Cognitive Reflection Predicts Real-Life Decision Outcomes, but Not Over and Above Personality and Decision-Making Styles

The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), designed to assess the ability to inhibit intuition to process a problem analytically, predicts people's performance in many normative judgement and decision-making tasks (e.g., Bayesian reasoning, conjunction fallacy and ratio bias). However, how the CRT predicts normative decision-making performance is unclear, and little is known about the extent to which the CRT predicts real-life decision outcomes. We investigate the role of the CRT in predicting real-life decision outcomes and examine whether the CRT predicts real-life decision outcomes after controlling for two related individual differences: the Big Five personality traits and decision-making styles. Our results show that greater CRT scores predict positive real-life decision outcomes measured by the Decision Outcome Inventory. However, the effect size was small, and the relationship became non-significant after statistically controlling for personality and decision-making styles. We discuss the limited predictive role of cognitive reflection in real-life decision-making outcomes, along with the roles of personality and decision-making styles.