Wiley, Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 1(29), p. 52-59, 2015
DOI: 10.1002/bdm.1875
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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. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.