lessdazed comments on Cognitive Style Tends To Predict Religious Conviction (psychcentral.com) - Less Wrong

10 Post author: Incorrect 23 September 2011 06:28PM

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Comment author: lessdazed 24 September 2011 09:03:11PM *  1 point [-]

It'd be interesting if getting the wrong answer first is the quickest method of getting the right answer.

I recently read something like this, though I can't remember where. The experiment went roughly like so:

Subjects were divided into two groups. In one, each subject was given 15 seconds to memorize an answer to a question for several seconds, and their performance recalling the answer later was recorded. In the other, each was asked to guess the answer, and was then given 7 or 8 or so seconds to memorize the correct answer. The time difference was to account for the time during which the second group's members thought about the question.

So each person was exposed to the question for 15 seconds, in the first group, they were exposed to the answer for those same 15 seconds, in the second group, for half that.

The second group was better at recalling the answers.