How Much Do We Care to Be Curious?

How much do you enjoy sitting with complexity? Or maybe you would rather be spontaneous, trusting your instincts and moving on? You’re not alone, either way. Actually, most people prefer not to think too hard unless they have to. It’s not laziness. It’s not a flaw. It’s how our minds are designed - to save energy, to think fast, to survive.

In this activity, you completed adaptations of two well-established Psychology measures:

• Need for Cognition, self report items about how much we like to think deeply, and
• Cognitive Reflections, puzzles capturing how often we actually do override our first, intuitive response to think more carefully.

They’re related — but not the same. And understanding that difference can help us grow in how we think, how we learn, and how we live.

Let’s start with a problem like Cognitive Reflection puzzles you saw:

Most people instinctively say 6, because half of 12 is 6.

But pause. Think it through. Is 6 actually the answer?

If short hair players made 6, and that’s half as many as the long hair players, then long hair players made 12 … totaling 18 goals. That’s too many.

The real answer? The short hair players made 4, and the long hair players made 8. Together: 12.

The math isn’t hard. But it takes just enough effort that most people don’t slow down to reconsider their first impression. Among my college students, 60% didn't get any of the three Cognitive Reflection puzzles correct, and only 16% got all three correct (figure 1). Even at elite universities like Harvard and Princeton, fewer than a quarter answer all three correctly (Frederick, 2005). So if you missed one - or every one - you’re in good company.

Cognitive Reflection tasks (CRT) reveal what social cognitive psychology calls our tendency to be cognitive misers (Stanovich & West, 2000). Like a frugal bookkeeper managing mental resources, your brain is constantly scanning: Do I really need to think harder here? Or is my first guess good enough? Most of the time, we pick fast and easy. And honestly, that works in a lot of situations. But in some moments - especially those involving uncertainty, persuasion, and moral complexity - slowing down makes quite a difference.

That brings us to Need for Cognition (NfC) - a trait describing how much we *enjoy* effortful thinking. People high in NfC tend to love nuance, play with ideas, and chase down mental puzzles just for the thrill of it. They’re the ones who start debates in class even when they agree, or get curious about things most people scroll past.

If that sounds like you, you’re not alone. Professors - the group used to define the high end of the scale — tend to score high. Here's a way you can interpret your score (table 1):

These aren't fixed categories - just playful descriptions about how we vary in our relationship to thinking. Wherever you fall, there’s value in your style. I personally score a 7.38, which doesn’t surprise me. I’ve always found myself pulled toward complexity.  After all, I chose to go to graduate school.

Need for Cognition is linked with lots of helpful things: better performance on standardized tests, higher vocabulary, even more appreciation of metaphor (Skalicky, 2020). It’s moderately correlated with intelligence (r ≈ .30) and strongly linked with Openness to Experience, one of the Big Five traits (r = .49; e.g., Fleischhauer et al., 2010).

But here’s what’s really interesting: enjoying thinking doesn’t always mean you slow down to think reflectively. Among my students, NfC and CRT scores were only modestly related (r = .20). So someone might love deep ideas but still stick with their first instincts. And someone who doesn’t love thinking for fun might still pause and reflect when it matters. In fact, research shows Cognitive Reflection performance — how often we override intuitive errors — often predicts decision quality better than intelligence alone (Toplak, West, & Stanovich, 2011).

Being high in NfC has shaped how I experience life - especially how I relate to belief systems. I always question strong ideologies, from far right to the far left, from strict religious dogma to dismissive atheism. I'm just uncomfortable accepting any one system because my mind likes to keep questioning.

To me, learning is life-long. As I keep growing, I notice something else: my constant habit of thinking - of analyzing, evaluating, mentally commenting on everything - can create distance. Instead of simply living, I sometimes find myself watching life like it's a running commentary. And that's exhausting.

Lately, I step back from constant thinking. To let myself be spontaneous. To, "suck out all the marrow of life," as Thoreau might say. Which is a big shift for someone who finds comfort in thought, especially since I’m a vegetarian. 😜 Seriously though, I'm learning to choose when to think deeply. To pause and ask myself: Does this moment need analysis, or presence? Some moments do. I value joy and reflection deeply.

Before we go further, there’s something important to notice: not everyone gets the same encouragement, or safety, to think reflectively.

Some people grow up in environments where questioning is celebrated. In my case, I was raised in Judaism — a tradition that often values critical thinking and debate. Think the philosopher who invented critical thinking - Hillel! But even there, I noticed that questioning was welcomed only to a point. Some interpretations or traditions within Judaism emphasize obedience. Like Hillel's competing elder, Shammai. In some environments, people are taught that harmony, efficiency, or compliance matter more. And in many cultures or classrooms, thinking out loud is actively discouraged. For some, things like math anxiety or stereotype threat shape how we engage with Cognitive Reflection puzzles.

