Challenging the doctrine of “non‐discerning” decision‐making: Investigating the interaction effects of cognitive styles

Abstract The impact of intuitive and analytic cognitive styles on task performance is a much‐debated subject in the scientific discourse on decision‐making. In the literature on decision‐making under time pressure, intuition has been regarded as a fast and frugal tool. At the same time, the heuristics and biases tradition sees intuition as a source of errors, implying that more analytic decision‐makers are less biased and better performers. We conducted two studies of the effects of interplay between intuitive and analytic cognitive styles on decision‐making in a simulated wicked learning environment. The results of the first study revealed that the high‐performing individuals were those who exhibited a strong preference for both cognitive styles, as well as those who showed a lack of preference for both. Individuals with a strong preference for only one of the styles were outperformed. In the second study, we replicated these findings in a team context. Post‐hoc, we found that cognitive ability correlated highly with performance for the two high‐performing style combinations but not for the two low‐performing style combinations. Our results indicate that flexible style preferences boost the effect of cognitive ability, while strong preferences for a single style may entrench even those with high cognitive abilities.