Giving biased people more time to think doesn't make them right; it just makes them more sure of their wrong answers.
March 26, 2026
Original Paper
Thinking in Vain: A Mechanistic Account of Biased Evidence Accumulation in Reasoning
PsyArXiv · ze2ku_v1
The Takeaway
The common advice to 'stop and think' assumes that deliberation fixes intuition errors. However, this study found that for many people, the 'thinking longer' process uses the same biased evidence as the 'gut feeling,' leading them to reach the same incorrect conclusion but with a much higher (and more dangerous) level of certainty.
From the abstract
Reasoning biases are often explained as a failure to detect conflict between an erroneous intuitive response and logical information–or, when conflict is detected, an inability to correct the initial error during deliberation. We propose that both failure modes share a common computational origin: a distorted latent evidence signal that jointly drives choice, confidence, and response time. In a classic base-rate neglect task, participants (N = 151) judged which of two groups an individual most l