That's fair. How do you explain the in-person respondents? And more than that, the people who answered incorrectly and then were willing to bet money that they were right?
> 16 of the 22 Yale undergraduates who made the common error were sufficiently confident to bet on it, preferring to receive $2 for a correct response than $1 for sure.
That's a very large proportion! People who are rushing and who know that they are rushing should take the $1. I guess you could claim that that's not a large enough monetary motivation to induce truthful reflection but.. I think that that's a big problem all by itself! People in their day-to-day jobs are almost never motivated to put extra thought into making correct decisions to hard problems like these. They're motivated to put in enough effort to make their boss happy and not get fired and then go home to their spouse and kids. Very few people enjoy these types of problems but everyone encounters them.
If someone makes the common error to the bat and ball problem in their daily life, they'll Maybe lose $5. For most people, intuition is sufficient.
I don't think that your assertion that humans aren't this dumb is particularly useful here. Humans definitely do behave this dumbly in their day-to-day lives and that matters quite a lot.
If they're rushing then they can enter $5 as specifically instructed by the question. They can also check that if fits as a correct solution, which it does. The fact that so many people aren't doing that is interesting.
The report also details a study that tests instructions like "Be careful! Many people miss the following problem because they do not take the time to check their answer." Along with a big yellow warning icon. Does the warning work? Kindof! mTurk response times go from 22 seconds to 33 seconds. eLab responses go from 21 to 37 seconds (almost doubling). Did scores improve with greater attention paid? Not really! eLab correct answers went from 43% to 52%, a rise of only 9%. mTurk correct answers dropped from 34% to 25%.
I really don't think that they're wrong because they're rushing.
They're not screwing up only decisions that don't matter, they're also screwing up decisions that don't matter to them. But many of those decisions matter quite a lot! The entire phenomenon of bike-shedding happens due to people focusing on the wrong things: things that they can trivially and lazily understand. Bike-shedding was first observed and described in the context of people designing nuclear power generating stations.
So in summary, some of the decisions people make are very important. Some of the people making those decisions are screwing them up because they are dumb, with rushing being a contributing but not exclusive factor, a factor that applies just as much in real life as it does in studies.