Individual differences in rational thought.

Much research in the last 2 decades has demonstrated that humans deviate from normative models of decision making and rational judgment. In 4 studies involving 954 participants, the authors explored the extent to which measures of cognitive ability and thinking dispositions can predict discrepancies from normative responding on a variety of tasks from the heuristics and biases literature including the selection task, belief bias in syllogistic reasoning, argument evaluation, base-rate use, covariation detection, hypothesis testing, outcome bias, if-only thinking, knowledge calibration, hindsight bias, and the false consensus paradigm. Significant relationships involving cognitive ability were interpreted as indicating algorithmic-level limitations on the computation of the normative response. Relationships with thinking dispositions were interpreted as indicating that styles of epistemic regulation can predict