Performance on the Cognitive Reflection Test is stable across time

By M. Stagnaro, Gordon Pennycook, David G. Rand. Judgment and Decision Making, 2018

92 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A widely used measure of individual propensity to utilize analytic processing is the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), a set of math problems with intuitively compelling but incorrect answers. Here, we ask whether scores on this measure are temporally stable. We aggregate data from 11 studies run on Amazon Mechanical Turk in which the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) was administered and identify N = 3,302 unique individuals who completed the CRT two or more times. We find a strong correlation between an individual’s first and last CRT performance, r = .806. This remains true even when constraining to data points separated by over 2 years, r = .755. Furthermore, we find that CRT scores from one timepoint correlated negatively with belief in God and social conservatism from the other timepoint (and to a similar extent as scores gathered at the same timepoint). These results show that CRT scores are stable over time, and – given the stable relationship between CRT and religious belief and ideology – provide some evidence for the stability of analytic cognitive style more generally.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fe6a66fe637663912fac50cb365c410415cb70f3

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Citations in the corpus

Analytic-thinking predicts hoax beliefs and helping behaviors in response to the COVID-19 pandemic (2020, background): “Importantly, prior exposure to the CRT does not seem to adversely affect the predictive validity of the CRT, and people continue to incorrectly respond to the same items in subsequent exposures (Bialek & Pennycook, 2018; Meyer et al., 2018; Stagnaro et al., 2018).”