Here’s a fun brain test to try out. See how many of these questions you can answer correctly. Only 17% of university students get all three right.
Head down to the comments to discuss your answers.
If you need a hint, these questions were chosen because they all have an intuitive answer that immediately comes to mind, but is actually wrong. This is called the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), and was developed in 2005 as a quick measure of cognitive ability, reflection, and patience. Indeed, better performance was associated with realistic measures of patience—for example, people who got zero on the CRT were willing to pay more than twice as much to get a book shipped to them overnight compared to people who got all three right ($4.54 vs. $2.18, respectively).
So if you answered quickly, you might want to go back and give your responses some more thought.
The CRT has been described as “the world’s shortest IQ test,” and is moderately related with common intelligence tests, but I wouldn’t take it too seriously as a reliable measure of overall cognitive ability.
