Participants were randomly assigned to receive one of two instruction sets, one which encouraged them to rely on their intuitions and another which encouraged a more analytical thinking style. Participants were also randomly assigned to read one of two reports in order to decide whether an elementary school student who exhibited some ambiguously aggressive behaviors should be recommended for a program designed for children with behavioral problems. The otherwise identical reports were either concerning a student named “Eric” or a student named “Tyrone.” I predicted that participants would be more likely overall to recommend Tyrone for the behavioral program than Eric, but that this effect will be more pronounced for participants in the condition that encouraged an intuitive thinking style. This hypothesis was not confirmed. Participants in the condition that encouraged an intuitive thinking style were more confident in their judgments and less ambivalent about their judgments than participants who were encouraged to use an analytical thinking style.No embarg
