beliefs (heaven, miracles, etc.) and paranormal beliefs (extrasensory perception, levitation, etc.) with performance measures of cognitive ability and analytic cognitive style. An analytic cognitive style negatively predicted both religious and paranormal beliefs when controlling for cognitive ability as well as religious engagement, sex, age, political ideology, and education. Participants more willing to engage in analytic reasoning were less likely to endorse supernatural beliefs. Further, an association between analytic cognitive style and religious engagement was mediated by religious beliefs, suggesting that an analytic cognitive style negatively affects religious engagement via lower acceptance of conventional religious beliefs. Results for types of God belief indicate that the association between an analytic cognitive style and God beliefs is more nuanced than mere acceptance and rejection, but also includes adopting less conventional God beliefs, such as Pantheism or Deism. Our data are consistent with the idea that two people who share the same cognitive ability, education, political ideology, sex, age and level of religious engagement can acquire very different sets of beliefs about the world if they differ in their propensity to think analytically.

The role of answer fluency and perceptual fluency as metacognitive cues for initiating analytic thinking.

Although widely studied in other domains, relatively little is known about the metacognitive processes that monitor and control behaviour during reasoning and decision-making. In this paper, we examined the conditions under which two fluency cues are used to monitor initial reasoning: answer fluency, or the speed with which the initial, intuitive answer is produced (Thompson, Prowse Turner, & Pennycook, 2011), and perceptual fluency, or the ease with which problems can be read (Alter, Oppenheimer, Epley, & Eyre, 2007). The first two experiments demonstrated that answer fluency reliably predicted Feeling of Rightness (FOR) judgments to conditional inferences and base rate problems, which subsequently predicted the amount of deliberate processing as measured by thinking time and answer changes; answer fluency also predicted retrospective confidence judgments (Experiment 3b). Moreover, the effect of answer fluency on reasoning was independent from the effect of perceptual fluency, establishing that these are empirically independent constructs. In five experiments with a variety of reasoning problems similar to those of Alter et al. (2007), we found no effect of perceptual fluency on FOR, retrospective confidence or accuracy; however, we did observe that participants spent more time thinking about hard to read stimuli, although this additional time did not result in answer changes. In our final two experiments, we found that perceptual disfluency increased accuracy on the CRT (Frederick, 2005), but only amongst participants of high cognitive ability. As Alter et al.s samples were gathered from prestigious universities, collectively, the data to this point suggest that perceptual fluency prompts additional processing in general, but this processing may results in higher accuracy only for the most cognitively able.

Cognitive style and religiosity: The role of conflict detection

Recent research has indicated a negative relation between the propensity for analytic reasoning and religious beliefs and practices. Here, we propose conflict detection as a mechanism underlying this relation, on the basis of the hypothesis that more-analytic people are less religious, in part, because they are more sensitive to conflicts between immaterial religious beliefs and beliefs about the material world. To examine cognitive conflict sensitivity, we presented problems containing stereotypes that conflicted with base-rate probabilities in a task with no religious content. In three studies, we found evidence that religiosity is negatively related to conflict detection during reasoning. Independent measures of analytic cognitive style also positively predicted conflict detection. The present findings provide evidence for a mechanism potentially contributing to the negative association between analytic thinking and religiosity, and more generally, they illustrate the insights to be gained from integrating individual-difference factors and contextual factors to investigate analytic reasoning.

The brain in your pocket

Novel framing of Smartphone use as instantiation of extended mind.Lower analytic thinking associates with increased Smartphone use.Results suggest that people offload thinking to the device.Supports conceptualization of Smartphone use as a type of cognitive miserliness. With the advent of Smartphone technology, access to the internet and its associated knowledge base is at ones fingertips. What consequences does this have for human cognition? We frame Smartphone use as an instantiation of the extended mind-the notion that our cognition goes beyond our brains-and in so doing, characterize a modern form of cognitive miserliness. Specifically, that people typically forego effortful analytic thinking in lieu of fast and easy intuition suggests that individuals may allow their Smartphones to do their thinking for them. Our account predicts that individuals who are relatively less willing and/or able to engage effortful reasoning processes may compensate by relying on the internet through their Smartphones. Across three studies, we find that those who think more intuitively and less analytically when given reasoning problems were more likely to rely on their Smartphones (i.e., extended mind) for information in their everyday lives. There was no such association with the amount of time using the Smartphone for social media and entertainment purposes, nor did boredom proneness qualify any of our results. These findings demonstrate that people may offload thinking to technology, which in turn demands that psychological science understand the meshing of mind and media to adequately characterize human experience and cognition in the modern era.

