Cognitive (Ir)reflection: New Experimental Evidence

We study whether cognitive ability explains choices in a wide variety of behavioral tasks, including riskand social preferences, by collecting evidence from almost 1,200 subjects across eight experimentalprojects. Since Frederick (2005)'s Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) has been administered to allsubjects, our dataset is one of the largest in the literature. We divide the subjects pool into three groupsdepending on their CRT performance. Reflective subjects are those answering at least two of the threeCRT questions correctly. Impulsive ones are those who are unable to suppress the instinctive impulseto follow the intuitive although incorrect answer in at least two 2 questions, and the remaining subjectsform a residual group. We find that females score significantly worse than males in the CRT, and intheir wrong answers impulsive ones are observed more frequently. The 2D-4D ratio, which is higherfor females, is correlated negatively with subject's CRT score. In addition, we find that differencesbetween CRT groups in risk aversion depend on the elicitation method used. Finally, impulsive subjectshave higher social preferences, while reflective subjects are more likely to satisfy basic consistencyconditions in lottery choices.