For example:

* Politics: Conservatives score lower than liberals on Cognitive Reflection with the strongest correlations for conservative attitudes toward social "culture war" issues (e.g., Deepe et al., 2015). It may be more a matter of people with strong over-arching ideologies being less cognitively reflective. For example, those who are far left-wing - leftist in contrast with liberal - tend to have lower Cognitive Reflection (Celniker et al., 2022).

* Religion: Religion has intricate correlations too. Individuals with understand their faith as a dogma - a set of given truths - tend to score lower on Cognitive Reflection. In contrast, who see faith as a neverending journey of finding meaning and purpose - tend to score higher in cognitive reflection (Pennycook et al., 2016; Shenhav, Rand, & Greene, 2012).

* Gender: Women often score lower than men on Cognitive Reflection, but this difference shrinks when you control for math anxiety (Primi et al., 2018).

But even with these group differences, here’s what matters most: there’s way more variety within any group than between them. Our scores reflect our unique way of thinking - not our gender, politics, or background, even if those things nudge us each one way or another.

Our scores give us insight, but not a complete story about thinking deeply.

• They don’t measure our creativity.
• They don’t measure our emotional awareness.
• They don’t tell us how deeply we love, or how carefully we listen.

We can be deeply thoughtful in so ways these tools don’t capture. You can be spontaneous and still wise.

Here’s a tiny challenge:

Next time you feel yourself jumping to a conclusion - in class, in a conversation, or online - pause. Give yourself ten seconds. Ask yourself, "Is there more here?"

Or try journaling. When do you feel most reflective? When do you think fast? And when do you give yourself space to think deeply?

The goal isn’t becoming someone else. It’s to become more you - more aware, more intentional, more alive to how your mind works.

Because reflection, when we choose it, can help us not just think better - but live more fully.

Uneasy Feelings about Your Results?
Please remember your results with any activity are not who you are. Your results are a 'snapshot' of a moment when you did an activity. It's just one measure, a single thread, of the many strands of who you are. Any result is a guess with statistical error. And it's possible the measure is flawed in a way so it doesn't work for you. Please do not think of your results as definitive dogma. Instead they're a starting point for our self reflection. Please keep in mind too, self-reflection can feel uncomfortable. "Bad" feelings are not actually bad. They're information. So, even if your activity result is inaccurate and flawed, you might ask yourself what your feeling is trying to tell you? Trusted teachers, friends, and therapists can be helpful. I wrote an essay elaborating with concrete examples how we can appreciate uneasy feelings about our activity results.

Scholarly Information?
You're welcome to use Copernican Revolution activities and essays for your thesis and studies. Having information about scholarly aspects like psychometric data, activity design details, and norm calculations may help. The primary focus of my essays is connecting educated laypersons with psychology. To help people like you, with advanced academic interests, I add an appendix with each activity.

Celniker, J., Graso, M., & Ji, H. (2022). Cognitive reflection and ideological rigidity: The case of wokeism. Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 10(1), 123–138.

Deepe, M., Norris, J., & Stanovich, K. E. (2015). Ideological thinking and cognitive reflection: A closer look at political conservatism. Political Psychology, 36(2), 199–214.

Fleischhauer, M., Enge, S., Brocke, B., Ullrich, J., Strobel, A., & Strobel, A. (2010). Same or different? Clarifying the relationship of need for cognition to personality and intelligence. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36(1), 82–96.

Frederick, S. (2005). Cognitive reflection and decision making. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 19(4), 25–42.

Kahan, D. M. (2013). Ideology, motivated reasoning, and cognitive reflection. Judgment and Decision Making, 8(4), 407–424.

Pennycook, G., Ross, R. M., Koehler, D. J., & Fugelsang, J. A. (2016). Atheists and agnostics are more reflective than religious believers: Four empirical studies and a meta-analysis. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 42(2), 200–217.

Primi, C., Morsanyi, K., Chiesi, F., Donati, M. A., & Hamilton, J. (2018). The role of numeracy and cognitive reflection in understanding the outcome of the Cognitive Reflection Test: An item response theory approach. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 31(3), 393–401.

Shenhav, A., Rand, D. G., & Greene, J. D. (2012). Divine intuition: Cognitive style influences belief in God. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 141(3), 423–428.

Skalicky, S. (2020). Need for cognition and metaphor appreciation. Metaphor and Symbol, 35(1), 1–13.

Stanovich, K. E., & West, R. F. (2000). Individual differences in reasoning: Implications for the rationality debate? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23(5), 645–665.

Toplak, M. E., West, R. F., & Stanovich, K. E. (2011). The Cognitive Reflection Test as a predictor of performance on heuristics-and-biases tasks. Thinking & Reasoning, 17(4), 341–365.