The test your gut will fail
Seven short puzzles. Each has an answer that feels obviously right, and is wrong. The test measures cognitive reflection: the willingness to override an intuitive answer and check it before committing.
Take your time; there's no clock. Just don't trust your first thought.
The science
In 2005 Shane Frederick published a three-question test that became one of the most cited instruments in judgment and decision-making research. The trick is that every item triggers a fast, fluent, wrong answer. Getting it right requires noticing the error impulse and doing thirty seconds of actual checking: what dual-process theories call overriding System 1 with System 2.
CRT scores predict a surprising range of things: resistance to framing effects and other cognitive biases, less superstitious and paranormal belief, better calibrated probability judgments, and more patient intertemporal choices, over and above general intelligence, with which it correlates only moderately (Frederick, 2005; Toplak, West & Stanovich, 2011). This version uses the expanded seven-item CRT-7 (Toplak et al., 2014), which adds four items to reduce ceiling and familiarity effects.
Typical performance is humbling: in Frederick's original samples a third of university students scored zero out of three, and even MIT students averaged barely two. On the seven-item version, university samples typically land in the 3–4 range.
Honest caveats
The bat-and-ball question is now internet-famous: if you've seen these puzzles before, your score is inflated and measures memory, not reflection. Numeracy also contributes: the items are all mildly mathematical, so the test partly reflects comfort with numbers. And a multiple-choice format (used here for mobile friendliness) scores slightly higher than the original free-response format, because the correct answer is visible among the options.
- Frederick, S. (2005). Cognitive reflection and decision making. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 19(4), 25–42.
- Toplak, M. E., West, R. F., & Stanovich, K. E. (2014). Assessing miserly information processing: An expansion of the Cognitive Reflection Test. Thinking & Reasoning, 20(2), 147–168.
- Toplak, M. E., West, R. F., & Stanovich, K. E. (2011). The Cognitive Reflection Test as a predictor of performance on heuristics-and-biases tasks. Memory & Cognition, 39, 1275–1289.