Have you ever made judgments about something even if you do not have enough reliable evidence to support your point of view? Previous literature suggests that people are not only comfortable with but also confident about developing theories with a small amount of evidence. Decades of research about schizophrenia also suggest that cognitive habits such as jumping to conclusions (JTC) are related to impaired judgment and delusional beliefs. However, little research has investigated this tendency among people without schizophrenia. Let’s take a look at how Sanchez & Dunning (2021) studied the relationship between JTC, errors in decision-making, and confidence in nonclinical populations.

Sanchez & Dunning (2021) conducted a series of experiments to fully explore whether JTC predicted confidence and reasoning errors. The current article will focus on introducing the first two experiments in which the researchers recruited participants from Mturk and assessed their JTC behavior through a fishing task. Participants observed a character fishing from one of two lakes varied in the percentages of red and gray fish. They then made a conclusion about which lake the character was fishing from. They could make their decision at any time from just seeing the first fish to seeing the last fish. The researchers also measured participants’ confidence by calculating the difference between their actual performance in the fishing task and the self-rated accuracy of the judgments. Reasoning biases were assessed by several tasks that measured participants’ resistance to system 1 bias, which refers to a fast and relatively effortless thought process. Moreover, participants’ oddball beliefs were measured by their agreement with a series of oddball belief statements such as “the Apollo moon landings never happened and were staged in a Hollywood film studio”. The results showed that JTC behavior was not only related to system 1 bias but also oddball beliefs. It was worth noticing that participants with high JTC scores tended to perform worse than their peers with low JTC scores, and thus have a larger gap between confidence and accuracy than their peers with low JTC scores. They also showed fewer differences in confidence between right and wrong answers than low JTC participants.

These results can guide researchers to investigate whether there are any reciprocal effects between low academic performance, cognitive habits, and judgmental errors. Sanchez & Dunning’s (2021) study suggests that high JTC learners may have lower performance, more reasoning biases, and more faulty beliefs than low JTC learners. But it is also possible that students that struggle with learning are particularly vulnerable to JTC and errors in decision-making. The study also provides implications for EPIC’s current research about the sources of people’s failures. Perhaps cognitive habits and errors in decision-making contribute to students’ failure experiences. 

For more information about Sanchez & Dunning’s (2021) study, check out the link below for the journal article:

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2020-87894-001

Reference:

Sanchez, C., & Dunning, D. (2021). Jumping to conclusions: Implications for reasoning errors, false belief, knowledge corruption, and impeded learning. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 120(3), 789–815. https://doi-org.tc.idm.oclc.org/10.1037/pspp0000375