A few pages from the paper.

Upon Reflection, Ep. 12: Tell Us What You Really Think

I have a question for you: “If a bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total and the bat costs $1.00 more than the ball, how much does the ball cost?“. Did 10 cents seem right? The authors of questions like this are attempting to lure you to accept this incorrect answer in order to test whether you thought reflectively when you solved the problem. However, there may be problems with this method of testing reflective thinking. So my colleagues used some underrated methods to determine the degree to which tests like this misclassify correct responses as reflective or lured responses as unreflective. I’ll read the paper in this episode.

The (free) paper is “Tell Us What You Really Think: A think-aloud protocol analysis of the Verbal Cognitive Reflection Test“. Special thanks to co-authors Brianna Joseph and Gabriela Gongora for helping me with Study 1 and to co-author Miroslav Sirota for helping with conceptualization and revisions. This paper is dedicated to the late Anders Ericsson (1947-2020), who helped inform the development of our online think-aloud protocol (Study 2).

1st page of the paper

As always, free preprints of my papers are available on my CV at byrdnick.com/cv under “Publications”.

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Nick Byrd

Nick is a cognitive scientist at Florida State University studying reasoning, wellbeing, and willpower. Check out his blog at byrdnick.com/blog