Overcoming intuition: Metacognitive difficulty activates analytic reasoning
Adam Alter, Daniel Oppenheimer, Nicholas Epley and Rebecca Eyre started from the view that people reason in two ways, a fast intuitive way and a slower analytic way. They report experiments in which an incidental experience of difficulty, such as a degraded font, hard-to-read lettering or furrowing the brow, switched on the analytic way. That reduced the pull of heuristics and defaults in judgement, reduced reliance on peripheral cues in persuasion, and improved syllogistic reasoning. The authors suggest that the feeling of difficulty works as an alarm that prompts people to check and sometimes correct their intuitive answer.
Adam Alter, Daniel Oppenheimer, Nicholas Epley and Rebecca Eyre started from the view that people reason in two ways, a fast intuitive way and a slower analytic way. They report experiments in which an incidental experience of difficulty, such as a degraded font, hard-to-read lettering or furrowing the brow, switched on the analytic way. That reduced the pull of heuristics and defaults in judgement, reduced reliance on peripheral cues in persuasion, and improved syllogistic reasoning. The authors suggest that the feeling of difficulty works as an alarm that prompts people to check and sometimes correct their intuitive answer.
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Alter, A. L., Oppenheimer, D. M., Epley, N., & Eyre, R. N. (2007). Overcoming intuition: Metacognitive difficulty activates analytic reasoning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 136(4), 569-576. doi:10.1037/0096-3445.136.4.569 https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-3445.136.4.569