1) A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?What all of these questions have in common is that they have an obvious, intuitive, wrong answer, and a correct answer that is easy to determine but requires a few moments of thought.
2) If it takes five machines five minutes to make five widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?
3) In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half the lake?
The researchers note that people who got the bat-and-ball question correct generally thought of the incorrect answer first, as indicated by their crossed-out answers and notes in the margins, but they kept trying. The correct group said other participants were 62% likely to get the same answer (which turned out to be way more than the actual percentage). In contrast, people who got the question wrong thought others were 92% likely to get the same answer, probably because they thought it was so obvious. (Also an overestimate.)
The researchers also asked participants questions like, "Would you rather have $100 now or $140 in a year?" Their study correlates these answers with the test results to suggest that smart people are more patient.
Interesting stuff. I think there are alternate explanations to both; for instance, smart people are not more patient, but are more likely to realize that there are multiple answers to questions and that the intuitive answer is not always correct. In other words, they didn't answer correctly because they took the time to think about it; they thought about it more deeply because they didn't assume their first guess was correct. Likewise, with the time preference questions, their impulse may have told them to take the $100 and run, but they didn't accept that impulse and then used reason to conclude that they probably couldn't increase the $100 by 40% in one year.
