The simple maths puzzle that shows us how to separate fact from fiction

For certain kinds of questions, there are answers that are simple, elegant and wrong. Take the most famous example of the genre, the “bat and ball” question: if a bat and a ball together cost $1.10, and the bat costs a dollar more than the ball, how much does the ball cost ? This is known as a cognitive reflection problem, because it’s designed to be a test of your ability to stop and think rather than a test of sophisticated maths. There’s a tempting wrong answer: 10 cents.

Pennycook reminds me that “the bat and ball question is just a single problem and if you think about the way we think in the real world, it’s obvious that our intuitions are varied and complicated”. What blew my mind about Meyer and Frederick’s article was the way they painstakingly undermined the idea that made the bat and ball question famous — which is that many people can figure out the right answer if only they slow down for long enough to avoid the decoy.

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