Good Thinking or Gut Feeling? Cognitive Reflection and Intuition in Traders, Bankers and Financial Non-Experts

Article

Thoma, V., White, Elliott, Panigrahi, Asha, Strowger, Vanessa and Anderson, I. 2015. Good Thinking or Gut Feeling? Cognitive Reflection and Intuition in Traders, Bankers and Financial Non-Experts. PLoS ONE. 10 (4), p. e0123202.
AuthorsThoma, V., White, Elliott, Panigrahi, Asha, Strowger, Vanessa and Anderson, I.
Abstract

The current study investigated differences in decision-making style and risk-taking between financial traders, non-trading bank employees, and people not working in finance. Traders scored significantly higher than participants in the other two groups on the cognitive reflection test (CRT) which measures the tendency to inhibit automatic but frequently false responses in reasoning tasks. Scores for traders compared to people outside the banking sector were also higher on a self-rated scale for reflective thinking in decision-making, but
there were no differences in self-rated intuitive thinking between groups. Financial risk-taking correlated with cognitive reflection scores and was significantly lower in the non-expert group compared to the other groups working in financial services. Traders in the current study showed no elevated preference to use ‘intuition’ in their decision-making compared to other groups. Overall, these results indicate that compared to non-expert participants financial traders have a higher self-rated tendency for reflective thinking and a greater propensity to inhibit the use of mental shortcuts (heuristics) in decision-making.

JournalPLoS ONE
Journal citation10 (4), p. e0123202
ISSN1932-6203
Year2015
PublisherPublic Library of Science (PLoS)
Publisher's version
License
CC BY
Web address (URL)http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0123202
Publication dates
Online13 Apr 2015
Publication process dates
Deposited23 Apr 2015
Accepted01 Mar 2015
FunderEclipse Energy Group AS
Eclipse Energy Group AS
Copyright information© 2015 Thoma et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
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