Humans and LLMs rate deliberation as superior to intuition on complex reasoning tasks

Abstract

Influential models conceive human thinking as an interplay between intuition and deliberation. Yet, it’s unclear how people actually perceive these types of reasoning. Across 13 studies ( n = 239, 241, 240, 240, 241, 240, 184, 482, 479, 240 and 240 for Studies 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12 and 13, respectively), we examined whether humans favor intuition or deliberation and if this replicates in LLMs. Participants rated individuals’ reasoning quality in short vignettes that varied by reasoning type (fast-intuitive vs. slow-deliberative) and past accuracy (high, low, unspecified). Consistently, participants rated deliberative reasoning as superior to intuition, even when accounting for accuracy. Deliberative thinkers were seen as smarter and more trustworthy—a preference that held under time pressure and cognitive load, suggesting it arises intuitively. Studies with LLMs (ChatGPT 3.5 and 4) replicated the human preference pattern, indicating that AI language models capture human folk beliefs about reasoning. These findings suggest humans intuitively link deliberation with reliability and have implications for public trust in human and AI recommendations.