The Japanese Society for Cognitive Psychology

It is known that reflective thinking, particularly measured by the Cognitive Reflection Test, predicts a broader range of intuitive-analytic responses. However, recent work by Gervais et al. (2018) demonstrated that the link between CRT and religious disbelief was not evident in less religious society and suggested that CRT measures a tendency to question prevailing cultural norms. In this study, we investigated the effect of CRT on various tasks where normative response was assumed to be either common or different across cultures. Using Bayesian multilevel analysis, we found that consistent negative relationship between CRT and intuitive response across tasks and no cultural difference in the effect of CRT on syllogistic reasoning. However, we found that the link between CRT and denominator neglect bias was different across cultures; on the other hand, it was also evident that the effect on paranormal belief was not different.