The role of analytic thinking in moral judgements and values

While individual differences in the willingness and ability to engage analytic processing have long informed research in reasoning and decision making, the implications of such differences have not yet had a strong influence in other domains of psychological research. We claim that analytic thinking is not limited to problems that have a normative basis and, as an extension of this, predict that individual differences in analytic thinking will be influential in determining beliefs and values. Along with assessments of cognitive ability and style, religious beliefs, and moral values, participants judged the wrongness of acts considered disgusting and conventionally immoral, but that do not violate care- or fairness-based moral principles. Differences in willingness to engage analytic thinking predicted reduced judgements of wrongness, independent of demographics, political ideology, religiosity, and moral values. Further, we show that those who were higher in cognitive ability were less likely to indicate that purity, patriotism, and respect for traditions and authority are important to their moral thinking. These findings are consistent with a “Reflectionist” view that assumes a role for analytic thought in determining substantive, deeply-held human beliefs and values.

Reasoning with base rates is routine, relatively effortless, and context dependent

We tested models of base rate “neglect” using a novel paradigm. Participants (N = 62) judged the probability that a hypothetical person belonged to one of two categories (e.g., nurse/doctor) on the basis of either a personality description alone (NoBR) or the personality description and a base rate probability (BR). When base rates and descriptions were congruent, judgments in the BR condition were higher and more uniform than those in the NoBR condition. In contrast, base rates had a polarizing effect on judgments when they were incongruent with the descriptions, such that estimates were either consistent with the base rates or discrepant with them. These data suggest that the form of base rate use (i.e., whether base rates will be integrated with diagnostic information) is context dependent. In addition, judgments made under instructions to respond intuitively were influenced by the base rates and took the same length of time in the two conditions. These data suggest that the use of base rates is routine and effortless and that base rate “neglect” is really a mixture of two strategies, one that is informed primarily by the base rate and the other by the personality description.

Is the cognitive reflection test a measure of both reflection and intuition

The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) is one of the most widely used tools to assess individual differences in intuitive–analytic cognitive styles. The CRT is of broad interest because each of its items reliably cues a highly available and superficially appropriate but incorrect response, conventionally deemed the “intuitive” response. To do well on the CRT, participants must reflect on and question the intuitive responses. The CRT score typically employed is the sum of correct responses, assumed to indicate greater “reflectiveness” (i.e., CRT–Reflective scoring). Some recent researchers have, however, inverted the rationale of the CRT by summing the number of intuitive incorrect responses, creating a putative measure of intuitiveness (i.e., CRT–Intuitive). We address the feasibility and validity of this strategy by considering the problem of the structural dependency of these measures derived from the CRT and by assessing their respective associations with self-report measures of intuitive–analytic cognitive styles: the Faith in Intuition and Need for Cognition scales. Our results indicated that, to the extent that the dependency problem can be addressed, the CRT–Reflective but not the CRT–Intuitive measure predicts intuitive–analytic cognitive styles. These results provide evidence that the CRT is a valid measure of reflective but not of intuitive thinking.

Everyday Consequences of Analytic Thinking

We review recent evidence revealing that the mere willingness to engage analytic reasoning as a means to override intuitive gut feelings is a meaningful predictor of key psychological outcomes in diverse areas of everyday life. For example, those with a more analytic thinking style are more skeptical about religious, paranormal, and conspiratorial concepts. In addition, analytic thinking relates to having less traditional moral values, making less emotional or disgust-based moral judgments, and being less cooperative and more rationally self-interested in social dilemmas. Analytic thinkers are even less likely to offload thinking to smartphone technology and may be more creative. Taken together, these results indicate that the propensity to think analytically has major consequences for individual psychology.

Atheists and Agnostics Are More Reflective than Religious Believers: Four Empirical Studies and a Meta-Analysis

Individual differences in the mere willingness to think analytically has been shown to predict religious disbelief. Recently, however, it has been argued that analytic thinkers are not actually less religious; rather, the putative association may be a result of religiosity typically being measured after analytic thinking (an order effect). In light of this possibility, we report four studies in which a negative correlation between religious belief and performance on analytic thinking measures is found when religious belief is measured in a separate session. We also performed a meta-analysis on all previously published studies on the topic along with our four new studies (N = 15,078, k = 31), focusing specifically on the association between performance on the Cognitive Reflection Test (the most widely used individual difference measure of analytic thinking) and religious belief. This meta-analysis revealed an overall negative correlation (r) of -.18, 95% CI [-.21, -.16]. Although this correlation is modest, self-identified atheists (N = 133) scored 18.7% higher than religiously affiliated individuals (N = 597) on a composite measure of analytic thinking administered across our four new studies (d = .72). Our results indicate that the association between analytic thinking and religious disbelief is not caused by a simple order effect. There is good evidence that atheists and agnostics are more reflective than religious believers.