Manipulating response times in the cognitive reflection test: Time delay boosts deliberation, time pressure hinders it

Abstract

We employ the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) to assess the effectiveness of two widely applied cognitive manipulations which rely on constraining response times. The CRT measures the ability of a person to resist giving an immediate response that is intuitive but incorrect in favor of greater reflection to find out the correct answer. We have two treatments: a Time Pressure (TP) treatment (provide an answer within 30 s) and a Time Delay (TD) treatment (provide an answer after 60 s). We find that TD increases the frequency of correct answers, while TP increases the frequency of incorrect answers, especially incorrect answers that are not intuitive. Moreover, we confirm the existence of gender biases as already found in other studies. In particular, gender moderates the effects of the experimental treatments: TD increases the frequency of correct answers for males but not for females, while TP increases the frequency of incorrect but less intuitive answers for females but not for males. Our findings provide important insights on the effectiveness of the time manipulations that are widely used in the literature of cognition.