Individual differences in conflict detection during reasoning

Abstract

Decades of reasoning and decision-making research have established that human judgment is often biased by intuitive heuristics. Recent "error" or bias detection studies have focused on reasoners' abilities to detect whether their heuristic answer conflicts with logical or probabilistic principles. A key open question is whether there are individual differences in this bias detection efficiency. Here we present three studies in which co-registration of different error detection measures (confidence, response time and confidence response time) allowed us to assess bias detection sensitivity at the individual participant level in a range of reasoning tasks. The results indicate that although most individuals show robust bias detection, as indexed by increased latencies and decreased confidence, there is a subgroup of reasoners who consistently fail to do so. We discuss theoretical and practical implications for the field.

Individual differences in logical intuitions on reasoning problems presented under two-response paradigm

“…However, participants did not differ in their detection efficiency at As can be seen from the overall detection efficiency, participants successfully detected more than half of the conflicts on the tasks on which they were biased. Such relatively high prevalence of successful detection was also observed in previous studies which report individual-level conflict detection analyses (Frey et al, 2018;Mevel et al, 2014;Pennycook et al, 2015;Šrol & De Neys, 2019). Interestingly, participants' detection efficiency is remarkably similar at the initial and final response stage, suggesting that sensitivity to conflict takes place very early in the reasoning process (Bago et al, 2018).…”

Dual Processing in Syllogistic Reasoning

“…Within hybrid (De Neys, 2014) and three-stage (Pennycook et al, 2015) DPT models, the conflict between responses has been conceptualized as a clash between intuitions, rather than between an intuition and a thought. Implicit awareness of the belief-logic conflict was demonstrated by showing how even biased reasoners implicitly activate basic normative principles, which was evidenced by lower confidence or increased response time on incorrectly solved conflict items in comparison to correctly answered non-conflict items (Brisson et al, 2018;De Neys & Franssens, 2009;De Neys & Glumicic, 2008;De Neys et al, 2010, 2013Frey et al, 2018). This finding is validated through different indirect measures on various reasoning tasks (see e.g.…”

“…Also, considering mixed results of recent studies (Frey & De Neys, 2017;Frey et al, 2018;Pennycook et al, 2015), present research was aimed to examine if there is a correlation between conflict sensitivity, measured through confidence ratings, and response accuracy. Finally, it was expected that measures of cognitive decoupling, also derived from corresponding confidence ratings, will correlate positively with performance on conflict items, despite the fact that Pennycook and colleagues (2015) reported negative correlation, although for a somewhat different measure of decoupling.…”

“…Bearing in mind considerable noisiness of individual measures of conflict detection (see e.g. De Neys, 2018; Frey & De Neys, 2017;Frey et al, 2018;Pennycook et al, 2015), absolute difference scores for each participant were divided by observed variability of his/her confidence ratings across all items, irrespective of task conflict and response accuracy. In such way, they were transformed into a measure which holds a resemblance to Cohen's d, and the weight was put on differences between corresponding confidence ratings for participants who generally showed less variability in confidence ratings.…”

Commentary: Seeing the conflict: an attentional account of reasoning errors

“…Within samples of biased responders there are subgroups of participants across various tasks who do, indeed, fail to detect reasoning conflicts. This group tends to range from 15 to 40% of incorrect responders (Mevel et al, 2015; Pennycook et al, 2015; Frey et al, 2017). Yet, the majority of even biased individuals detect conflict across a number of tasks that make use of different measures, suggesting that there is no good empirical reason to universally equate incorrect responding with insensitivity to conflict.…”