Citation

Bhatia S. J. Exp. Psychol. Learn. Mem. Cogn. 2016; 43(2): 319-325.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2016, American Psychological Association)

DOI

10.1037/xlm0000307

PMID

27685023

Abstract

Conflict has been hypothesized to play a key role in recruiting deliberative processing in reasoning and judgment tasks. This claim suggests that changing the task so as to add incorrect heuristic responses that conflict with existing heuristic responses can make individuals less likely to respond heuristically and can increase response accuracy. We tested this prediction in experiments involving judgments of argument strength and word frequency, and found that participants are more likely to avoid heuristic bias and respond correctly in settings with 2 incorrect heuristic response options compared with similar settings with only 1 heuristic response option. Our results provide strong evidence for conflict as a mechanism influencing the interaction between heuristic and deliberative thought, and illustrate how accuracy can be increased through simple changes to the response sets offered to participants. (PsycINFO Database Record

(c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

Language: en