Intuition and analytic processes in probabilistic reasoning: The role of time pressure

Assessing inoculation's effectiveness in motivating resistance to conspiracy propaganda in Finnish and United States samples

Introduction

This study tested the motivational power of inoculation to foster resistance to conspiracy propaganda (9/11 Truth Movement), comparing inoculation effects across United States and Finnish study participants.

Method

We used a 2 inoculation (treatment vs. control)  ×  2 national culture (American vs. Finnish) independent groups design (N = 319), while examining the effects of motivational threat and thinking modes-analytic vs. intuitive-on the inoculation process. To test the effectiveness of the inoculation strategy, we used an excerpt from a conspiracy film Loose Change as a counterattitudinal attack message.

Results

Our results indicated that inoculation was effective at motivating resistance regardless of national culture. Inoculation effects emerged mostly as a direct effect on resistance and two indirect effects wherein motivational threat mediated the relationship between inoculation and resistance as well as inoculation and analytic mode of message processing. Although we found that an increase in analytic mode of processing facilitated resistance and intuitive processing increased conspiracy-theory endorsement, the indirect effects between inoculation and resistance via message processing modes were not significant. Finally, the data revealed national culture differences in analytic mode and cultural-context differences mostly pertaining to the relationships between thinking styles, media literacy, and modes of thinking.

Discussion

These results offer important theoretical implications for inoculation scholarship and suggest viable practical solutions for efforts to mitigate misinformation and conspiratorial beliefs.

Previous beliefs affect Bayesian reasoning in conditions fostering gist comprehension

It has been shown that Bayesian reasoning is affected by the believability of the data, but it is unknown which conditions could potentiate or reduce such belief effect. Here, we tested the hypothesis that the belief effect would mainly be observed in conditions fostering a gist comprehension of the data. Accordingly, we expected to observe a significant belief effect in iconic rather than in textual presentations and, in general, when nonnumerical estimates were requested. The results of three studies showed more accurate Bayesian estimates, either expressed numerically or nonnumerically, for icons than for text descriptions of natural frequencies. Moreover, in line with our expectations, nonnumerical estimates were, in general, more accurate for believable rather than for unbelievable scenarios. In contrast, the belief effect on the accuracy of the numerical estimates depended on the format and on the complexity of the calculation. The present findings also showed that single-event posterior probability estimates based on described frequencies were more accurate when expressed nonnumerically rather than numerically, opening new avenues for the development of interventions to improve Bayesian reasoning.

Numeracy, gist, literal thinking and the value of nothing in decision making

The onus on the average person is greater than ever before to make sense of large amounts of readily accessible quantitative information, but the ability and confidence to do so are frequently lacking. Many people lack practical mathematical skills that are essential for evaluating risks, probabilities and numerical outcomes such as survival rates for medical treatments, income from retirement savings plans or monetary damages in civil trials. In this Review, we integrate research on objective and subjective numeracy, focusing on cognitive and metacognitive factors that distort human perceptions and foment systematic biases in judgement and decision making. Paradoxically, an important implication of this research is that a literal focus on objective numbers and mechanical number crunching is misguided. Numbers can be a matter of life and death but a person who uses rote strategies (verbatim representations) cannot take advantage of the information contained in the numbers because 'rote' strategies are, by definition, processing without meaning. Verbatim representations (verbatim is only surface form, not meaning) treat numbers as data as opposed to information. We highlight a contrasting approach of gist extraction: organizing numbers meaningfully, interpreting them qualitatively and making meaningful inferences about them. Efforts to improve numerical cognition and its practical applications can benefit from emphasizing the qualitative meaning of numbers in context - the gist - building on the strengths of humans as intuitive mathematicians. Thus, we conclude by reviewing evidence that gist training facilitates transfer to new contexts and, because it is more durable, longer-lasting improvements in decision making.

Thinking more or thinking differently? Using drift-diffusion modeling to illuminate why accuracy prompts decrease misinformation sharing

Recent experiments have found that prompting people to think about accuracy reduces misinformation sharing intentions. The process by which this effect operates, however, remains unclear. Do accuracy prompts cause people to "stop and think," increasing deliberation? Or do they change what people think about, drawing attention to accuracy? Since these two accounts predict the same behavioral outcomes (i.e., increased sharing discernment following a prompt), we used computational modeling of sharing decisions with response time data, as well as out-of-sample ratings of headline perceived accuracy, to test the accounts' divergent predictions across six studies (N = 5633). The results suggest that accuracy prompts do not increase the amount of deliberation people engage in. Instead, they increase the weight participants put on accuracy while deliberating. By showing that prompting people makes them think better even without thinking more, our results challenge common dual-process interpretations of the accuracy-prompt effect. Our findings also highlight the importance of understanding how social media distracts people from considering accuracy, and provide evidence for scalable interventions that redirect people's attention.

Precise/not precise (PNP): A Brunswikian model that uses judgment error distributions to identify cognitive processes

In 1956, Brunswik proposed a definition of what he called intuitive and analytic cognitive processes, not in terms of verbally specified properties, but operationally based on the observable error distributions. In the decades since, the diagnostic value of error distributions has generally been overlooked, arguably because of a long tradition to consider the error as exogenous (and irrelevant) to the process. Based on Brunswik’s ideas, we develop the precise/not precise (PNP) model, using a mixture distribution to model the proportion of error-perturbed versus error-free executions of an algorithm, to determine if Brunswik’s claims can be replicated and extended. In Experiment 1, we demonstrate that the PNP model recovers Brunswik’s distinction between perceptual and conceptual tasks. In Experiment 2, we show that also in symbolic tasks that involve no perceptual noise, the PNP model identifies both types of processes based on the error distributions. In Experiment 3, we apply the PNP model to confirm the often-assumed “quasi-rational” nature of the rule-based processes involved in multiple-cue judgment. The results demonstrate that the PNP model reliably identifies the two cognitive processes proposed by Brunswik, and often recovers the parameters of the process more effectively than a standard regression model with homogeneous Gaussian error, suggesting that the standard Gaussian assumption incorrectly specifies the error distribution in many tasks. We discuss the untapped potentials of using error distributions to identify cognitive processes and how the PNP model relates to, and can enlighten, debates on intuition and analysis in dual-systems theories.

Age, numeracy, and cultural differences in Chinese and American adolescents' performance on the ratio bias task

Ratio bias occurs when low-probability events with large numerators are judged as more probable than identical or higher-probability ratios with small numerators. Chinese and American adolescents made judgments on ratio bias problems with identical winning probabilities and unequal winning probabilities and completed a test of numeracy. In general, older participants performed better than younger participants and Chinese participants performed subtly better than American participants. On both problem types, numeracy mediated the relationships between age and performance. Between-country differences on unequal ratio problems were moderated by numeracy, such that Chinese participants outperformed American adolescents only at the most numerate level. By contrast, numeracy neither mediated nor moderated the country-performance relationship on equal ratio problems; instead, Chinese adolescents outperformed American adolescents at each level of numeracy, although these differences were fairly small. Discussion focuses on transferring formal math skills to everyday judgments, the associations among age, culture, and numeracy from a dual-process perspective, and limitations and alternative interpretations of the findings.