Don't Cheat. Conclusions.

Cognitive Reflection and Decision Making. That's the title of Dr. Frederick's work published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. Part I was the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT). Frederick correlates this to decision making, specifically in economics, using questions like those in Part II. In his article, he shows the correlations.

The bad news is our study carries essentially no weight. We clearly did not sampled a population remotely close to a Gaussian distribution. The good news is this group was certainly leading the bell, not trailing. Anthony's family, friends (and friends of friends) are too damn smart and with it.

The CRT is not an IQ test. It is supposed to test the difference between an intuition-driven response and a reflection-driven response. Those people able to make quick decision while relying heavily on intuition generally score lower on the CRT. Those people who require more time to reflect before making a decision score higher on the CRT. Each CRT question has an intuitive answer that is wrong. Our average correct answers in our group's CRT is 2.45. On a whole, this score outperforms MIT, Princeton, Harvard, University of Michigan and other groups. (Of course, again, our N = 11 which means our study presents no statistically significant correlation).

In economics questions and correlation, when comparing two questions #1 and #2, directly from Frederick's paper, our results compare very well. This compares the subset group of those scoring 3 out of 3 on the CRT. For question #1, our group scored 87.5%, while Frederick observed 60%. For question #2, our group scored 50%, while Frederick observed 37%. The trend is right... perhaps the numbers would be closer with a proper sample population. Interestingly, we are slightly behind the trend for question #3. The reflective answer is (b). This is mainly because the "value" of option (b) is $150,000 (chance times payoff). But only 50% of our 3/3 CRT group chose that option, while Frederick observed 60%. This is a great study to apply to "Deal or No Deal."

Men and women correlation? Though completely inconclusive, our trend is about right. Our sample population was also skewed female. Frederick found men tend to score higher on the CRT than women. Frederick does not offer much of an explanation. Let me suggest one. Men score higher on the CRT because men are generally reasonable, rational and fact-driven decision makers. Women tend to be unreasonable, irrational, emotionally-driven decision makers. This goes back to caveman days when men had to hunt, trap and figure out how to survive while women sat on their rearends watching Oprah and eating chocolates. It's just a theory. Anyone have any better ideas? (I can't wait to hear them.) Any other thoughts on the CRT?

Thanks, group, for participating. My PhD is officially 36 minutes behind schedule due to this "study."

Oh yea, the answers.
CRT Part I: $0.05, 5 minutes, 47 days
CRT Part II: high CRT scored correlated answers are b, b, b, b, a