The Smart Intuitor: Cognitive Capacity Predicts Intuitive Rather Than Deliberate Thinking
Résumé
Research into heuristics and biases has shown that people are often biased by their intuitions. Overriding and correcting biased intuitions is a demanding process that often fails. Thus, cognitive capacity is commonly assumed to predict performance in classical reasoning tasks because people higher in cognitive capacity are better at this deliberate correction process. However, recent findings suggest that people also have accurate, “logical” intuitions and that there can be a positive correlation between cognitive capacity and correct intuitive thinking. Two studies investigated the respective contribution of cognitive capacity to generating correct intuitions or successful deliberate correction of an incorrect intuition. Although cognitive capacity was associated with the correction tendency, it was more predictive of correct intuitive responding.