Browsing by Subject "http://www.yso.fi/onto/yso/p8743"

The purpose of this study was to look for relationships between analytical thinking skills, two selected decision-making characteristics (time preference, risk preference) and temperament. A commonly applied test to detect individual differences in analytical thinking is the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT; Frederick, 2005), which captures important characteristics of rational thinking, different from intelligence and other cognitive ability (Toplak, West, & Stanovich, 2011). If a strong correlation between the ability to analytical thinking and some other types of characteristics was found, it would help to identify individuals with good analytical decision-making skills and to clarify the phenomenon of analytical thinking. This work continued the exploration of relations between individual differences in analytical thinking, assessed as performance in CRT, and selected psychological characteristics: time preference and risk preference, where a link has been detected in previous research on university students in the U.S. In this study, time preference was assessed as performance in the Consideration of Future Consequences Test (CFC-14; Joireman, Shaffer, Balliet, & Strathman, 2012). With data gathered from Finnish university students, this study attempted to replicate the findings of the original study (Frederick, 2005), where a relationship between the CRT and risk preference was detected. The current study extended previous research by examining also the relation of analytical thinking skills and neurobiological temperament (Rawlings, Tapola & Niemivirta, 2017). The relation of time preference and temperament was also studied. The participants in the present study were 135 first-year students from the National Defence University in Finland. The students completed a self-report questionnaire via a weblink. An exploratory factor analysis was performed to test the construct validity of the models applied. The correlations between the tests were examined and by using standard regression analyses the effects of the temperament on the time preference were analysed. Contrary to expectations, no relation between the CRT score and time preference, risk preference or temperament were detected. However, interesting links between time preference and temperament were found. Therefore, future research could investigate further how neurobiological temperament sets our concerns with future and immediate consequences, that is, our farsightedness or the lack of it.