The aim of our study was to explore psychological determinants of COVID-19 responsible behavior. We focused on trait anxiety and worry about the corona crisis, knowledge and unfounded beliefs about coronavirus and thinking dispositions (cognitive reflection, actively open-minded thinking, faith in intuition and science curiosity) that should drive knowledge and beliefs. Additionally, we tested the effectiveness of a one-shot intervention based on the "consider counter-arguments" debiasing technique in changing COVID-19 unfounded beliefs. We used a convenience sample of 1439 participants who filled in the questionnaire on-line. Comparison of latent means showed that the "consider counter-arguments" intervention did not affect unfounded beliefs. Structural equation model, conducted on 962 participants with data on all variables, indicated that greater worry and weaker endorsement of COVID-19 unfounded beliefs lead to more responsible COVID-19 behavior. The relationship of trait anxiety and thinking dispositions with the criterion was mediated through the worry about COVID-19 and unfounded beliefs about COVID-19, respectively.

The aim of our study was to explore psychological determinants of COVID-19 responsible behavior. We focused on trait anxiety and worry about the corona crisis, and knowledge/unfounded beliefs about coronavirus and thinking dispositions (cognitive reflection, actively open-minded thinking, faith in intuition and science curiosity) that should drive knowledge/beliefs. Additionally, we tested the effectiveness of a one-shot intervention based on the “consider-the-opposite” debiasing technique in changing COVID-19 unfounded beliefs. We used a convenience sample of 1439 participants who filled in the questionnaire on-line. Comparison of latent means showed that the “consider-the-opposite” intervention did not affect unfounded beliefs. Structural equation model, conducted on 880 participants with data on all variables, indicated that greater worry and weaker endorsement of COVID-19 unfounded beliefs lead to more responsible COVID-19 behavior. The relationship of trait anxiety and thinking dispositions with the criterion was mediated through the worry about COVID-19 and unfounded beliefs about COVID-19, respectively.

Although it is generally acknowledged that the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) captures intelligence and numerical ability, many agree that it cannot be completely reduced to these constructs. Rather, it is presumed that the CRT also assesses some kind of thinking disposition towards reflective and open-minded thinking. In this manuscript, we report the results of a study that tested this assumption by exploring convergent validity of both the numerical and verbal version of the CRT. Using structural equation modelling, we investigated whether intelligence and numerical ability can account for all the variance in the CRT and if not, what is the nature of the unaccounted variance. Our conclusions about the convergent validity differed for the two types of test. For the numerical CRT, we found that the correlation between the latent numerical CRT and numerical ability was so high that the constructs were practically indistinguishable. As for the verbal CRT, the correlations between the latent verbal CRT and intelligence and numerical ability constructs were substantially lower, meaning that these two constructs do not account for all the variance in the test. However, the latent verbal CRT failed to correlate with belief bias and actively open-minded thinking, two closely related constructs, once the variance of intelligence and numerical ability was partialled out. We concluded that, despite its name, the CRT does not seem to assess the construct of cognitive reflection and its correlation with other variables found in the literature might mostly be driven by its overlap with intelligence and numerical ability.

The aim of the study was to test convergent/discriminant validity of two measures of cognitive reflection, cognitive reflection test (CRT) and belief bias syllogisms (BBS) and to investigate whether their distinctive characteristic of luring participants into giving wrong intuitive responses explains their relationships with various abilities and disposition measures. Our results show that the same traits largely account for performance on both non-lure task, the Berlin Numeracy Test (BNT), and CRT and explain their correlations with other variables. These results also imply that the predictive validity of CRT for wide range of outcomes does not stem from lures. Regarding the BBS, we found that its correlations with other measures were substantially diminished once we accounted for the effects of BNT. This also implies that the lures are not the reason for the correlation between BBS and these measure. We conclude that the lures are not the reason why cognitive reflection tasks correlate with different outcomes. Our results call into question an original definition of CRT as a measure of ability or disposition to resist reporting first response that comes to mind, as well as the validity of results of studies showing “incremental validity” of CRT over numeracy.

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