Conflict Detection in Moderate Base-Rate Tasks: A Multi-Measure Study

Abstract

Empirical studies have found that although humans often rely on heuristic intuition to make stereotypical judgments during extreme base-rate tasks, they can at least detect conflicts between stereotypical and base-rate responses, which supports the dual-processing view of flawless conflict detection. The current study combines the conflict detection paradigm with moderate base-rate tasks of different scales to test the generalization and boundaries of flawless conflict detection. After controlling for possible confounding by the “storage failure” factor, the conflict detection results indicated that reasoners providing stereotypical heuristic responses to conflict problems were slower to respond, less confident in their stereotypical responses, and slower to indicate their reduced confidence than reasoners who answered no-conflict problems. Moreover, none of these differences were affected by different scales. The results suggest that stereotypical reasoners are not blind heuristic performers and that they at least realize that their heuristic responses are not entirely warranted, which supports the argument for flawless conflict detection and extends the boundaries of flawless conflict detection. We discuss the implications of these findings for views of detection, human rationality, and the boundaries of conflict detection.