overcoming intuition metacognitive difficulty activates.pdfVIP

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General Copyright 2007 by the American Psychological Association 2007, Vol. 136, No. 4, 569–576 0096-3445/07/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/0096-3469 Overcoming Intuition: Metacognitive Difficulty Activates Analytic Reasoning Adam L. Alter and Daniel M. Oppenheimer Nicholas Epley Princeton University University of Chicago Rebecca N. Eyre Harvard University Humans appear to reason using two processing styles: System 1 processes that are quick, intuitive, and effortless and System 2 processes that are slow, analytical, and deliberate that occasionally correct the output of System 1. Four experiments suggest that System 2 processes are activated by metacognitive experiences of difficulty or disfluency during the process of reasoning. Incidental experiences of difficulty or disfluency—receiving information in a degraded font (Experiments 1 and 4), in difficult- to-read lettering (Experiment 2), or while furrowing one’s brow (Experiment 3)—reduced the impact of heuristics and defaults in judgment (Experiments 1 and 3), reduced reliance on peripheral cues in persuasion (Experiment 2), and improved syllogistic reasoning (Experiment 4). Metacognitive experi-