Although human thinking is often biased, some individuals are less susceptible to biases than others. These individual differences have been at the forefront of thinking research for more than a decade. We organize the literature in three key accounts (storage, monitoring, and inhibition failure) and propose that a critical but overlooked question concerns the time point at which individual variance arises: do biased and unbiased reasoners take different paths early on in the reasoning process or is the observed variance late to arise? We discuss how this focus on the ‘whens’ suggests that individual differences in thinking biases are less profound than traditionally assumed, in the sense that they might typically arise at a later stage of the reasoning process.
Not directly related to the post itself, but I thought that I’d drop the link to this recent paper here so that CFAR folks see if it they haven’t already: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364661313000405
PDF.