Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.