title: Rethinking fast and slow based on a critique of reaction-time reverse inference.
abstract: Do people intuitively favour certain actions over others? In some dual-process research, reaction-time (RT) data have been used to infer that certain choices are intuitive. However, the use of behavioural or biological measures to infer mental function, popularly known as 'reverse inference', is problematic because it does not take into account other sources of variability in the data, such as discriminability of the choice options. Here we use two example data sets obtained from value-based choice experiments to demonstrate that, after controlling for discriminability (that is, strength-of-preference), there is no evidence that one type of choice is systematically faster than the other. Moreover, using specific variations of a prominent value-based choice experiment, we are able to predictably replicate, eliminate or reverse previously reported correlations between RT and selfishness. Thus, our findings shed crucial light on the use of RT in inferring mental processes and strongly caution against using RT differences as evidence favouring dual-process accounts.
authors.affiliation: Laboratory for Social and Neural Systems Research, Department of Economics, University of Zurich, Zürich 8006, Switzerland.|Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, 1827 Neil Avenue, 200E Lazenby Hall, Columbus Ohio 43210, USA.|Department of Economics, The Ohio State University, 1945 North High Street, 415 Arps Hall, Columbus, Ohio 43210, USA.
authors.forename: Ian
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Krajbich
authors.affiliation: Department of Economics, University of Zurich, Zürich 8006, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Björn
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Bartling
authors.affiliation: Laboratory for Social and Neural Systems Research, Department of Economics, University of Zurich, Zürich 8006, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Todd
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Hare
authors.affiliation: Laboratory for Social and Neural Systems Research, Department of Economics, University of Zurich, Zürich 8006, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Ernst
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Fehr
mesh_terms: D002755:Choice Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D065786:Delay Discounting / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D019545:Intuition; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology*