Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, University of Toulouse, Toulouse, France.
PLoS One. 2011 Jan 25;6(1):e15954. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0015954.
Human reasoning is often biased by intuitive heuristics. A central question is whether the bias results from a failure to detect that the intuitions conflict with traditional normative considerations or from a failure to discard the tempting intuitions. The present study addressed this unresolved debate by using people's decision confidence as a nonverbal index of conflict detection. Participants were asked to indicate how confident they were after solving classic base-rate (Experiment 1) and conjunction fallacy (Experiment 2) problems in which a cued intuitive response could be inconsistent or consistent with the traditional correct response. Results indicated that reasoners showed a clear confidence decrease when they gave an intuitive response that conflicted with the normative response. Contrary to popular belief, this establishes that people seem to acknowledge that their intuitive answers are not fully warranted. Experiment 3 established that younger reasoners did not yet show the confidence decrease, which points to the role of improved bias awareness in our reasoning development. Implications for the long standing debate on human rationality are discussed.
人类的推理常常受到直观启发式的偏见。一个核心问题是，这种偏见是由于未能检测到直觉与传统规范考虑之间的冲突，还是由于未能摒弃诱人的直觉。本研究通过使用人们的决策信心作为冲突检测的非言语指标，解决了这一未解决的争议。参与者被要求在解决经典基本比率（实验 1）和结合谬误（实验 2）问题后，表明他们的信心如何，在这些问题中，提示的直观反应可能与传统的正确反应不一致或一致。结果表明，当推理者给出与规范反应不一致的直观反应时，他们的信心明显下降。与普遍的看法相反，这表明人们似乎承认他们的直觉答案没有充分的依据。实验 3 表明，年轻的推理者还没有表现出信心下降，这表明在我们的推理发展中，偏见意识的提高起到了作用。讨论了对人类理性长期存在的争论的影响。
