Inducing Cognitive Reflection and its Impact on Contradictory Belief Holding

The idea that there are 2 distinct processing modes is seen throughout social and cognitive psychology research. One mode is generally fast, automatic, and relatively effortless, while the other is slow, systematic, and effortful. One mechanism of effortful processing is cognitive reflection which is one’s ability to reflect on their intuition. The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) is a 3-item measure that quantifies a person’s ability to recognize an intuitive answer as incorrect and identify the correct response. Additionally, a yea-yeaing score was collected to measure how often a person agrees with a statement and its opposite (i.e., endorses contradictory beliefs). In this study, two techniques were investigated to see if cognitive reflection could be explicitly induced. Participants either read a prompt before beginning the CRT, received feedback about the incorrect and correct answers following each CRT question, or simply took the CRT without any induction techniques. The results revealed that a prompt prior to CRT completion is an effective explicit induction technique that significantly increases CRT scores. Contradictory belief holding was not impacted by explicit induction of cognitive reflection. Implications and future directions for this research are explored