The well-known CRT is a test designed to measure a person’s ‘cognitive reflection’ and used as a predictor of decision making ability. Within the literature, however there is a growing consensus that it shares the majority of its variance with numerical and other cognitive abilities and thus the question increasingly asked is whether it has predictive power beyond existing measures. That is, is there something unique captured by the CRT? This study examines the CRT in parallel with a wide range of individual differences measures reflecting aspects of intelligence (8 CHC broad ability factors), personality (the Big 5 and 30 facets), other decision styles (5 measures) and attention (12 measures covering six aspects of attention). Results indicate that the CRT is, primarily, a cognitive measure, strongly linked to fluid, crystallized and quantitative ability but may also be capturing some distinct aspects of attention relating to the ability to ignore distractors.

Anchoring – the tendency for recently seen numbers to affect estimates – is a robust bias affecting expert and novice judgements across many fields. An anchoring task, in which people (N=301) estimated the number of circles in 10 stimulus figures after comparison to an anchoring value, was conducted within a larger study including numerous intelligence, personality, decision style and attention measures. Individual anchoring susceptibility was calculated and compared to potential predictor variables. Two of eight broad ability measures (from Catell-Horn-Carroll intelligence theory) correlated weakly but significantly with anchoring (Gq = 0.16, Gf = 0.12). No decision style or attention measures correlated significantly with anchoring, nor did the Big 5 personality traits, directly. Indirectly, however, as the anchoring task continued and fatigue increased, people relied more on anchors and higher neuroticism may have increased this tendency. Overall, results suggest our ability to predict anchoring is poor and implications of this are discussed.

The CRT is an increasingly well-known and used test of biassusceptibility. While alternatives are being developed, theoriginal remains in widespread use and this has led to itsbecoming increasingly familiar to psychology students(Stieger & Reips, 2016), resulting in inflated scores.Extending this work, we measure the effect of prior exposureto the CRT in a sample of oil industry professionals. Theseengineers and geoscientists completed the CRT, seven biastasks and rated their familiarity with all of these. Key resultswere that: familiarity increased CRT scores but tended not toreduce bias susceptibility; and industry personnel, evenwithout prior CRT exposure, scored very highly on the CRT -greatly reducing its predictive power. Conclusions are that thestandard CRT is not a useful tool for assessing biassusceptibility in highly numerate professionals – and doublyso when they have previously been exposed.