We find that cognitive effort as measured by response times increases by 40% when payments are very high; performance, on the other hand, improves very mildly or not at all as incentives increase

Cognitive Biases: Mistakes or Missing Stakes? Benjamin Enke, Uri Gneezy, Brian Hall, David Martin, Vadim Nelidov, Theo Offerman, Jeroen van de Ven. CESifo working paper 8168/2020. March 2020. https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/cesifo1_wp8168.pdf

Abstract: Despite decades of research on heuristics and biases, empirical evidence on the effect of large incentives – as present in relevant economic decisions – on cognitive biases is scant. This paper tests the effect of incentives on four widely documented biases: base rate neglect, anchoring, failure of contingent thinking, and intuitive reasoning in the Cognitive Reflection Test. In preregistered laboratory experiments with 1,236 college students in Nairobi, we implement three incentive levels: no incentives, standard lab payments, and very high incentives that increase the stakes by a factor of 100 to more than a monthly income. We find that cognitive effort as measured by response times increases by 40% with very high stakes. Performance, on the other hand, improves very mildly or not at all as incentives increase, with the largest improvements due to a reduced reliance on intuitions. In none of the tasks are very high stakes sufficient to debias participants, or come even close to doing so. These results contrast with expert predictions that forecast larger performance improvements.

Keywords: cognitive biases, incentives
JEL-Codes: D010