This MITWorld website provides a streaming video of a great lecture by Shane Frederick of the Sloan School of Management at MIT. It is more than 45 minutes in length.
Frederick has developed a simple simple "cognitive reflection test" which consists of three questions and requires less than a minute to administer. The questions are quantitative in nature. Each has the characteristic that the first answer that pops into your mind is wrong, but with a little reflection a person with quantitative skills will see the trick and find the right answer.
He has given this test to thousands of people, and finds patterns among the responses. Males generally get more answers right than females. MIT and Princeton students do better than students at less competitive schools.
What is perhaps most surprising is that this simple test is highly predictive of peoples willingness to defer gratification, and whether a person is risk seeking or risk averse.
I never would have guessed!
Sunday, October 01, 2006
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