Abstract
Human reasoning is often biased by intuitive heuristics. A central question is whether the bias results from a failure to detect that the intuitions conflict with traditional normative considerations or from a failure to discard the tempting intuitions. The present study addressed this unresolved debate by using people's decision confidence as a nonverbal index of conflict detection. Participants were asked to indicate how confident they were after solving classic base-rate (Experiment 1) and conjunction fallacy (Experiment 2) problems in which a cued intuitive response could be inconsistent or consistent with the traditional correct response. Results indicated that reasoners showed a clear confidence decrease when they gave an intuitive response that conflicted with the normative response. Contrary to popular belief, this establishes that people seem to acknowledge that their intuitive answers are not fully warranted. Experiment 3 established that younger reasoners did not yet show the confidence decrease, which points to the role of improved bias awareness in our reasoning development. Implications for the long standing debate on human rationality are discussed.
Highlights
Human judgment is often biased by erroneous intuitions
The accuracy on the base-rate problems replicated the findings in previous studies (e.g., [13,15])
The analysis focused on the contrast between the confidence ratings of the group of students who failed to solve the first conflict problem and those who solved a no-conflict problem
Summary
For example, the success of the popular ‘‘Buy One, Get Second One 50% Off’’ sale you often see at retail stores. If you buy one item you get the opportunity to buy a second, similar one for only half of the original price. Even when we do not need the second item, we will often be tempted to buy it because our intuition is telling us that by not taking the offer we are missing out on a unique opportunity to get something for ‘‘only half of the original price’’. If you do not need a specific good, spending any money to obtain it is a waste of scarce financial resources. While we intuitively think that we are saving money, the store marketeers are tricking us to spend more than we should
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