But perhaps a different definition of "reflective" is involved here.

Possibly. A reflective person can use expected-utility to make choices that regular people would simply categorically avoid. (One might say in game-theoretic terms that a rational player can use mixed strategies, but irrational ones cannot and so can do worse. But that's probably pushing it too far.)

I recall reading one anecdote on an economics blog. The economist lived in an apartment and the nearest parking for his car was quite a ways away. There were tickets for parking on the street. He figured out the likelihood of being ticketed & the fine, and compared its expected disutility against the expected disutility of walking all the way to safe parking and back. It came out in favor of just eating the occasional ticket. His wife was horrified at him deliberately risking the fines.

Isn't this a case of rational reflection leading to an acceptance of risk which his less-reflective wife was averse to?

I don't believe the article says "reflective":

Professor Frederick discovered striking systematic patterns in how people answer questions about risk and patience, including those above. This short problem-solving test, he found, predicts a lot:

1) A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

2) If it takes five machines five minutes to make five widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?

3) In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half the lake?

The test measures not just the ability to solve math problems but the willingness to reflect on and check your answers. (Scores have a 0.44 correlation with math SAT scores, where 1.00 would be exact.) The questions all have intuitive answers -- wrong ones.

Professor Frederick gave his ''cognitive reflection test'' to nearly 3,500 respondents, mostly students at universities including M.I.T., the University of Michigan and Bowling Green University. Participants also answered a survey about how they would choose between various financial payoffs, as well as time-oriented questions like how much they would pay to get a book delivered overnight.

Getting the math problems right predicts nothing about most tastes, including whether someone prefers apples or oranges, Coke or Pepsi, rap music or ballet. But high scorers -- those who get all the questions right -- do prefer taking risks.

''Even when it actually hurts you on average to take the gamble, the smart people, the high-scoring people, actually like it more,'' Professor Frederick said in an interview. Almost a third of high scorers preferred a 1 percent chance of $5,000 to a sure $60.

They are also more patient, particularly when the difference, and the implied interest rate, is large. Choosing $3,400 this month over $3,800 next month implies an annual discount rate of 280 percent. Yet only 35 percent of low scorers -- those who missed every question -- said they would wait, while 60 percent of high scorers preferred the later, bigger payoff.