4 ms·

This post title is heavily editorialized. The article title is "Cognitive Reflection Test - Examples of Reacting vs Checking", and doesn't really attempt to giv

This post title is heavily editorialized. The article title is "Cognitive Reflection Test - Examples of Reacting vs Checking", and doesn't really attempt to give a canonical answer the question of why many people fail the CRT. It discusses some possible reasons (mainly Kahnemans two modes of thinking) and proposes a 3-step strategy to to avoid falling into the trap of going with ones initial, gut feeling. The actual reason for the high proportion of failures doesn't seem that complicated, personally I'd label it as "falling for trick questions" and is something everyone is likely to do if such questions come out of the blue, especially if under some time constraint. Our minds tend to be as economical as possible.

twelve40 4y ago
yes exactly, i "failed" that test myself but then i thought, why didn't i do better? Because the cost of failing in this case is absolutely nothing, and the brain automatically optimizes for speed with the first random answer.
mytailorisrich 4y ago
The 3 questions quoted in another comment are not trick questions and they obviously did not come out of the blue for anyone taking the test. They are simple reasoning questions. IMHO, people tend to "fall for them" not because they are trick questions but because people don't really reason carefully. The standard advice I have always received is to read the actual question carefully, the whole question and nothing but the question. This might catch a random member of the public but you would think university students are at their peak of "reading test questions skills". Here I think what the questions do is that they may cause our brain to very quickly come up with a shortcut and wrong answer, which should immediately be discarded if you were indeed carefully reading the question, i.e. paying attention (so maybe indeed something like a conflict between 'fast and slow thinking').

twelve40 4y ago

yes exactly, i "failed" that test myself but then i thought, why didn't i do better? Because the cost of failing in this case is absolutely nothing, and the brain automatically optimizes for speed with the first random answer.

mytailorisrich 4y ago

The 3 questions quoted in another comment are not trick questions and they obviously did not come out of the blue for anyone taking the test. They are simple reasoning questions. IMHO, people tend to "fall for them" not because they are trick questions but because people don't really reason carefully. The standard advice I have always received is to read the actual question carefully, the whole question and nothing but the question. This might catch a random member of the public but you would think university students are at their peak of "reading test questions skills". Here I think what the questions do is that they may cause our brain to very quickly come up with a shortcut and wrong answer, which should immediately be discarded if you were indeed carefully reading the question, i.e. paying attention (so maybe indeed something like a conflict between 'fast and slow thinking').