Challenging the doctrine of “non-discerning” decision-making: Investigating the interaction effects of cognitive styles

Abstract

The impact of intuitive and analytic cognitive styles on task performance is a much-debated subject in the scientific discourse on decision-making. In the literature on decision-making under time pressure, intuition has been regarded as a fast and frugal tool. At the same time, the heuristics and biases tradition sees intuition as a source of errors, implying that more analytic decision-makers are less biased and better performers. We conducted two studies of the effects of interplay between intuitive and analytic cognitive styles on decision-making in a simulated wicked learning environment. The results of the first study revealed that the high-performing individuals were those who exhibited a strong preference for both cognitive styles, as well as those who showed a lack of preference for both. Individuals with a strong preference for only one of the styles were outperformed. In the second study, we replicated these findings in a team context. Post-hoc, we found that cognitive ability correlated highly with performance for the two high-performing style combinations but not for the two low-performing style combinations. Our results indicate that flexible style preferences boost the effect of cognitive ability, while strong preferences for a single style may entrench even those with high cognitive abilities.