ACQUIRED KNOWLEDGE AND BIAS SUSCEPTIBILITY: MINDWARE AUTOMATIZATION MEASURED WITH A TWO-RESPONSE PARADIGM AND ITS RELATIONSHIP WITH CONFLICT DETECTION

According to a recent model of mindware automatization, the extent to which the mindware is automatized should play a crucial role in preventing cognitive biases, as it should lead to very easy detection of a conflict between a misleading intuition and the logical structure of a situation. To examine the model in the present study, mindware automatization was measured as intuitive accuracy in neutral tasks commonly used as a measure of mindware instantiation. Participants also solved two types of conflict reasoning tasks, with response time and confidence used as measures of conflict detection. The results indeed showed the relationship of mindware automatization and most of the conflict detection measures with reasoning accuracy; however, mindware automatization was not related to conflict detection measures, except in one of the detection indices. Mindware automatization also emerged as a significant predictor of reasoning accuracy but lost its predictive power when other variables were added to the model. Overall, the results provide little support for the mindware automatization model. However, whether the relationship between the measures is linear and whether conflict detection is even necessary if the mindware is automatized remain open questions.