Research Article Smarter Than We Think When Our Brains Detect That We Are Biased

ABSTRACT—Human reasoning is often biased by stereo-typical intuitions. The nature of such bias is not clear. Some authors claim that people aremere heuristic thinkers and are not aware that cued stereotypes might be inap-propriate. Other authors claim that people always detect the conflict between their stereotypical thinking and nor-mative reasoning, but simply fail to inhibit stereotypical thinking.Hence, it is unclearwhether heuristic bias should be attributed to a lack of conflict detection or a failure of inhibition. We introduce a neuroscientific approach that bears on this issue. Participants answered a classic deci-sion-making problem (the ‘‘lawyer-engineer’ ’ problem) while the activation of brain regions believed to be involved in conflict detection (anterior cingulate) and response in-hibition (lateral prefrontal cortex) wasmonitored. Result