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The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) has been used in thousands of studies across several fields of behavioural research. The CRT has fascinated scholars because it commonly elicits incorrect answers despite most respondents possessing the necessary knowledge to reach the correct answer. Traditional interpretations of CRT performance asserted that correct responding was the result of corrective reasoning involving the inhibition and correction of the incorrect response and incorrect responding was an indication of miserly thinking without feelings of uncertainty. Recently, however, these assertions have been challenged. We extend this work by employing novel eye-tracking techniques to examine whether people use corrective cognitive pathways to reach correct solutions, and whether heuristic respondents demonstrate gaze-based signs of uncertainty. Eye movements suggest that correct responding on the CRT is the result of intuitive not corrective cognitive pathways, and that heuristic respondents show signs of gaze-based uncertainty.

Teleology involves an appeal to function to explain why things are the way they are. Among scientists and philosophers, teleological explanations are widely accepted for human-made artifacts and biological traits, yet controversial for biological and nonbiological natural entities. Prior research shows a positive relationship between religiosity and acceptance of such controversial teleological explanations. Across three large online studies, we show that the relationship between religiosity and teleological acceptance cannot be explained by acceptance of objectively false explanations. Furthermore, we show that anthropomorphism and a belief in supernatural agents each independently predict teleological acceptance. In contrast, the tendency to inhibit intuitively appealing, yet incorrect responses to simple reasoning problems was associated with lower teleological acceptance. These results provide strong support for an intention-based account of teleology, and further contribute to the existing literature which situates teleological reasoning within a dual-process framework. Several avenues of future research are discussed, including the need to dissociate implicit and explicit measures of teleological belief, and the need for a greater focus on cross-cultural variation in teleological beliefs.

Previous research suggests that people implicitly believe that biological and nonbiological natural entities exist to fulfil certain functions (i.e., people hold implicit teleological beliefs). The standard experimental paradigm used to demonstrate this is to compare rates of teleological acceptance in an un-speeded condition to acceptance in a speeded condition. As speeded decision-making limits the opportunity to engage in reflective thought, increased rates of teleological acceptance relative to the un-speeded condition are said to provide evidence of implicit teleological beliefs. Across two large online studies, we show that due to the exclusion criteria typically used in this paradigm, the included and excluded participants vary systemically in important ways between conditions, and that increased rates of teleological acceptance during speeded responding does not provide evidence of implicit teleological beliefs. Rather, the difference between conditions can be explained by increased acceptance of explanations which are objectively false. Furthermore, we show that a key assumption underpinning the use of this paradigm – that accepting teleological explanations should be effortless and rejecting them should require effort – is not supported by the data. These results highlight not only a methodological issue, but also a theoretical issue in the current literature. We discuss the implications of these findings in the context of existing theoretical and empirical literature on teleological reasoning and dual-process theory more generally.